Open Thread: September 9, 2021

The Open Thread/Daily Merengue is a place where you can discuss anything and everything related to football. Feel free to discuss the topics presented here, or start your very own discussions! The Open thread will be posted every day by one of the mods: Valyrian Steel, Felipejack, YoSnail, Ezek Ix or NeRObutBlanco.

Congrats to Real Madrid Femenino for reaching the CL group stage

Real Madrid and the European championships are a love story. And beating Manchester City makes it doubly awesome. Good luck to them going forward. If anybody has managed to find an official channel for viewing these matches, let us know.

Eduardo Camavinga is ready to play for Real Madrid

He displayed some ball control skills:

And brought his little brother with him on the grounds at the Valdebebas.

Cute as can be.

Real Madrid announces that tickets are still for sale for Sunday

It’s tempting to drop the responsibilities and buy a plane ticket, is it not?

A scientific look at the Messi vs. Ronaldo debate

Dr Tom Crawford of Oxford University designed a data model to compare the top 10 male players of all time - chosen according to certain criteria - and rank them using statistics.

Crawford was asked by LiveScore, of which Cristiano Ronaldo is the global ambassador, to devise the G.O.A.T index, and the mathematician set about the task enthusiastically.

To be included in the initial top 10, players had to score highly across seven categories: club trophies, international trophies, club goals, international goals, Ballon d’Ors (minimum of two required), records, Z-factor seasons (mathematically outstanding campaigns).

In a complex model, points were awarded for each category based on multiple factors, taking into account the difficulty of certain achievements and rewarding those players who had success across multiple leagues.

There is, of course, no way to ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ way settle the debate for a variety of reasons, beginning with the fact that there is no univocal meaning of ‘greatest’. The ‘greatest’ might be defined by some as aggregate success in big games, the number of international and club trophies, the greatest influence on how the game is played, the number of goals and assists for club and country, and so forth. Going by some of the criteria in the above scientific study, it would seem that the greatest player would actually need to have a good team in around him in order to win international trophies, which is a strange assumption. In any case, it is always interesting to see how our reasoning and arrangement of the evidence for one’s case can be used in a persuasive way to approach a semblance of truth on the matter.