Best Football players of all time

Messi leads the Football ranking with 1775 ELO points over 780 duels, ahead of CR7 and Zidane.

The 87-point gap between Messi and CR7 reflects a clear separation at the summit, though both players dominate the upper reaches of the ranking. Messi wins 83% of his duels, while CR7 takes 74% of his 793 encounters. Zidane sits third with 1622 points, followed by Maradona at 1606 and Pelé at 1566. The podium confirms the grip of modern and late-20th-century icons on the community's vision of greatness, with the top five spanning different eras of the game. At the opposite end, Fritz Walter anchors the ranking at 782 points with a 24% win rate, while Scirea and Van Bommel sit just above at 800 and 848 points respectively. The bottom suggests that pre-modern legends and defensive specialists struggle to galvanize voters in a contest framed around individual brilliance and attacking flair.

The ranking draws on 31264 duels across 114 contenders, submitted by 127 players, and was updated on 12 October 2026. The scale of participation underlines the weight of the debate and the appetite for head-to-head comparisons in a discussion that rarely reaches consensus. Cast your own vote and shape the hierarchy.

Updated on October 12, 2026

How this ranking is computed

Every duel won lifts a contender and every loss drops them, by an amount that depends on the opponent's strength: beating the leader is worth more than beating the last. It is an ELO, the same principle as in chess. Duels are not drawn at random — an adaptive entropy sort puts the least predictable match-ups first, which settles the ranking far faster than a full round robin. A worldwide ranking is only published past 30 completed plays. Known limit: a contender who has faced few opponents keeps an approximate score, and the bottom of the table moves more than the podium.

How our rankings are made →