dimarts, 31 d’octubre del 2017

The 50 best football teams ever

Deciding the best teams in history is never easy, but we thrive on making the tough decisions. So, each armed with our personal favourites, we gathered in a darkened room one evening to narrow things down. Deliberations continued long into the night.

You won’t find many one-season wonders in this list, but such was the magnitude of Leicester’s title triumph that it’s hard to exclude them.

You’d probably assume that Saint-Etienne’s greatest team would be the one Michel Platini led in the early ‘80s, before he ruled Europe with Juventus. You’d be wrong.


Clad in classic old gold, Stan Cullis's uncompromising and direct team powered their way to three league titles in nine years from 1953 onwards, missing a hat-trick of First Division titles and the FA Cup-League Double by just a point in 1959/60.

Hamburg had always been on the periphery of the German football elite until two tireless workers came together just after the club won its first European trophy in the 1977 Cup Winners’ Cup.

OM’s owner Bernard Tapie set out to mastermind France’s first European Cup triumph – and if that meant bribery, match-fixing and doping, so be it.
In truth, Marseille were good enough to conquer Europe without skulduggery. They lost the 1991 final to Red Star Belgrade on penalties but, two years later, out-thought and outplayed defending champions Milan to claim the trophy.
At the back, sweeper Basile Boli and centre-back Marcel Desailly protected Fabien Barthez. The midfield featured Didier Deschamps, Abedi Pele and Chris Waddle, while the attack – which contained German World Cup winner Rudi Voller, fearsome France striker Jean-Pierre Papin and powerfully skilful Croatia international Alen Boksic – wasn’t too shabby either.


Manager Arsene Wenger was roundly mocked when, in 2002, he'd suggested it was possible for his team to go through the league campaign unbeaten. But in 2003/04, after surviving two early scares against Portsmouth and Manchester United, Arsenal emulated Preston's 'Invincibles' and won the league without defeat.

With strikers Bobby Smith and Les Allen notching goals for fun, the prodigiously gifted inside-forward John White dismantling opposition defences with his blind-side runs and midfield anchored by the rock-like Dave Mackay, Tottenham romped to the title by eight points (in the days of two for a win) in 1960/61, then defeated Leicester in the FA Cup final.

Truth is a rare commodity when it comes to former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. Yet for all the accusations of dictatorial favouritism that dogged Steaua Bucharest in the late ‘80s, the Militarii did go 104 domestic games unbeaten from June 1986 until September 1989.

In the Elland Road dressing room, manager Don Revie nailed a sign to the wall which read: 'Keep fighting.' His Leeds team, combining ruthless pragmatism with a shimmering of skill, did precisely that as football entered the technicolour age.

Deploying the W-M formation to perfection, Herbert Chapman's Arsenal team routinely flattened opponents at their Art Deco, palatial Highbury home in the early '30s with a fast, direct and uncompromising brand of football.

When Louis van Gaal took over in 1991, Ajax had won one European trophy – the 1987 Cup Winners’ Cup – since the 1970s’ golden era of Michels and Cruyff.


Rarely can a team that achieved so little have been held in such high regard by so many for so long. The Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney called Tele Santana's tournament favourites "the most gifted collection of footballers in the game, the unmistakable nucleus of a great team".

Ten years after the Munich air crash wiped out the Busby Babes, Matt Busby's Manchester United triumphed 4-1 at Wembley against Benfica in the 1968 European Cup Final in one of the most emotive nights in the history of British football.

Common football lore has it that Ajax invented the modern 4-3-3 at the same time as inventing Total Football. Well, those pioneering Amsterdammers may have done the latter, but they certainly didn’t do the former. That was their great rivals Feyenoord, who won two Eredivisie titles and the 1970 European Cup.

Remember Platini not as a UEFA suit but one of the finest players to ever lace up boots. Numerically and positionally a No.10, he led Alain Giresse, Jean Tigana and Luis Fernandez in les Bleus’ “Carre Magique” (Magic Square) midfield that waltzed away with the Euro 84 crown on home turf.

In 1988, PSV won the European Cup after drawing all five games in the knockout stage and beating Benfica, 6-5 in the shootout.

The Maquina were probably South America’s greatest club side. That nickname – the Machine – refers to a stellar attack of Julian Carlos Munoz, Jose Manuel Moreno, Adolfo Pedernera, Angel Labruna and Felix Loustau which only played 18 games together.

Most great sides have a nickname. The Real Madrid side that won five successive La Liga titles between 1986 and 1990, reached three European Cup semi-finals in a row (1987-1990) and won back-to-back UEFA Cups (1985, 1986) was known as La Quinta del Buitre (the Vulture Squadron) after its talismanic genius, Emilio Butragueno – aka ‘the Vulture’ – and his stellar team-mates, Sanchis, Michel, Martin Vazquez and Miguel Pardeza.

Matthias Sindelar, known as “The Paper Man” due to his frail frame, was the fulcrum of the Wunderteam assembled by manager Hugo Meisl and English coach Jimmy Hogan. All rapid passing and interchanging of positions, they might have ended Anglocentric chauvinism 21 years before Puskas’s Hungary, but ultimately lost 4-3 to England at Stamford Bridge.

The Flamengo side that won the Copa Libertadores and beat Liverpool 3-0 in the Intercontinental Cup in 1981 is often reductively described as the genius of Zico and 10 others.

Has any team proved so much greater than the sum of its parts than the Nottingham Forest that won back-to-back European Cups under Brian Clough and Peter Taylor? This dynamic duo perfected a remorseless and entertaining good cop/bad cop act that filled their players with existential dread.

In the mid-1950s, Honved were the team the world wanted to watch. Coached by Gusztav Sebes, the architect of the Mighty Magyar side that beat England 6-3 at Wembley, Honved became an R&D lab where new tactics were honed, inspiring Brazil’s World Cup winners in 1958 and Rinus Michel’s Total Football.

With their movement off the ball, interchanging positions and clever passing, Honved played a kind of football that seemed to come from outer space. They could only do so because Sebes could call on such greats as Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis, Jozsef Bozsik, Zoltan Czibor and Gyula Grosics, who helped Honved to five titles in seven years.

France had a fallow patch after the break-up of their glorious mid-’80s team, missing the tournaments in 1988, 1990 and 1994 while exiting Euro 92 winless.


The story of this team is a miracle. Not even the success of Brian Clough’s Forest was as improbable as the rise of this small, provincial club.

When Juventus won the Champions League in 1996, players wept with joy. Marcello Lippi’s Bianconeri were indisputably the best in Europe – they had swept aside Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid, before beating Ajax on penalties after winning the first of three Serie A titles in four years. They would also reach two more Champions League finals, losing both.


Preston were football’s first great team: innovators, agitators, the original Invincibles. They paid players before professionalism even existed, pioneered a previously unseen ‘pass and move’ game when dribbling was all the rage and were among the first clubs to look beyond their local area for top talent.

When Carlos Bianchi took over in 1998, Boca were distinctly average. They’d won just one minor trophy in 15 years, their back-to-back Copa Libertadores victories of the late-’70s a distant memory.

The Argentines won three successive Copa Libertadores from 1968, but it’s the all-consuming gamesmanship for which they are best remembered.

Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team brought about a Total Football revolution at the Camp Nou and beyond. They may have been subsequently outshone by Pep Guardiola’s cohort, but even Pep knows it wouldn’t have been possible without his old manager.

“They were pioneers and we cannot compete with that no matter how many trophies we win,” Guardiola said in 2011. “We will never equal the period of the Dream Team.”

On the face of it, Dynamo have no business being on this list. The Ukrainians never went beyond the last four of the European Cup, while before the fall of the Iron Curtain they never managed to better back-to-back Soviet titles. Yet their gift to the modern game goes beyond mere gongs.

This was a thinking man’s side, comprising several members of the Ajax Totaalvoetbal side which won three successive European Cups from 1971 to 1973: the masterful Johan Cruyff, versatile defender Ruud Krol, nippy back Wim Suurbier, explosive midfielder Arie Haan, classy playmaker Johan Neeskens, brainbox winger Piet Keizer and lethal forward Johnny Rep.


Juve boss Giovanni Trapattoni was a brilliant man-manager and disciple of catenaccio, and for his early successes in Turin he relied heavily upon the Italian players who would form the backbone of Italy’s 1982 World Cup-winning side.

Despite Independiente's previous success in the Copa Libertadores, no one could have predicted that the Argentine side would go on to win four more consecutive continental titles, dominating the early 1970s and managing a feat which is unlikely to ever be matched.

Among the new faces in the West German squad at the 1970 World Cup was Gerd Muller, who’d already scored 207 goals in 235 Bayern Munich appearances. He promptly bagged 10 in five games, including two in the semi-final defeat by Italy, a two-hour slog in which Franz Beckenbauer played with his arm in a sling.

The summer of 1995 was a pivotal time in the reign of Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford. His team had just relinquished their Premier League title to Blackburn, lost the FA Cup final to Everton and sold Mark Hughes, Paul Ince and Andrei Kanchelskis – three key players in Ferguson’s first two championship triumphs.

"They were sleek and tanned like film stars,” recalled Celtic’s Bobby Murdoch of the Inter line-up, as Celtic prepared for the biggest moment in their history, the 1967 European Cup Final. “On our side there were quite a few with no teeth.”

Believe the hype: the Grande Torino side that perished in the Superga air disaster on May 4, 1949 really were that good. In 1947/48, they won Serie A by 16 points (in the days of two for a win), scoring 125 goals, winning 19 out of 20 home games and finishing the season with a goal difference of +92.

If a single team can create an entire club, then this side laid the foundation for the dynasty we know as Bayern Munich. When Franz Beckenbauer and Sepp Maier, both in their early teens, joined the club’s youth set-up in 1959, Bayern weren’t even the top club in their own city – 1860 Munich were more popular and successful.

Restless Hungarian genius Bela Guttmann had a simple credo for building teams: “Give the public their money’s worth.” That philosophy came to glorious fruition in the Benfica side he created.

The Magical Magyars came together under Gusztav Sebes, a cobbler’s son who advocated “socialist football” – a Total Football precursor in which players could swap positions at will.

Not many teams can boast nine World Cup winners. And only one had the “The Athlete of the Century” up front during his peak. This is why Pele’s Santos feared no side, dominating the Brazilian league when it was at its strongest. Their motto was simply unrefined: “if the opposition scores once, we will score three.”

The team that defined the way we still think about Italian football. Argentine boss Helenio Herrera didn’t invent catenaccio, but his modified version – a 5-3-2 with a libero behind the defence and half-backs launching speedy counter attacks – was implemented so precisely that his side came to embody it.

here was a time when Spain were football’s great underachievers, but at Euro 2008 it all came together. Uniting a previously disparate squad, Luis Aragones harnessed possession-minded midfielders like Xavi, Andres Iniesta, David Silva and Cesc Fabregas, and married the aesthetic to the athletic as La Roja secured the trophy.

The year after taking over from Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley’s team finished second in the 1974/75 table. “I considered it a real failure,” admitted the new gaffer. “We never celebrate second place here.”

In 50 years’ time, when most of us will be eating through a straw, we can die happy that we saw one of the greatest sides ever performing at the apogee of their celestial talent. In introducing tiki-taka – originally intended as an insult – to the footballing lexicon, Barça re-wrote the beautiful game’s playbook in their own, perfectly formed 4-3-3 image.

The influence of this team extends far beyond the talent of Di Stefano, Ferenc Puskas, Raymond Kopa and Paco Gento. Far beyond even the trophies they accumulated – and no other team has won five European Cups in a row, as they did, from 1956 to 1960.

Italy’s most successful European campaigners have enjoyed several stellar vintages, but the perfect storm of style and success came in a four-year flurry that blew away Italy’s boring football reputation.


Brazil had had good sides before, but the team that swaggered to glory in 1970 will forever occupy a prominent place in the pantheon; this side represented the romantic ideal of football, the entertaining epitome of “You score four, we’ll score five”.

After being hoofed out of the 1966 tournament, Pele was at his peak in a team of showstoppers. Alongside him up top was Tostão, with Roberto Rivellino and Jairzinho providing the ammunition from the flanks.

In coach Rinus Michels, the club’s trademark 4-3-3, chaotic position switching and teamwork was established; Total Football invented. When he left in 1971, replacement Stefan Kovacs afforded the team yet more attacking freedom.

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