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#3 Mario Balotelli
Maybe Mario Balotelli would have had a better career had he got better guidance. Or maybe not. The Italian international whose natural ability was phenomenal, squandered all the initial promise away due to his erratic behaviour and attitude problems.
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He started off the last decade by even stating that he is the second-best player on the planet after Lionel Messi. However, as we come to the end of the decade, his one major achievement is scoring 2 goals for Italy in the 2012 Euro semi-finals.
Balotelli was trouble in whichever dressing room he inhabited, whether it be Manchester City's or Liverpool's or AC Milan's. At 29-years-old, Balotelli currently plies his trade for Serie A club Brescia and that is a good indicator of how far he has fallen.
Balotelli had enough quality and talent to be one of the best in the world and at 29 years of age, he is hardly even relevant right now.
#2 Roberto Carlos
Roberto Carlos has gone down as one of the legends of the game. He has scored some outrageous goals and had illustrious careers for club and country and of course, he has scored some absolutely unbelievable goals as well.
But in reality, Roberto Carlos was more of a winger than a fullback. He was a mediocre defender at best and the untouchable status is quite undue if you simply go by the merits of his game.
The hype around Roberto Carlos comes from the misconception that he was the first modern fullback who would shuttle back and forth down the wing and get involved in attack a lot more than any other fullback would.
Giacinto Facchetti was famous for doing it as early as the 60s and Amoros was a master of it in the 80s. However, lack of television coverage at the time meant that praise would go to Carlos instead. Roberto Carlos owes an awful lot to Ivan Helguera who used to do the defending for himself and a couple more players in that Real Madrid backline.
Roberto Carlos makes it to the list because he is often labelled as the best full back of all time. He simply was not.
#1 Pele
Before you start flipping desks and screaming at the computer screen, please hear me out. Pele is, ofcourse, an incredible player who has had an incredible career. But all those goal statistics, in close view, is quite dodgy and the greatness attributed to the name feels a bit extra.
The records state that Pele scored 1283 career goals in1363 games . However, what fails to be stated is that more than 500 of those were goals scored in 'unofficial' friendlies. That brings his actual total goal tally down to 757 goals in 812 games.
As exposed by a thread on Twitter,
Before 1971, Santos played in the Campeonato Paulista, which was a regional tournament as the Brazilian National League didn't exist yet. And you guessed it right 469 of this man's goals came against farmers even worse than an average French second division donnies.
Pele has been outperformed in each of his much celebrated World Cups. He wasn't even the most important player for Brazil when they wont he World Cup in 1966 and 1970. He played just one game in the 1962 World Cup and came off injured in the second and missed the rest of the tournament.
Pele scored 34 goals from 84 games in the top flight and that's not a goalscoring return that's worthy of the tag of the greatest player of all time.
You can decide for yourself now.
