* Know your Football * - Best GOAL SCORER ever?

* Know your Football * - Best GOAL SCORER ever?

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Ali Daei is the greatest International goal scorer with 109 goals of 149 matches.

Hey man, you should do us a favour, and give us the number of goals, country they played for, and period they played in for each player in the poll... would be interesting... unless thats too much? paulm2007-10-19 23:04:28

hey, well yeah thats a hell of a lot of work for all of the guys but if there's any you particularly want to know more about just google them and click on the Wikipedia page :) 

Does that make him greatest or best though?

As a striker, yes, he has the most goals in matches at ultimate (international) class, the statistics don't lie, as a striker, the best is the one who gets the most goals, its their job to score goals and he has the most at the highest level making him the best at what he does :)

statistics may or may not lie but their naive use invariably makes any subsequent conclusions invalid

surely you have to factor in a) goals per game and b) quality of the opposition

a) for instance (from memory) Pele was scoring at about 1:1 in internationals, as did Jimmy greaves
so your player might have remained injury free, had limited competition for the role, not pissed off his international coaches, and (most importantly) played in an era with greater numbers of internationals per year etc, etc - so whilst he has accumulated most goals in total he isn't scoring as frequently as other - better - players

b) the matches he played in were unlikely to have been consistently at the same level as those played by other nations

the best players are tested at the highest levels - not all international matches are of equal standard

First of all he isn't "my player", and i wouldn't put him in Pele's class, but by the amount of goals scored he is the most prolific.
Look at Wynton Rufer, he played for a reletivly useless team like New Zealand at the higehst level available to him, i.e. One world cup and Autralia, Fiji and other island nations with the odd exhibition against a higher level opponent, Yet no one argues he is NZ best EVER 'Player', EVEN THOUGH Vaughan Coveny is NZ greatest ever GOAL SCORER, can you see the point im trying to make? Greatest GOAL SCORER does not mean GREATEST PLAYER.

Pele is the greatest PLAYER ever, Ali Daei is the greatest GOAL SCORER ever. It's simple, you cant go into availability of matches and ease of playing against other countries as it is all arguable, its all 'what ifs', but the statistics show he has the record for most goals at international level, as a striker you cannot argue he was the greatest, if someone else was better  why have they not got more goals? If they are playing against higher level opponents consistently they themselves should be of a high level and it should be no different than Iran vs. Saudi Arabia where both teams are fairly equal.

highest international goal scorer - yes

best or greatest goal scorer - open to interpretation

and we have taken different interpretations

Enjoy the Nix  game! (I expect we'll agree on the desired outcome)

Hell Yeah! pity it didn't go our way though.