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Ranking the Years That Have Produced the Best Football XIs Since 1985

First it was ranking teams by their under-25s, followed by ex-players; now it's by birth years. No one plays the hypothetical XI quite like B/R Football.

We return with another fantasy exercise, ranking the best birth-year XIs. We took the best teams we could make out of players born in the same year and compared them, side by side, forming this order.

We went from 1985 to 2000, totalling 16 XIs, as it got quite difficult to fill out the teams with 11 recognisable names beyond those dates—world-class 35-year-old wingers and full-backs are in short supply, as are world-class 17-year-old centre-backs!