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It's a bad list, and it keeps getting worse as you go on.
It is an American list meant to make American sports and sportspeople look great. Ah yes, 56/100 are American and 17/100 are from Baseball, a sport that is played by Americans and Dominicans, and the 30x smaller country is somehow better.
From a competitiveness perspective, Tennis and Swimming are nowhere close to (real) Football. Messi is by far the greatest player to have every played football, and also the greatest sportsperson of all time. (not just the 21st century). Unlike every other sports person, Messi was the best player in the world when most players start their careers (~20) and stayed the very best for the next 15 years. Messi (not unlike Gretsky) could be 2 players, and they would be the #1 and #2 greatest players of all time.
When one nation uniformly dominates a sport, then you know that it isn't THAT competitive. Swimming is one such example. I can speak about swimming because I personally know family members who were nationally (one of them was in the US) ranked top-10 swimmers for their age. Either my family is uniquely suited for swimming. Or, they have the 1 trait all my family members share, which is ruthless ladder climbing (Tier 0 tiger moms in my family). Swimming as a sport uniquely rewards hard-work. Which tells you that it is not competitive enough. You can't work hard at soccer and get good. You need to be insanely gifted, then work hard, and that gets you into the 4th tier of English football. Now Phelps' dominance of swimming was large enough, that I'd still give him #2. But, Messi is #1. Speaking of swimming, Ledecky deserves as shoutout for the top 20.
Djokovic - Federer & Nadal having close head-to-heads helps none of them. I wouldn't put any of them on the top 10.
Sports I think shouldn't qualify for more than 1 name:
tldr:
I would completely agree on Messi being the best footballer of the 21st century, and even the best athlete of the period. But as a Brazillian, I must defend Pelé's claim to the GOAT. He was far more successful on the national team compared to Messi, took Santos from a small team that nobody knew to one of the most acclaimed clubs ever, and became an international sensation. He may never have played in Europe outside of exhibition, but back then, the leveling field was much more even.
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You may want to look into this. She has numerous career and individual superlatives, and won nearly half of all grand slams for 10 years straight.
Serena is gonna get a ton of shit on here because she's the best example on the list, Lewis Hamilton being the other, of everyone chasing the Jackie Robinson high. But there was only one 42. You can't just pretend it happened that way.
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I meant dominating in the sense that others in the top 5 did.
Messi was simultaneously the best scorer, free kick taker, dribbler, passer and orchestrator in the footballing world. For a while, fans would confer a MOTMOTM (man of the match other than messi) award, because Messi was always the best. Phelps, Biles and Bolt won 100% of all serious competitions they entered in the prime of their careers.
Serena dominated her sport in the way that the rest of the top 30 did. Not enough for #2.
I just can’t see Biles anywhere near the top after the 2020 games. I get that she’s dominated everything else, but in one of the biggest moments she didn’t perform.
Michael Jordan dropped out of the NBA for two entire seasons to putter around playing minor league baseball - and many have speculated that he did so as a result of his considerable gambling addiction - abandoning his teammates and likely costing them at least one championship. Do you believe this should disqualify him from discussion as the NBA’s GOAT? I think Simone Biles is certainly on Jordan’s level for her respective sport, and her dropping out of those Olympics doesn’t seem to have impacted her teammates to quite the extent that Jordan’s dropping out did, since the U.S. still won 6 gymnastics medals at those Olympics.
I don’t see it. Jordan allegedly quit because his dad was murdered. That is a bit different from “I felt pressure whilst performing.” And Jordan was actually starting to turn into an okay MILB player (probably never would’ve been good enough to be in the majors).
Jordan’s probably most iconic game was the flu game. Biles quit over anxiety. Jordan dropped 40+
Biles didn’t just drop out because of “anxiety”. She was, allegedly, experiencing something gymnasts call “the twisties”, wherein she was literally losing her sense of spatial orientation during aerial twisting events. When an NBA player of Jordan’s caliber has a bad day, it means scoring 15 points instead of 40. When an Olympic gymnast has a bad day, it can mean landing the wrong way and ending up with a career-altering injury. Like, I get why people shit on Biles at the time, especially because the morons in the feminized sports media decided to use it as an opportunity to celebrate her bravery rather than just recognizing it as a somewhat unfortunate and embarrassing setback in what has otherwise been an incredible, historic career. Still, if we’re talking about greatest athletes, very few have had the sustained level of dominance in a particular sport that Biles has.
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I'm pretty sure the 'Lords' you've heard referred to in cricket is the cricket ground. Cricket isn't played by literal lords, it's a middle class sport in England and Australia and a working man's sport in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.
Aristocrats play (or played) badminton, croquet and polo.
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This has no bearing at all on Messi's greatness, because that must be judged relatively to all other soccer players, but as a tangent, I can never get into soccer because to me it seems to be fundamentally broken. Penalty kicks have way too much influence on game results. A penalty kick has an ~80% chance of going in, in games that end about 2-2 on average, and about one in four games have at least one penalty kick.
It would be like if the NBA had a type of foul such that at least one of this type was awarded about once in four games, and the resulting free throw was worth 50 points if the player shooting the free throw made it.
It just makes soccer really hard to watch for me, I keep getting into soccer games and enjoying them but then when there's a penalty kick it just sucks all the excitement out of it and makes me feel like "why did I just spend all that time watching this?".
My American problem with European football leagues is that the national level season is so boring to me. What's the point of a league where only four teams have won a championship this century?
La Liga trophies literally count, to me, in a comparative ranking like this somewhere between Brady's AFC east division wins and Lebron's Eastern conference wins. It's just not really a competitive league outside of Barca and Real.
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I feel a lot of sports would not get any traction if they were debuting for the first time ever now in this media and attention environment.
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National tournaments have more penalties than usual club football. The worldcup is wnotionally important, but tactically, it is pretty bad football.
In most club competitions, there are very clear guidelines on what qualifies for penalities. In those cases, penalties are only given when a goal is near guaranteed.
National level refereeing is too erratic.
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I've always suspected that the fictional sport of Quidditch is based on JK Rowling just not liking football and inventing the stupidest sport imaginable to express that dislike.
From her annotated version of Philsopher's Stone:
"[Quidditch] was invented in a small hotel in Manchester after a row with my then boyfriend. I had been pondering the things that hold a society together, cause it to congregate and signify its particular character and knew I needed a sport.
It infuriates men...which is quite satisfying given my state of mind when I invented it."
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I’m down with Magnus being included. Anand too. OTOH, there’s a case to be made for e-sports. Flash and maybe Jaedong should be up there.
Faker over Jaedong imo
ESPN should know this https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/13035450/league-legends-prodigy-faker-carries-country-shoulders
Faker for sure.
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Japan, Korea, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia might like a word. Ditto the rest of the Caribean.
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If you are talking about careers, then Barry Bonds. He had two inner circle HoF careers. He is just absurd. Mahomes likely will get there.
But I would say Mario is the GOAT. Dude got chemo. Later that day he suited up and scored a goal on his first shift. Just absurd stuff. Most naturally gifted player ever.
Chess isn’t a sport but Magnus is awesome.
Murray I agree. Great tennis player but he is clearly far behind the big three and probably even Alcaraz. He is more Stanimal territory. Agree re WNBA as well.
A huge chunk of Bonds' career predates 2000.
Totally. Other poster broadened the discussion to all time.
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Bonds even before he got (rightly) upset over the attention McGwire & Sosa got and started taking roids was a HOF player.
Especially since he was going up against plenty of roided up pitchers himself, I'd argue 2001-2004 Barry Bonds is the among the scariest athletes when it comes to ability to take over a game, and it's in a sport where he only gets 5 chances to do so.
From 2001-2004 Bonds didnt have a single season with an OBP below .500. That’s utterly insane. In 2004 his OBP was above .600. The numbers are hard to fathom.
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Anyone who cheated (steroids in his case) doesn't belong on a list of greatest athletes. And if that means the list is empty, then so be it. Great athleticism requires doing it the honest way.
Yeah but realistically most of the candidates here would be using something.
Usain Bolt an outlier upon outliers in a very simple/easily-optimized sport in which most of his contemporaries popped for doping at some point? Either he's like 3-4 levels of outlier from the fastest people ever, or he was doing approximately the same stuff and was only a tier ahead.
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