Books: "The Soccer 100" By Kay & Horncastle of The Athletic

 

The Soccer 100: The Story of the Greatest Players in History

By Oliver Kay & James Horncastle

William Morrow; hardcover; $45.00; available today, Tuesday, November 18th

The Athletic has created the world's largest sports newsroom, with its trademark being a focus on deep reporting, expert analysis, and unmatched journalism. A part of The New York Times Company, its breadth of coverage can be found on their website and in their Sports section in their daily newspaper.

Oliver Kay and James Horn castle are both senior writers at The Athletic. Kay previously spent 19 years with The New York Times, and has covered 11 World Cups and European Championships. His first book, Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football's Lost Genius, won the Football Book of the Year and Sports Book of the Year awards in 2017. Horncastle specializes in covering Italian and European football, and he speaks Italian, has lived in Rome, and is a regular contributor to the BBC and TNT Sports. In 2024, he was honored with the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his contribution to promoting Italian football and strengthening the cultural ties between Italy and the United Kingdom.

Just as The Athletic's previous productions on football and basketball aimed to achieve, The Soccer 100 aims to find out who the greatest player ever is, among the millions who have stepped onto a pitch. This quest resulted in something that went way past a simple ranking, and is really an unparalleled history of the sport, with fresh never-before-seen profiles of these players.

The superlatives for this incredible group from the world's game include 25 nationalities, 34 Ballon d'Or winners, 43 World Cup champions, 10 World Cup Golden Boot winners, 7 World Cup Golden Ball winners, and 1 Greatest of All Time.

These are players who left lasting legacies, redefined the game with their signature skills, and became national icons, such as Argentina's Lionel Messi, who finally hoisted the World Cup in 2022. The most-represented country on the list is Brazil, with 15 players, including Pele, Ronaldinho, Neymar Junior, Garrincha, and Jairzinho.

There are many names in here that represent eras of certain teams, such as Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo, Ryan Giggs, and Wayne Rooney, but there is one incredible omission from Man U's Alex Ferguson dynasty era from 1993 to 2013.

Barcelona in the 2010s is represented with Messi, Neymar, Xavi Hernandez, and Sergio Busquets. Currently, Messi and Busquets, who play for Inter Miami in the MLS.

Speaking of MLS, there are two players who played in New York, Thierry Henry for the Red Bulls and Andrea Pirlo for New York City Football Club, and Patrick Vieira coached NYCFC from 2016 to 2018. Also interesting to note, Henry and Vieira starred for Arsenal, most notably when they went undefeated in the 2003-04 season, a team known as the Invincibles.

Current European players on the list include Liverpool's Mohamed Saleh, of Egypt; Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappe, who has won a World Cup with France in 2018, and Manuel Neyer, goalkeeper for Bayern Munich and a World Cup champion with Germany in 2014.

United States Men's Soccer Team Head Coach Mauricio Pochettino contributed a Foreword, in which he writes: What sets the greatest players apart?

Of course technical quality is one part of it. But there's also a different kind of charisma that the best players have on the pitch. Even when you watch young kids playing, you can sometimes see one kid has a totally different energy the other kids don't have. It's the same at elite level: certain players are on a totally different level. Even at that stage of his career, Maradona was like that.

With the great players, you see it in the way they touch the ball, the way they pass the ball, the way they control it. With some players, the ball bounces off them. But with Maradona or Lionel Messi, it's like the ball is connected to them. Watching them in motion, it's as if you see the ball smiling, like it knows: "This guy will treat me well. This guy is going to give me love." The ball never looked happier than when it was at the feet of Maradona or Messi.

I was blessed with the opportunity to play in Europe, in Spain and France, and to play for my country, including at the Copa America in 1999 and the World Cup in 2002. With Argentina, I played with guys like Javier Zanetti, Diego Simeone, Juan Sebastian Veron, Panlo Aimar, Juan Roman Riquelme, Ariel Ortega, Hernan Crespo, Gabriel Batistuta...At Paris Saint-Germain I played with Ronaldinho and Jay-Jay Okocha, who were two of the most spectacularly gifted, most joyous footballers I ever saw. They played with smiles on their faces. Ronaldinho played like he was dancing, like samba. Another one was Ivan de la Pena at Espanyol. He doesn't have the profile of some of the others I mentioned, but he was a genius, another of those players who made the ball smile.

Then there are the ones I played against. 

At Espanyol we used to come up against the Real Madrid galacticos side of Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Roberto Carlos, David Beckham, Raul, and the Brazilian star Ronaldo, or the Barcelona team of Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta, and Rivaldo. Toward the end of my playing career at Espanyol I played against a very young Messi. It was only a brief encounter, but even at that stage, everyone was so excited about his potential, particularly in Argentina.

My coaching career has allowed me to work with so many wonderful players. It is hard to pick out just a few, but I worked with Harry Kane and Son Heung-Min at Tottenham Hotspur and Messi, Neymanr, Sergio Ramos, and Kylian Mbappe at PSG. I would like to mention another two who,like De la Pena, rarely receive the recognition but who were two extraordinary players: Moussa Dembele at Tottenham and Marco Verratti at PSG. Again, they made the ball smile.

To coach Messi was a privilege. Before that, I had admired him from a distance - even from the opposition dugout - and thought he was the best player I had seen since Maradona. But then to work closely with him, on the training pitch with him for 90 minutes or two hours every day, was an amazing experience. He has the most incredible technique, but also he had this ability to read exactly what is happening on the pitch and what the team needs to do.