Retro-Series: Team of the Season 1953-1954

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle the history of excellence in football. Since official awards are frequently less than fully trustworthy, I decided to watch my way through football history and build up an educated opinion on the great players and teams of the past. I do so by watching roughly 50 full matches per season, if that much footage has survived to this day. If not, I simply watch all the matches I can find. Having done so, I select a Team of the Season (or Tournament) and briefly portrait the players and why I chose them.
At the time of publishing the blogpost you are currently reading, this blog covers the years 1950-1954 and 2003-2024. A big spreadsheet at the end displays all my choices and applies a crude rating system to them.

Every season that I watch has its own charme, certain characteristics that make it unique, never to be repeated. Furthermore, most seasons contain some specific highlights. Be it individual matches, maybe even individual performances, or certain players who produced a whole season that transcends the normal ‘world class’ level that constitutes the state of the art at any given time. However, every once in a while the stars align and a season becomes truly historic. In my opinion the 1953-1954 season is such a year. 

There are essentially two reasons for this: first, the Mighty Magyars, arguably the greatest international side of the 20th century, hit their peak. This is the year they beat England 6-3 at Wembley and 7-1 in Budapest. Second, Di Stefano arrives in Europe and immediately begins to transform Real Madrid into arguably the biggest club in the world. The competition for Player of the Season will get even more intense later on in the decade when a certain young Brazilian enters the stage, but the overall quality of the team, especially in midfield and attack, is already extremely high in 1953-54. The dominance of the Hungarian team is reflected by the fact that for the first time ever, 11 players from one team make a single team (including the bench, of course).

I want to thank my two co-authors for this post: Rob Fielder, who also helped me with the selection process and generally contributes to everything that is good about this series. And Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling, the German author on all things football history. His book on the history of FC Barcelona in particular was one of the reasons I got interested in football history in the first place. For him to contribute the profile on Di Stefano is a great honour. Thank you!

Now, without further ado, here is the team:

Manager: Gusztav Sebes
Bench: Ghezzi, Grocsis, Beara; N. Santos, Lantos, J. Navarro; Happel, Lorant, Posipal; D. Santos, Buzanzky, Rickaby; Ocwirk, Zakarias, Munoz; Nesti, Didi, Cajkovski; Kubala, Schiaffino, Liedholm; F. Walter, Skoglund, Baltazar; Finney, Czibor, Mullen; Nordahl, Charles, Wilshaw; Matthews, Boniperti, Julinho
Best Player: Nandor Hidegkuti
Best Team: Hungary
Best Match: England – Hungary 3-6, 25.11.1953

Retro-Series: Team of Euro 2004

Manager: Otto Rehhagel

Bench: Cech, Nikopolidis; A. Cole, Zambrotta; S. Campbell, Ujfalusi; Carvalho, Mellberg; Helveg, Puyol; Davids, Maniche; Deco, Katsouranis; Seedorf, Lampard; Robben, Karagounis; Baros, Ibrahimovic; Rooney, Rui Costa

Best Player: Traianos Dellas

Best Team: Czech Republic

Best Match: Netherlands – Czech Republic 2-3, 19.06.2004

When you look for individual excellence in the history of football, Euro 2004 is probably not where you should start. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily think it was a bad tournament. It had its moments of individual greatness. It also had a pretty entertaining Czech side that could have gone on to win the whole thing. And of couse the story of the team that actually won the tournament, Greece, is perhaps the ultimate underdog tale in European international football history. Their defensive line, including their occasional man-marking act, was a particular stand-out. But then again, they were quite lucky both in parts of the group phase and knockout phase. Writing them up as some impenetrable defensive fortress would mean to overstress things a little. So while there were quite a few players that had a good tournament, I don’t think anyone produced a Euro for the ages or anything like that. But with that being said, enough about what Euro 2004 wasn’t. Let us turn to those players who did impress me when I re-watched the whole tournament:

Retro-Series: Team of the Season 1952-1953

Manager: Alfredo Foni

Bench: Beara, Grocsis, L. Buffon; N. Santos, Kohlmeyer, Marche; Horvat, Lorant, Jonquet; D. Santos, Branko Stankovic, Giovannini; Wright, Ocwirk, A. Bosch; Zakarias, Hanappi, A. Forbes; Zizinho, Kopa, Palotas; Francisco Molina, Didi, Liedholm; Finney, Zebec, Nyers; Mortensen, Lofthouse, Nordahl; Matthews, Kocsis, Baltazar

Best Player: Ferenc Puskas

Best Team: Hungary

Best Match: Blackpool – Bolton Wanderers 4-3, 02.05.1953

Not often will international sides win Best Team for any given season of football, but this time around there really can be no debate. 1952-53 marks the first of two seasons during which the Mighty Magyars hit their peak. I don’t think it is too far-fetched to say that it will take another ~60 years before another European international side reach a similar status over the course of multiple years. Consequently this team features quite a few of the Hungarian legends.

Glorious Waste

Some Thoughts on Neymar’s Career as He Transfers to Saudi Arabia

Neymar is one of the best footballers of recent times, of this there can be no doubt. In a little over 600 competitive senior matches for club and country, he’s achieved an average of roughly one goal scored or assisted per match. This, the combination of the 1-in-1 ratio and the staggering absolute number, is an enormous feat. It shows a player who not only reached a performance level squarely in the world class category but managed to maintain it for essentially a whole decade. To do so is the surest sign of true sporting excellence there is.

On these pages he won a place on the bench of the Team of the Season in 2010-11, 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, and 2020-21 as well as first eleven honours for the 2014 World Cup and the 2014-15 season. The only attacking players to feature significantly more prominently in my selections are Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Robert Lewandowski, and Kylian Mbappe (the selections currently cover 2004-05 until the present).

It is therefore wrong to speak of Neymar as a player who was merely ‘very talented’ but failed to turn that talent into a career. Injuries kept him from fulfilling anything near 100% of the talent he had, but the careers of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have made us forget that coming close to reaching a 100/100 score is an outlier rather than the norm. Mercurial attackers in particular usually fall far short of having the best career they potentially could have had. If Neymar reached, say, 75% of the career he could have had in terms of performance level, that would be squarely within the ‘well done’ category. Neymar’s talent was not lost.

It was wasted.

Team of the Season 2022-2023

Manager: Pep Guardiola

Bench: Courtois, Kobel, Alisson; Davies, Th. Hernandez, Mario Rui; Militao, L. Martinez, R. Dias, de Ligt, Kounde, Bastoni; White, Trippier, Di Lorenzo; Lobotka, Casemiro, Kroos; Modric, Bellingham, B. Silva; Griezmann, Lautaro Martinez, B. Fernandes; Mbappe, Kvaratskhelia, Grealish; Osimhen, Kane, Rashford; Messi, Musiala, Brandt

Best player: Kevin De Bruyne

Best Team: Manchester City

Best Match: Manchester City – Arsenal FC 4-1, 26.04.2023

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle footballing excellence both past and present. The 2022-23 season featured many examples of individual excellence, the pinnacle of which (hopefully) makes up the team you see above. But at the same time it is true that the most important peak of excellence this season was not an individual one, but came from a collective. If you care about the upper limits of what is possible on a football pitch, Manchester City was the story of the season. Modern-day Manchester City is an immoral project because of the nature of its funding. But it is a surpremely well-run one that this year, finally, seems to have peaked. The second truly great Pep Guardiola side has further, and perhaps ultimately, cemented its status as one of the outstanding modern sides. It is the best club team world football has seen since Guardiola’s Barcelona. I still think it is inferior to Pep’s debut masterpiece – for one, not having the best player of all time is a “problem”, and I also have questions about their psychological resilience in big games (see the CL final) – but the current City has by now reached the stage where historical comparisons have become warranted. Usually a sure sign of lasting quality.

Retro-Series: Team of the Season 2004-2005

Manager: Rafael Benitez

Bench: Buffon, Casillas, Dida; Gallas, Maldini, Heinze; Carvalho, Cannavaro, Stam, Hyypiä, Lucio, Puyol; Cafu, Zanetti, Beletti; Demichelis, M. Diarra, Pirlo; Vieira, van Bommel, Zidane; Riquelme, Gerrard, J.S. Park; Camoranesi, J. Cole, Kaka; Rooney, Forlan, Adriano; Shevchenko, Makaay, Drogba

Best Player: Ronaldinho

Best Team: Chelsea FC

Best Match: Chelsea FC – FC Barcelona 4-2, 08.03.2005

Anyone comparing this season’s team with that of last season will notice a lot of familiar faces. I would say this is justified since there really was a relatively high degree of continuity in mid-2000s top football. In the English, Italian, Spanish, and German league, the 2004-05 champions were able to defend their title one season later. Overall, it is fair to say that 2004-05 marked the season when the superpowers of mid-2000s football really established themselves.
In Europe, Liverpool win the highest honour under the most memorable of circumstances. It is sometimes forgotten how much of a surprise contender they were in the first place. Overall, they were not even close to fielding one of the best teams in Europe. Arguably the single most important figure in their unlikely Champions League run was their manager, Rafael Benitez. His plans and mid-game changes transformed Liverpool into a side that, at least for one night, were able to go toe-to-toe against the very best. Mourinho would have also been a worthy choice for Manager of the Season but Benitez made even more of what he had to work with.
I contend that my choice for Match of the Season may strike many as an attempt to be needlessly creative given the legendary status of the 2005 Champions League final, but I simply enjoyed the tie between Barcelona and Chelsea, and in particular the return leg, even more. A ‘high-water mark match’, a game where the uppermost limit of what was possible in world football back then was on display.
As always, this selection is purely about quality and quantity of performance. It doesn’t matter whether any player won anything or produced a memorable story, but solely about whether he performed well and how often he did do so. The 2004-05 season is defined as starting with the final whistle of the 2004 Champions League final and ending with the final whistle of the 2005 Champions League final. Euro 2004 is excluded because I will compile a team specifically for that tournament.

A big thank you goes out to Rob Fielder, who wrote a portrait of Frank Lampard and explained why the Chelsea midfielder rather than the Barcelona fantasista should win Player of the Season. His contribution is the highlight of this blogpost.

Retro Series: Team of the Season 1951-1952

After having written about the 1950 World Cup and the 1950-51 season, we continue our travels through the early 1950s by having a look at the 1951-52 season. It is in some ways a transitionary year. Perhaps most noteably, it is the season before the Mighty Magyars really burst onto the global stage during the Olympics (which count as part of 1952-53). It is also Alfredo Di Stefano‘s last season in South America. As such, it marks the end of Millonario‘s Ballet Azul, arguably the most legendary South American club side of the decade. In Europe, FC Barcelona win everything there is to win for them: league, cup, and Latin Cup, the closest thing to the European Cup of later years. The arrival of Kubala in particular is a highly important event in their history (although their last league and Latin Cup double came only three years earlier). In Italy the era of high-scoring Scandinavians shooting their respective clubs to the Scudetto continues: Hansen‘s Juventus wrestles the title from Nordahl‘s Milan. More generally speaking, the abundance of Scandinavian superstar players really is a remarkable feature of this era. The two central strikers already mentioned are part of a cohort that also includes legends like Gren, Liedholm, Praest, and Skoglund. Never again will Scandinavia produce such a depth of talent. During the early to mid-50s, only Central Europe can better their output per capita. South America continues to be very hard to judge. Footage is even more scarce and of even poorer quality compared to Europe. Millonarios, the Brazil team that wins the 1952 Pan-American Championship (while gaining some degree of revenge over Uruguay for the 1950 loss), and some of the names we know either from later spells in Europe or one of the World Cups of the time are our best points of reference. So, yes, choosing players remains quite hard given that this blog claims not to be about repeating opinions, but about forming an opinion based on watching footage ourselves. Rob Fielder has once again greatly helped me with his expertise, both in the selection process and for writing the profiles. While his enormous knowledge is the next best thing there is to actually watching full matches of the players in question, I still must say that I can‘t wait to watch the first full match available, the 1953 FA Cup Final which will be a part of next season. So please keep in mind that our selections come with a degree of uncertainty that greatly exceeds that of later times. Football‘s mythical age hasn‘t quite ended yet – which is in equal degrees frustrating and fascinating.

Selection is as always based on quality and quantity of performance.

Manager: Matt Busby

Bench: Walter Zeman, Vladimir Beara, Giovanni Viola; Ernst Happel, Roger Byrne, Gyula Lorant; Ivica Horvat, Josep Seguer, Jose Santamaria; Djalma Santos, Alf Ramsey, George Young; Jozsef Bozsik, Zlatko Cajkovski, Gerhard Hanappi; Didi, Giacomo Mari, Nestor Rossi; Ferenc Puskas, Giampiero Boniperti, Antonio Baez; Zizinho, George Robledo, Jack Rowley; Karl Aage Praest, Cesar Rodriguez, Baltazar; John Hansen, Gunnar Nordahl, Ademir; Julinho, Ermes Mucinelli, Ernst Stojaspal

Best Player: Laszlo Kubala

Best Team: Millonarios FC

Best Match: FC Barcelona – Juventus Turin 4-2, 24.06.1952

Retro-Series: Team of the Season 1950-1951

Manager: Arthur Rowe

Bench: Grocsis, Ditchburn, Rugilo; G. Young, Kohlmeyer, Danilo; Jonquet, Lorant, Liebrich; Ocwirk, Varela, Hanappi; Wright, Johnston, Didi; Liedholm, F. Walter, Annovazi; Gren, Boniperti, Palotas; Jair, Schiaffino, Hidegkuti; Finney, Nyers, Ademir; Kocsis, Zarra, O. Walter; Basora, Cesar, Ghiggia

Best Player: Gunnar Nordahl

Best Team: AC Milan

Best Match: Scotland – Austria 0-1

We continue our travels through early post-war football history by having a look at the first full season after the return of the global game in the form of the 1950 World Cup. Once again the selections are made not by me alone but with the help of the fantastic Rob Fielder! His outstanding knowledge of football history makes up for the lack of footage and especially for the lack of complete matches.

Team of the World Cup 2022

This blog of mine serves as a kind of chronicle for football history both past and present. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was undoubtedly a major event in football history that every chronicle of football history must cover. On the other hand, this World Cup was no ordinary World Cup but especially worthy of criticism because of the way the workers building its infrastructure were treated. See the Amnesty page on the topic. FIFA World Cups should not be touched by anyone wishing to end up with clean hands morally speaking, but this one marked the lowest point reached during my lifetime.

I therefore chose to proceed with the following uneasy compromise: I watched the World Cup on public broadcasting, compiled the Team of the Tournament you see below, but refrained from anything that could be seen as promoting the tournament. I did not tweet about it and this blogpost arrives nearly a month after the tournament has finished and only in a much shortened version. Just the selection, no portraits of the players. I also do not advertise this post on Twitter.

Bit of a half-baked compromise, you say? I agree. It is an uneasy compromise resulting from the conviction that the right thing is to stay as far away from this World Cup as possible and my desire to continue chronicling important on-the-pitch events in football history.

Now that you know why this blogpost is much shorter than usual, here is my selection.

Form Follows Function – On the Rationality of Lionel Messi

This is an old article of mine. Written in 2016, it was posted on the now defunct grup14.com homepage that exclusively featured FC Barcelona-related material. I was recently reminded of this piece when reading some comments Mauricio Pochettino made about Messi and Neymar in an interview for the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. He said that while Neymar is a player aiming for the special and the spectacular, Messi simply does what is needed to get the job done. No embellishments, no experiments, instead: clean control, clean dribbling, clean passing. Neymar frequently had to be the ‘piggy in the middle’ in Rondo exercises, Messi never. I think the main point I make in this essay is still true and hence I am re-publishing the piece.