The sacred place that football holds for the last great stars of Real Madrid.

There's nothing like seeing a player emerge from the fog, controlling the ball and being chased by a pack of players who wear different outfits. What draws a child's attention to football isn't exactly the team play, as moralists proclaim, but the players who soar over the field , the magicians, those who invent secret tunnels between reality and fantasy, which is where football is invincible and becomes the greatest generator of desire of the last hundred years.

The illusionists, those who break the scene and perch on it, the tyrants, those without compassion, the dazzling greyhounds, the violent, the exquisite, the one who guards the gate with an axe and the one who knocks down the wall with his headbutt. All these characters end up being produced by Real Madrid. Footballers who have gradually assumed the skin of an archetype until they have become so immersed in it that victory ends up seeming like a destiny, not a possibility.

The key to Real Madrid isn't buying better players than the others. It's nurturing the talent that comes its way and pushing it to the limit through a competitive culture unprecedented in sports (due to its persistence) and a mystique associated with that culture that uncovers in players corners they didn't even know about. The latest of those players was Modric . He went to Milan with six European Cups under his belt. There's not enough distance to place him in the historical position he deserves.

That's what we'll be doing in this article: ranking the recent history of soccer, a highly entertaining and controversial game that should never end.

1. The gods

Creators of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, the first of them was Di Stéfano , now semi-forgotten but who taught the art of the ball to an entire continent where football was played the way war was waged . All who saw him have no doubts. His superiority over other footballers—and there were some formidable ones, like Puskas or Kubala— has never been seen again. The impression given by that Madrid, which Di Stéfano molded in his image and likeness , was similar to that left by NBA teams when they toured Europe in the 1980s.

Di Stéfano's great disciple was Cruyff. Equally commanding on the pitch, he lasted less time , but his goals are remembered more universally; television made sure of that. Pelé was another of the primitive myths . Blessed with all the qualities a footballer should possess, his body encompassed the team player, the hero who throws himself against a thousand enemies and emerges victorious, the inventor of realities, the court painter, the merciless striker, the most exquisite foot, and a physique of unprecedented elasticity and power.

The greatest pure talent, along with Maradona , is the great sleepwalking myth of South America. A man whose only quality was his genius with the ball at his feet, and that condemned him to a happiness as absolute when he was on the pitch as his misery was absolute when he put on the shoes of everyday life. All these players created their own reality when they were on the field. A light illuminated their wanderings across the stage while the rest were consumed by darkness. It was what was said about Maradona: that when he had the ball at his feet, the other 21 went into a desperate frenzy.

Entering the 21st century, two other men with that same impact appeared: Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo . No one doubts Messi's presence, but with Cristiano, there's some hesitation. Remember that Jorge Valdano quote: "You can see Messi's street smarts, and Cristiano's his gym smarts ." It's unfair and untrue. The Portuguese player is as street smart as anyone, but he refined his game in the Premier League, and that blurred his dribbling and turned him into a new player. Someone without a known mold for whom the language had to be reinvented.

Messi is the son of the lifelong genius, the one with the pause, the dribble, the technique almost as an expression of the subconscious. Cristiano did everything at an unknown speed (and for that, you need sublime technique), but his hallmark was physical exuberance , and he didn't seem to possess the weightlessness of Zidane or the cunning of Raúl, to speak of the two archetypes most beloved by the Real Madrid player in 2009. His omnipresence, his moving effort, the monumental trail he left in his matches, did place him among the greatest. When Cristiano toned down his heroic style and became a pure center forward, Champions League titles began to fall with disconcerting ease. It was then that his true genius became very clearly evident . His ball handling was extraordinary, as was his finishing, but it was his mastery of space that made him invincible. A new martial art whose sole master has been Cristiano Ronaldo.

The great luck of Messi and Cristiano

The Portuguese and the Argentine had everything on their side. They were born at the right time, when kicks from behind and inconsiderate violence had been banned in football. When the grass in stadiums was the mosaic floor of the Alhambra. Cristiano came to football and said : I am the Sun King, give me everything . And they gave it to him at United. That perception of himself is only had by those who know they are superior. Cristiano's great decision was to go to Madrid . It was a sign of enormous intelligence and courage because the easy thing would have been to stay at Manchester United, but there he wouldn't have improved nor would he have dominated the Champions League like he had at Chamartín.

Cristiano made his own luck . That also marks his limit, because with self-conscious willpower, it's impossible to possess the magic of others. He was a ballistic missile, not a dream of those who overcome children. Overcoming limits, competitiveness, a heroic mentality ... Di Stéfano and Cristiano would be the best at that. Beauty, plasticity, a return to a natural and dreamlike universe where man is both animal and human; there Maradona and that Messi who destroyed a city with a single glance would reign .

2. The demigods

Footballers bathed in the Styx, who at times behave like gods and at others are weak, injured , corrupted, or lack the luck or the will to turn their career into a civilization. They're the ones ranked 7th to 15th. The best in each country... as long as that country isn't Argentina, Brazil, the Netherlands, or Portugal. Often the most beloved, precisely because there was something fragile or hidden about their talent.

Franz Beckenbauer was a German midfielder forged from the same steel as the legends, but whose talent wounded but did not dazzle. He had the same dominance over the game as Di Stéfano or Cruyff, but he rarely reached the final step, where the historic goal is shouted. He was just a player. He wasn't three players in one. The goal, on his teams , was the responsibility of Gerd Müller, a war demon who also ranks on his level. Someone hairy and brutal, with no regard for the poetic margins of football, a predator who condenses everything he is in the finish . The greatest penalty area player in history.

In the place of the princes would be Michel Platini and Marco Van Basten. They are the two archetypal stars of the 1980s. Platini was class. The easiest and most precise long pass ever made in football. And he also reached the penalty area in his own way , not like a sprinter but like a king whose ball was waiting for him. And he would gently pass it and put it in the corner, always where there was more space, without rancor or malice. With that natural grace that everyone surrenders to.

Zidane and Van Basten

Van Basten is the aesthetic pinnacle of football. Tall, very tall, he was a swan who grew ever darker and more menacing as he reached the edge of the penalty area. The most poetic and the most brutal, his shot was of a chilling clarity . Only Zidane could remove him from that throne where art and functionality coexist. The exquisite goal and the tremendous victory. Zidane had the physique of a retiree and the gait of a Renaissance painter. A musical footballer who returned Madrid to the center of the Universe and ended up tired of his own style.

Garrincha and George Best epitomize pure genius with a disjointed will. The Northern Irishman is a unique case. The greatest dribbler football has ever produced comes from a country where dribbling didn't exist. It's as if the best flamenco dancer were born in Antarctica. Also in the mix are Eusebio , Cristiano Ronaldo's only known role model. And Puskas. A left foot glued to the universe of Sancho Panza. The Hungarian made his homeland at Madrid. The power of his shot and his economy of movement remain at the top of his game.

There are only two left. One is Ronaldo Nazario. Children's favorite player. Another among those 10 best in history , who usually have at least two Ballon d'Ors. In reality, Ronaldo won very little. He's judged by what could have been . A league title with Madrid and a World Cup. The rest are minor tournaments. But his debut at Barcelona is the most dazzling in history. From then on, everything Ronaldo did immediately became a memory , material from which to weave a legend. There's one very important thing about Nazario . He symbolizes something. He symbolizes happiness without anything behind it.

At many points in his career, he wasn't even effective. Pure happiness, Brazilian style. Ronaldo took a while to learn how to play. Even at Inter, he would spend entire days dribbling down the wing as if thinking about the videos they would dedicate to him in the future. That, in that dog-eat-dog league, was useless. But he made people happy. On the street, every kid wanted to be Ronaldo. He wasn't self-centered, but he was a sucker. Give me the ball and I'll change your destiny, he seemed to say. And that magnetic presence, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, is what we look for in art, in literature, in representation. In football. Memory and childhood. That's everything. Ronaldo Nazario.

Sergio Ramos' problem

On this second tier, of gods and men, a Spanish player could have been placed. The best center back or perhaps the best defender, or better yet, the best footballer who has ever played as a defender. Sergio Ramos. A man on a horse from which to dominate the horizon. But Ramos doesn't have a country behind him . He doesn't even have fans behind him. A player is what he is... plus what he represents. Ramos represents boundless ferocity , courage, the broken voice that rises when all is lost. And he's also a great ball player. But he has a distorted image in Spain, which is the country that should have supported him to be at the top.

The hierarchy is built by critics, sports journalists, children, and people from all over the world. To be at that level, you need the unwavering support of your fans, your country. They must blindly believe you're the best in history. Everyone on this list has that unwavering support. But Ramos doesn't. He's disliked by his own fans and disputed in his own country. His image lacks that poetic aura of those far superior . Perhaps it's the burden of someone who turned his heart into a battlefield.

The last of all to make it onto that list is Luka Modric . In the 2021/2022 Champions League, when his physical condition had already given out on him , Luka starred in half a dozen moments that turned around knockout rounds that Madrid had lost. All those moments, flashes from beyond the grave, are in our memories. In Modric, there is the gift of grace and the gift of tyranny . Cristiano's Madrid, the most successful since Di Stéfano's, had Marcelo, Karim, and Isco for grace and Ramos, Kroos, Casemiro , and Cristiano for tyranny.

Modric was the one skipping rope and crossing the sacred line. Some will attribute his excellent record to his teammates, but Luka led Croatia to a World Cup final and another semifinal. A Croatia stingy with talent, yet generous in effort, that believed itself to be limitless because within it beat one of the greatest hearts the sport has ever produced. It's difficult to compare. But Luka is possibly superior to Platini or Beckenbauer in the big moments and to Zidane in the day-to-day. And here ends the first half.