Actually the way you disregard those players show that you view the game from a quite narrow point of view.
A creative player is a player who creates clear goal scoring opportunities. He can cross the ball, have excellent close control, be able to pick the final pass, have excellent touch or be able to dribble the entire defence. That is upto him and his style of play.
Beckham and Giggs lead the assist charts for Man Utd for the better part of a decade when Man Utd were untouchable. They were the hub that fed Yorke and Cole to break goalscoring record after record.
And Ronaldo and Messi and Suarez in addition to scoring a shitload of goals are near the top of the assist charts too in both their leagues hence they are creative players as well as finishers. It is why they are the 3 of the best players in the world.
This is all sensible stuff, but in practice the sensible stuff often fails to materialize.
US is the main example. They have buckloads of money, the majority of their youngsters have played soccer (for a couple generations now) and they practiced it in a much more tactical way - while US kids play in real fields with coaches brazilians play with rocks 3-on-3 on the streets. Yet, US never went too far in a WC and the average brazilian, italian or german probably can’t tell their skills apart from Japan or the Faroe Islands. A similar case can be made for Japan and South Korea.
I don’t claim to know what makes a national squad strong over time, but I don’t think book authors do either. A lot of densely populated countries throw money and people at soccer and yet small countries like Uruguay and the Netherlands walk all over them almost every single time.
And I don’t even think reaching top 16 (or sometimes top 8) is that much of an accomplishment. I think a lot depends on how well the team played and how tough were the opponents. 94’ Romenia was pretty strong. 02’ S. Korea made top 4 and yet it’s place was probably more due to extremely fortunate mistakes from judges and a powerful crowd than from a cohesive team.
Maybe it’s because I’m from a country where we used to think we own soccer, but most here feel that the real world cup is the top 8 - before that we’re just filtering the weaklies. (of course Brazil may very well fail to make top 8 this year, but that woud make it one of the weaklies and you can expect new stupider riots after that).
No, that is not what a creative player means. Xavi doesn’t alway create a lot of goalscoring opportunities so according to you, Beckham is a creative but Xavi is not?
Creative players, while being tough to define have a few attributes:
Extreme ball skills
Excellent passing ability
Anticipation of teammates’ movement and the ability to integrate with their play.
As for the creative player debate, I think that’s a little bit of semantics. It depends on your definition of creative.
For the brazilian press, for instance, creative is a player that does unexpected things. Form that point of view, Beckham was not very creative. But Beckham was better than many creative players. Creativity is just one aspect of the game. It seems to me that Isildurr’s definition of creativity is wider than Palantir’s.
This is where the point of ideas come in. You have to have the right idea about how the game needs to be played. America doesn’t have that.
The Japanese apparently have strong ties to brazil and their game is influenced by certain aspects of the brazilians. The koreans play with heavy emphasis on technique which is why i think they’ll do well.
This makes no sense, Maldini is a world class player. I don’t call him creative.
I think crazy is right, you have a very idealistic view about the game which is strange because you rate mourinho.
I’m not sure what your justification is for players who led the assist charts as not creative. That really makes no sense no matter what philosophy you prescribe to.
Plantir I beleive your general definition here is what I described to you with those players Scholes had excellent passing ability (creative), Beckam had a great field of vision and was good at anticipating teamates movements (he showed this lots of times with his pinpoint accurate crossing).
If you’re refferring to “extreme ball skills” like Ronaldinho that’s not creativity - that’s flair.
I base my football bets on statistics that Opta does for the Premier League that I analyse on a week to week basis (Bloomberg have used their stats in the past for articles). They base creativity on various factors.
Here’s Bloomberg using their stats if you don’t beleive me:
Scholes could never dominate the flow of the game the way better retaining players like Xavi do, nor was he particularly incisive in the final third.
Beckham was a very limited player, he did not have the technical skills of the very top tier, and nothing suggests he had the field vision. Being a good crosser doesn’t give you great field vision.
Ronaldinho is a huge straw man, there are many players with extreme technical skill who are not named Ronaldinho. Have you ever seen David Silva play? How about Toni Kroos? Or say Fernando Redondo… Do you know who he is?
I could say the same about my POV, there are many who easily agree with me.
“As a result, the list of most creative players still active in this season’s Champions League is revealing. The names are familiar – Franck Ribery, Arjen Robben, Philipp Lahm and Toni Kroos; Ronaldo , Karim Benzema, Luka Modric and Angel Di Maria.”
What data? What I’m trying to get you to grasp is that creative players aren’t defined by assists, this is a qualitative assesment of the player’s characteristics.
We grasped that a long time ago, no one argued that or denied that the players you listed aren’t creative. But the reverse is not true.
Ultimately a player who assists is a creative player and Beckham and Giggs lead the assist charts for quite a while for the most dominant team in the premiership era.
Beckham had phenomenal field vision and giggs had insane close dribbling and ball control skills and scholes touch was probably among the best in the premiership era.
