Ronnie O’Sullivan and the most boring football discussion of all time
I've watched the Ronnie doc and it made me mad about football.
As athletes (and snooker players are athletes) go, Ronnie O’Sullivan has every attribute you would want to see in a GOAT (which, in case you haven’t been on the internet/watched TV/listened to the radio in the last decade, is the nauseating acronym for Greatest of All Time) candidate.
Not only is he a troubled, charismatic genius that has won everything there is to win, he has kept winning for thirty years, across multiple generations and against different greats of the game. Unlike football GOAT candidates, you can measure him against other candidates because he’s played against basically all of them. He’s also playing against them in a sport that has remained essentially unchanged, other than a shift in the fags smoked/pints drank to cloth smoothness/ball lightness ratio (which, it must be said, has correlated with a considerable rise in the number of century+ breaks over the last 30 years).
Compared to 30 years ago, football is basically a different sport. Have you watched footage of old football? I’m fairly certain my 7s team would give the West Germany side that won Italia ‘90 a decent game. With football, you can’t realistically compare a player from one generation with one from another. You can’t really compare a player from one league to another. If I can butcher the cliche about Messi and whether he could or couldn’t do it on a wet and windy night in Stoke; could Jurgen Klinsman do it in the lower division of the WePlayFootball Mile End 7s Tuesday league? We’ll never know.
Despite this, football, a team game, is completely obsessed with individuals being the greatest. Not necessarily of all time, but just the greatest within whatever ridiculous parameters are put in place.
“The Premier League era”, for example, is 30 years in the history of over 150 years of a sport. As I’ve said, the 90s Premier League era was unrecognisable to the 2020s era. The Blackburn Rovers team that won (or “bought”) the Premier League in 1991 was owned by a wildly successful local businessman and boyhood Rovers fan with a personal fortune of £600 million. The member of the Abu Dhabi royal family that owns Manchester City has a yacht (one of a fleet) that cost more than that.
During Manchester City v Tottenham last weekend, Kyle Walker sprinted back to make a last minute tackle. Cue well deserved gushing praise about a sensational footballer who has developed into one of the top right backs around. And then cue Jamie Carragher on comms asking Gary Neville: “best right back the Premier League has ever seen, Gary?” Neville, a former Premier League right back that has won the treble, eight Premier League titles, three FA Cups and two Champions Leagues, agreed.
Back yourself, Gary. Jesus Christ.
It’s relentless. A couple of Saturdays ago, ahead of the 12.30 kick off between Manchester City and Liverpool, I found myself sitting in front of The Saturday Social, Sky’s bizarre YouTuber-led Soccer AM replacement. The premise is thus: One of the many contenders for Jake Humphries’ crown as king of the boring football blokes (see also any of the current indistinguishable male hosts doing Sky Sports football coverage) sits down with, I think, some YouTubers to slice every possible GOAT discussion every way it is possible to slice it. They did an all-time Manchester City & Liverpool combined 11 and literally no-one was just good or even world class. Andy Robertson was “the best left back in the world”, Alison was the “greatest goalkeeper the league has ever seen”, Bernardo Silva was “the best player in the league”. It’s so, So, SO dull. And it’s dumb. The common logic currently is that Erling Haaland is the best striker in the world. Afterall, the man is a terrifying, goal-hungry, record-hoovering freak, but also he missed a sitter against Spurs in midweek. Is he now no longer the best? People regularly referred to Benzema as the best striker in the world last year but now he’s in Saudi Arabia, it’s gone quiet. Did he stop possessing all his attributes the moment he decided to play in a petro-state farmers league?
Also, who is watching enough football to make that call? I don’t know anyone who watches much of Ligue Un, but I know plenty of people who claim Mbappe is the best in the world. And considering PSG are serial bottlers in the Champions League, rarely making it beyond the last 32, it’s hard to know where all the Mbappe analysis is coming from.
Growing up, it was Pele or Maradonna, both of whom’s deaths I think are a factor in the GOAT epidemic we’ve created for ourselves. Now, they’ve gone to the big Ballon D'or in the sky (with my only GOAT, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ), their achievements and careers are further raked over and mythologised.
I think the Fifa/FC games and Ultimate Team in particular probably has something to do with it. Giving every player past and present a rating out of 100 doesn’t lend itself to nuanced debate.
Above all, though, it’s the fact that all #content’s primary aim now is to drive #engagement beyond just people watching, reading or enjoying the thing. Now we have to #jointheconversation and nothing gets people frothing in the comments better than a debate that is literally impossible to settle.
Which leads me back to Ronnie O’Sullivan.
All the reasons that football GOAT discussions are stupid and boring are all the reasons why, above any other athlete (caveat: of the sports I have a passing interest in), O’Sullivan has the biggest claim to be the genuine greatest of all time. And yet, there’s doubt. Of course there is. You might like Stephen Hendry (although I’d argue his involvement in the Masked Singer disqualifies him from the debate) or Steve Davis or Alex Higgins or any of the other blokes that come up when you Google “snooker players”.
Essentially, it’s just “who do you like the most”, isn’t it? And lots and lots and lots of footballers are very, very good and fun to watch and that’s just fine. Plus, it’s obvs Messi anyway.