•FourFourTwo
Summary
The 100 best players of the 21st Century: the greatest Ballon d'Or hoggers, serial winners and cult heroes since the turn of the millennium. Debate about the best players of the 21st Century goes back, funnily enough, to 2000, when Boca Juniors beat Real Madrid in the now-extinct Intercontinental Cup final. President Florentino Perez reportedly gave both barrels to his misfiring Galacticos in the aftermath – but more because of the commercial opportunities that a pancontinental cup final loss had scuppered than the embarrassing result.
Flo saw the match as a chance to expand his brand to Asia, with a new millennium beaming more football matches than ever: but not even he could envisage what this new century would bring. The internet would create stars – it would break them, too – the Champions League would grow in prestige, while scientific and technological advancements (not to mention coaching evolution) would make this game almost unrecognisable from the one that Perez grew up wanting to tame as his own.
The 21st Century has taken football to new realms. Let us introduce the 100 best artists, artisans, wizards and wunderkinder to have boldly gone where no one has else has ventured since that heady Intercontinental Cup clash…
Recommend Channel
World National football team squads
© SportsLib. All rights reserved
Lionel Messi 
Videos
Cristiano Ronaldo 
Andrés Iniesta 
Ronaldinho 
Zinédine Zidane 
Manuel Neuer 
Luis Suárez 
Zlatan Ibrahimović 
Luka Modrić 
Samuel Eto'o 
Wayne Rooney 
Arjen Robben 
Robert Lewandowski 
Gareth Bale 
Andriy Shevchenko 
Andrea Pirlo 
Didier Drogba 
Mohamed Salah 
Vincent Kompany 
Pavel Nedvěd 
Radamel Falcao 
Nemanja Vidić 
Jan Oblak 
Alexis Sánchez 
