From today, Forza Italian Football intend to publish a ranking of the ten best and most significant Azzurri players of the last age. The list has been subdivided in three parts, by department, each with its own Top 10.
This for two reasons. Firstly, we believe intra-department comparisons to be fundamentally fictional, as the difference in technical attributes required to plays as, say, a mediano and a seconda punta, are such that comparisons become meaningless. Secondly, restricting such a list to only ten players in total would necessarily end up as an almost precise (perhaps off by two or three names) re-projection of the 2006 starters, as that year’s team was indisputably the best of the period. Everyone can agree that such a catalogue would be of limited interest.
The original decision to draw a Top 10 for the 2000-2010 decade was extended to include 1998 and 2012. We felt that this was a more comprehensive and more logical solution. Cutting off the 1998 and 2012 tournaments deprives many of the decade’s most influential players of significant parts of their careers, and makes it harder to assess their contributions as a whole.
Many of the Azzurri’s best started their illustrious journeys in 1998; others started mid-decade and stretched it up to 2012. Those two years also mark the end of the great generation of the 90s, and the beginning of the promising new cycle that is best embodied in such players as Mario Balotelli and Sebastian Giovinco. A proper consideration of this remarkable era of Italian players is thus best understood as contained in the 1998-2012 bracket rather than the arbitrary 2000-2010.
This ranking only considers the players in terms of their international careers; their achievements at club level, however great or small, have not been taken into account. In addition, the list considers the players in terms of their effective contribution to the teams they played in, not their skill alone.
This is how some enormously gifted players will be found to stand several notches below footballers of considerably inferior technique. A player’s strength of spirit, his tactical sagacity, his state of form, and to some extents his luck, are all aspects at least as important as raw talent. It may be said that this is not so much a list of the ‘best’ Italian players – it is a list of the greatest.
We start today with the defenders, and will go on publishing all other departments throughout the summer.
