A couple of days before the 2022 World Cup final, I made a lot of people really angry.
I wrote a piece in which I claimed that we'd been having the wrong argument for the past 15 years. The question wasn't whether Lionel Messi was the greatest soccer player of the modern era. No, if you spend more than 15 seconds thinking about it or a couple of minutes looking at data, then it's quite clear that Messi is the greatest soccer player of the game's fully globalized era.
Instead, I said, we should be asking ourselves whether Messi was the greatest male athlete of all time.