#1 ·
God bless Jesus and Mary
Watching AT&T, I’ve always found it fascinating when certain criteria highlight a massive imbalance in player quality between different birth years. You get one generation overflowing with class, while the next feels almost barren. It’s an interesting phenomenon highlighted by various studies ☕. So, last spring, I had this idea: why not assemble an "all-time best eleven" for every single birth year? I want to see exactly how much the talent levels fluctuate from one year to the next. When I say "assemble," I mean I'll take existing "best of" lineups and tweak them according to my own vision.
The goal here is simple: find the greatest footballing birth year of all time. To keep things manageable for a tournament format, I’m focusing on players born between Godwin's 1920 and 1999. This gives us eight groups, where the top four from each initial voting phase will advance to form a final field of 32.
To kick things off, teams are grouped by decade (one group for the 20s, one for the 30s, etc.). These will be split into five pairings where we’ll vote on which decade boasts the superior talent. After those five rounds, we’ll hold one more vote to eliminate the weakest link among those five, leaving us with the four strongest decades. From there, we’ll have our 32 candidates to move into a standard knockout bracket until we crown a winner.
Once we’ve visualized what each era offers through these tactical lineups, we can dive into the inevitable debates: was the football actually better back then? Were there truly more superstars, or just more hype? Maybe some forgotten legends deserve a second look.
A quick disclaimer on the formations: the goal isn't necessarily to build a cohesive squad that could actually win a match on a Sunday afternoon. It's about cramming as much pure talent from a specific year into a semi-logical structure as possible. Of course, if a particular year has enough elite players to form a legitimate, functional team, that should serve as a testament to just how deep that year's talent pool really was. I’ll start with the 90s—they're the most recent and the perfect way to warm up.
Watching AT&T, I’ve always found it fascinating when certain criteria highlight a massive imbalance in player quality between different birth years. You get one generation overflowing with class, while the next feels almost barren. It’s an interesting phenomenon highlighted by various studies ☕. So, last spring, I had this idea: why not assemble an "all-time best eleven" for every single birth year? I want to see exactly how much the talent levels fluctuate from one year to the next. When I say "assemble," I mean I'll take existing "best of" lineups and tweak them according to my own vision.
The goal here is simple: find the greatest footballing birth year of all time. To keep things manageable for a tournament format, I’m focusing on players born between Godwin's 1920 and 1999. This gives us eight groups, where the top four from each initial voting phase will advance to form a final field of 32.
To kick things off, teams are grouped by decade (one group for the 20s, one for the 30s, etc.). These will be split into five pairings where we’ll vote on which decade boasts the superior talent. After those five rounds, we’ll hold one more vote to eliminate the weakest link among those five, leaving us with the four strongest decades. From there, we’ll have our 32 candidates to move into a standard knockout bracket until we crown a winner.
Once we’ve visualized what each era offers through these tactical lineups, we can dive into the inevitable debates: was the football actually better back then? Were there truly more superstars, or just more hype? Maybe some forgotten legends deserve a second look.
A quick disclaimer on the formations: the goal isn't necessarily to build a cohesive squad that could actually win a match on a Sunday afternoon. It's about cramming as much pure talent from a specific year into a semi-logical structure as possible. Of course, if a particular year has enough elite players to form a legitimate, functional team, that should serve as a testament to just how deep that year's talent pool really was. I’ll start with the 90s—they're the most recent and the perfect way to warm up.
