re: RONALDO appreciation thread!

It's really hard to compare eras. The game was markedly different from Pele's era to Maradona's era and the game changed tremendously from even Zidane's era.

For the modern era, which I count as when the new offside rule was made in 2005, I'd suggest Messi as one, Ronaldo as two, and then it becomes significantly harder to rank. I'm partial to deep-lying playmakers, so Pirlo and Xavi would have to be ranked there. Iniesta might be in the top five, but I can't think of who else. Zlatan had a pretty incredible run, so he might be in the top six. It's hard to rank players in this era too where you can watch players more consistently. All of the potential top players have had periods where they dropped off, and no team has been as stylistically dominant as Pep's Barcelona teams, though I think the best team of this era was 2012 Bayern Munich.