Arguments: they are the toxic, yet infinitely renewable energy source that powers the global soccer economy. If you look hard enough, you can find someone, somewhere, arguing just about anything.
My favorite was probably when Thomas Rongen -- the former head scout for the U.S. men's national team and the former coach of American Samoa who was played by Michael Fassbender in the film "Next Goal Wins" -- claimed that Lionel Messi had an "average soccer IQ." There was also Andy Gray's famous suggestion that Messi would struggle if he had to play games on a cold night ... against Stoke City.
Stray further afield from pundits and former employees of the U.S. Soccer Federation, and you'll find claims that will make you wonder if you're seeing the very fabric of our reality being torn apart before your eyes. Things like, I don't know, "Is that guy who comes off the bench for an MLS team actually better than the USMNT starter who plays in the Champions League?" Heck, analytically minded people like myself have spent the past decade wondering if Real Madrid, winners of five of the past nine Champions League titles, are really that good.
In small part, this is all driven by how hard soccer is to understand and how the global competitive landscape makes it difficult to contextualize any one team or player's performance. We scream about how that bad player is actually good or the good team is actually bad -- and on and on.
But how about we try to be a little more specific? Rather than telling you who I think the best player in the Premier League is -- it's actually Dwight McNeil -- I'm going to take a page out of my colleague Matt Bowen's playbook. Armed with a new, detailed, granular dataset provided by PFF FC, I'm going to try to identify the best (and worst) players in the Premier League at a bunch of specific skills.
The numbers don't lie, so here is a list of the best -- and worst -- Premier League players in a multitude of different categories of skills.
