Interesting comparison but don't put too much trust in historical figures, ELO ratings do suffer from rating inflation.
Haven’t seen this site before.. United, Chelsea and Liverpool 07/08 teams all make the top 12 sides in history? That doesn’t make any sense. Especially since Arsenal finished 7 points above that Liverpool team (Ranked 25th).
PL 07/08 must have been a hell of a season come to thing of it - 4 of the top 25 sides ever battling it out for one league title.
Would love to play them in CL final..Fantasy football game.Would be interesting but experience might give them the edge.
Interesting that a Hungarian 2nd division side is in 5th in the all time list ahead of all English teams.
Its intrinsic, I guess he takes a base line considers the inflation and deflates everyone by a mean percentage. It gets complicated. If you look at Chess where players haven't really improved dramatically, as in football, fitness, diet etc not such a big influence, from the top 20 ever ELO ratings, only 3 players feature from pre 2000. Kasparov July 1999, Fischer April 72 and obviously Karpov who amazingly creeps in only at 20th in 1994. With the greatest respect to Anish Giri who is at 13th with an ELO of 2798, it would be churlish to claim he was a better player than Karpov, Alekhine, Fischer, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Even Steinitz and Morphy could be argued to be better players had they had access to modern tools and the advantage of modern opening theory.That’s true though I know Lars(who runs the site) attempts to guard against that...don’t ask me how though!
Its intrinsic, I guess he takes a base line considers the inflation and deflates everyone by a mean percentage. It gets complicated. If you look at Chess where players haven't really improved dramatically, as in football, fitness, diet etc not such a big influence, from the top 20 ever ELO ratings, only 3 players feature from pre 2000. Kasparov July 1999, Fischer April 72 and obviously Karpov who amazingly creeps in only at 20th in 1994. With the greatest respect to Anish Giri who is at 13th with an ELO of 2798, it would be churlish to claim he was a better player than Karpov, Alekhine, Fischer, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Even Steinitz and Morphy could be argued to be better players had they had access to modern tools and the advantage of modern opening theory.
They now have developed other methods to attempt to compare players from different eras and the results are very different. Most of these systems though give far higher ratings to players from the past.
Its interesting though.
I visited it recently for the first time and thought it looked decent, haven't had the time to study as yet. I play a fair bit of chess myself so apologies for the lengthy diatribe, football is clearly a different animal. Players from 100 years ago could hardly be expected to put up much of a show today but I think iirc Fischer reckoned Morphy would beat anyone alive in the 1970's. I think that may have been an exaggeration but he certainly would have been a decent player. Maybe ratings inflation is actually applicable to football, but how much is questionable. More than this, do we want to literally compare Barcelona of today against Real Madrid of the fifties, it seems a bit pointless. I think the idea is to say which team was the most dominant in their era.To you and I it's interesting, not sure there are many people on a City forum who would share our view!
Comparing players/teams from different eras is really difficult as you say and chess is a good example as of course that's where Elo was first used. I can't find much agreement on chess players past v present. Some argue that deflation is as common as inflation and that modern players are that much better now as they have access to so much more data and can play the finest computer programs. Then again if Fischer was around now with the same access I'm sure he would be one hell of a force. It's easier to determine dominance in an era and compare those I think but that's not as relevant.
Clubelo has proven the best footy site there is in terms of present day accuracy in predicting outcome in empirical tests. I like that he has attempted to compare teams from different eras and given it his best shot. He takes the highest rating of a team four years either side of the peak. With football I can definitely believe that sides post Bosman would be vastly greater than the pre Bosman era. Second now is a seriously good team historically. The top club sides would in general beat the top International sides which wasn't always the case.
I see we have slipped to third but can take back second if we beat Stoke by 7 clear goals tonight!
If you have time take a tour of his site its a great piece of work and a lot of the info is a link to more info even though that's not always clear. You can also see from his twitter feed what a close knit group football staticians are...they all know each other...even the guys in America like Nate Silver.