Xavi/Iniesta better than Zidane?

First of all, being 2nd in “dribbles and runs” doesn’t mean someone would’ve been 2nd in dribbles, because they are different stats (as you should well know at this point, after having unsuccessfully argued otherwise for years). And we’d expect a midfielder to have relatively more “runs” than a lot of other players, since they operate in more space than those further up the pitch. Which means there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have been 2nd in just dribbles.

And even leaving that aside, it is actually quite common for the top dribblers in a league season to only have around 2 or 3 dribbles per game. For instance, the league leader and 2nd place in Serie A this season have 2.8 dribbles per game. The league leader in Serie A last season had 2.3 dribbles per game. The league leader the year before that had 2.9 dribbles per game, and 2nd place was 2.3. The year before that it was 3.4 for first place and 3.2 for 2nd (and if we were looking at total dribbles, 2nd place had 2.9 per game). Second-place in 2019-2020 had 2.9 dribbles per game. Second place in 2018-2019 had 2.5 dribbles per game. I could go on and on, and we could do the same exercise in other leagues. It would not be at all surprising for someone to be 2nd in a league season in dribbles while only dribbling about as much as Zidane did in the OPTA data we have. A big part of what makes your claim so absurd is precisely the fact that the dribbling stats you’re claiming Zidane had are so rare!

 

Also, to add to this, if we once again ignore that “dribbles and runs” is a different stat and assume that it’d at least be proportionate with dribbles stats (which, as I’ve noted above, is a favorable assumption to make here for Zidane, since he was a midfielder), the data there that @carlito86 noted has Rui Costa having over 50% more dribbles and runs per game than Zidane that season! So, if we are expected to believe that Zidane dribbled more than Messi and that “dribbles and runs” data should be taken seriously as a proportional indicator of “dribbling” volume, this would suggest Rui Costa was making like 7 or 8 OPTA dribbles per game. That is obviously implausible on its face. Rui Costa averaged 3.3 OPTA dribbles per game in the Euro 2000 that was held right before that season, and he averaged 3.81 dribbles per 90 minutes in his WC+Euro career. So, being proportionally 50% below Rui Costa’s dribbling would, in fact, suggest Zidane being around 2.2 to 2.5 dribbles per game—which is pretty similar to the kind of range Zidane was in for the OPTA data we have for him. If anything, this dribbles and run data is evidence that goes against the claim being made!

And that’s not even getting into the fact that I’ve previously showed “dribbles and runs” data in seasons where we also have actual “dribbles” stats, and demonstrated that someone with the same number of “dribbles and runs” per game as Zidane had in 2000-2001 only had 2.5 dribbles per game (see part about Victor Moses in this post, for an example of me making this point almost a decade ago to this same poster: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/xavi-iniesta-better-than-zidane.2021285/page-7#post-32479367). Another reason this data actually goes against the claim!

 

What’s your point? That’s a tiny sample (and not something that holds if we add more NT OPTA dribbles data for these players—even if just from Zidane’s younger years). You are asserting that Zidane dribbled more than Messi in general (i.e. over a large sample). And your only piece of evidence for that is that…he dribbled a lot less than Rui Costa over a large sample. Lol!

 

Great info @carlito86! Hopefully that’ll help put to rest this absurdity.

One thing that is implicit in your post that I just want to note: The data you provided indicates that Cristiano was making 14.61 “dribbles and runs” per 90 minutes in 2005-2006, and that he had 4.21 dribbles per 90 minutes. So that indicates that his “dribbles” were only like 28.8% of his “dribbles and runs.” I’ve also provided another piece of data showing that in 2011-2012, Victor Moses had 6.9 “dribbles and runs” per game and 2.5 dribbles per game. In that case, Moses’s “dribbles” were only 36.2% of his “dribbles and runs.” The data provided from 2000-2001 indicates Zidane had 7.4 “dribbles and runs” per 90 minutes. If his proportion of “dribbles” compared to “dribbles and runs” was similar to Cristiano or Victor Moses, then that’d suggest Zidane was probably making somewhere between 2.1 and 2.7 dribbles per 90 minutes. Which would also be quite consistent with the dribbles data we have for Zidane in WC+Euros and in the Champions League. All signs point in the same direction!

 

If anything, we’d expect that a winger would have a higher percent of his “dribbles and runs” be dribbles, because they tend to operate in more constrained space. So I wouldn’t say Zidane being a CM is helpful to you at all. Nor is it reasonable more generally to think that Zidane would absolutely massively depart from others in what percent of his “dribbles and runs” were dribbles. You’re not positing relatively marginal differences, but rather are positing that virtually all of Zidane’s “dribbles and runs” were dribbles, while only a small portion of “dribbles and runs” were dribbles for people we have both sets of data for. And you then back that assertion with a random claim “from memory.” Just stop this charade. You have literally humiliated yourself with this since 2015. Every piece of data we have points in the same direction, as does everyone’s eye test except your own.

 

There is no evidence that Zidane dribbled as much as Messi. Your entire argument is built on rampant speculation. That speculation is contrary to the data we have—including the data we have from Zidane’s younger years. Of course, you have other excuses why we should ignore virtually all of those data points too, because you are desperate to cling to a claim that has no evidence supporting it and that is just an obviously incorrect claim. You are now also engaging in your other patented tactic of making a specific empirical claim but refusing to actually provide evidence for it (who could forget the many instances where you’ve claimed to have unnamed “sources” for things but that you couldn’t provide the evidence then but would do it later when your “source” got back to you, only to never do so?). Everyone else who has posted about this (not just me!) has told you that this is not a believable claim. It is embarrassing to watch you continue.

Lol, love the projection, buddy!

The difference of course is that you’ve taken a sample that is all from well outside Messi’s prime. In fact, Messi was older in the 2021-2022 CL and 2022 WC than Zidane was when he retired, and Zidane was three years from getting his first NT cap at the age Messi was in WC 2006, so there’s literally no possible parallel to these in Zidane’s career. Meanwhile, unlike this silliness, a good portion of the data we have on Zidane is from Zidane’s prime years. There’s not prime-years data from Messi that looks anything like what we see from Zidane—which is presumably why you didn’t include any. And of course that’s because Messi was a substantially more prolific dribbler than Zidane.

And the hilarious thing here is that you also just engage in silly misleading dishonesty even in this dumb cherry-picking exercise. Specifically, Messi was a sub in WC 2006, so using per-game stats there is ridiculous. Messi actually had 7.38 dribbles per 90 minutes in the 2006 World Cup! So that is actually a data point that goes strongly against your claim. Overall, in that 17-game sample you list, Messi had 3.0 dribbles per 90 minutes. That’s still ahead of the Zidane data we have that is derived from across Zidane’s career, and you are using numbers for Messi that come from ages that Zidane didn’t even play anymore! Remember, by the way, no one is cherry-picking Zidane’s worst data points here. We are using all the data we have for Zidane, and you are comparing it to intentionally cherry-picked data for Messi. And yet, even taking out data from Zidane’s last several years, he still doesn’t match this cherry-picked data from old-man Messi! If you can’t even get Messi in line with Zidane when you’ve intentionally cherry-picked data from years where Messi was older than Zidane ever was, then that is a really good sign that you are clearly wrong!

Let’s instead look at data for Messi that is actually analogous to what we have for Zidane. Specifically, for Zidane we have data from NT tournaments when he was 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, and 33 years old. And we have CL data from when he was 31, 32, and 33 years old. So, for Messi, that corresponds most closely to the 2011 CA, 2014 WC, 2015 CA, 2018 WC, 2019 CA, and 2021 CA, as well as the 2018-2019 CL, 2019-2020 CL, and 2020-2021 CL. What do Messi’s dribbling stats look like overall in those competitions? Well, in those competitions, Messi had 320 dribbles in 58 matches. That is 5.52 dribbles per match! And it was 5.57 dribbles per 90 minutes. That is compared to the 2.52 dribbles per match (and 2.55 dribbles per 90 minutes) that Zidane had in the corresponding data for him. So yeah, if we do an apples to apples comparison here, Zidane gets absolutely blown out of the water. So I’m glad you had this idea of comparing specific data points for Messi! It really accentuates how utterly absurd your position is!

 

Following up on the last part of your post here, please see the last paragraph of my post above, in which I compiled Messi’s dribbling stats in the corresponding competitions at the same ages. Messi ends up with over twice as many dribbles in that data set than what we see from Zidane in the analogous ages and competitions.

Amusingly, by the way, Zidane only even had 2 games out of the 44 we have data for where he actually had at least as many dribbles as Messi averaged over the corresponding ages and competitions.

 

LOL! No substantive response whatsoever, and just wild personal attacks. Anyways, I hate to break it to you, but I’m happily married, and, as you well know from prior discussions we’ve had, I’m a gainfully employed Harvard-Law-School-educated lawyer. So pretty much the opposite of what you suggest. Go project elsewhere—your constant preoccupation with personality disorders is perhaps revealing.