I have an image that Italy set up to respect and revere the golden age players in the same manner? Like it's blasphemy to compare and contrast with them?
Nah, not really. We don't particularly care and there are no acrimonious rivalries like that - mostly because we're not fans of players as a rule, we're fans of teams. So those comparisons might happen between active players, but those kind of historical ones, not so much. We mostly just don't care. Also no, while we do revere our past greats, we've had enough recent greats - and winning ones at that, world champions - that it's not blasphemy to compare them
AND FIGHT!
@JPRouve
PD: they have more issues club related with Del Piero, Totti and Baggio...Alesandro was quite vilified by many ardent anti Juve in general. What I do not know how this translates to the entire country and nowadays that all of them are retired.
See above. Baggio vs Del Piero was a thing very briefly, Del Piero vs Totti more so, but again, not something people particuparly cared about. Only Roma and Juventus fans did and neither cared about what the others thought anyways, so. For the neutrals, it's Baggio anyways
I'd like to see him carry Arsenal to multiple league titles. I mean I wouldn't, but you get the gist
Hardly carried them given how good those sides were and how well they did in the league. Plus they beat a United side in transition, and even managed to lose the title to them once anyways - if anything that was the season you could say Henry carried them, and they didn't win. Then Roman came along and that was that.
While Ter Stegen was generally excellent, without Messi playing 1v10 Football during the second halves of what seemed to be every single game, Barcelona doesn't win the title, they don't even qualify for the CL. And the worst part about it is that you knew that it was coming, Barcelona were useless but you knew that Messi would put together 15 to 20 minutes of utter dominance and lead Barcelona to an undeserved win.
Funny thing is they were actually still a great team without Messi, but when Messi was on the pitch everybody else just sort of stood around waiting for him to win by himself. The Zlatan effect. Messi being Messi he still won the league twice and nearly got them in a CL final...
I know he didn't, I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised if it happened
I would have been. Again, something that happened once and by a guy who scored over 90 goals in a calendar year, reaching a level of consistency in goal scoring that's never been seen before or after