It is always difficult to compare players and ask the question, who is the best? The debate on this very site concerning who is the better player out of Steve Gerrard and Frank Lampard shows that people will rarely agree on what is a very subjective question.
It becomes even more difficult when the players are from different eras. Messi, Maradona or Pele?
Debate
In yesterday’s Daily Mail newspaper, Frank Lampard himself opened another similar debate that could be even more contentious. Lampard has said that Manchester United and England’s Wayne Rooney is a better player than Chelsea legend and current West Ham manager Gianfranco Zola was.
Lampard has played with both players so he should be in a good position to make a judgement. He believes that Zola was one of the greats but that Rooney is even more special,
“Wazza is the best. When he exploded onto the England scene at seventeen and played at Euro 2004 with me, I’d never seen anything like him for his power and all the other attributes he has that stand out. As a midfielder, as soon as I get on the ball, I want to play it in behind the other team’s midfield or defence. I need someone to be ahead of that action, already getting into a good position. As you learn to play with Wayne, you realise that his awareness is exceptional. It’s his key strength, his game awareness. Franco Zola is top-class, as a player, a man and evidently, too, as a coach. He is still way up there, but the football Wayne is producing for England makes him a very, very special player.”
There will be Chelsea fans who are outraged by Lampard’s assessment of the two players. Back in 2003 a poll on the Chelsea official website saw 15,000 fans vote for who was the best Chelsea player ever. An amazing 60% of the votes were cast for Zola. I guess a more recent poll may see the likes of Terry, Cech, Essien, Lampard, Drogba, etc giving Zola a run for his money, but in that previous vote he easily beat the likes of Peter Osgood, Dennis Wise and Jimmy Greaves.
Caps
Gianfranco Zola only won thirty-five caps for Italy, scoring ten goals. He was part of the World Cup runners-up squad in 1994. At club level he won Serie A, the Supercoppa Italiana, the UEFA Cup and the UEFA Super Cup with two different sides. After moving to Chelsea he won the FA Cup, the League Cup, the UEFA Cup Winners Cup and the UEFA Super Cup.
Individually he was twice voted player of the year and in 2004 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire and in 2006 he was inducted to the English football hall of fame.
Titles
Wayne Rooney, of course, is still only twenty-three years old and hopefully has many years at the top of the game ahead of him. He already has fifty-two England caps and has scored twenty-four goals. He has won three Premier League titles, the League Cup, the Champions League and the FIFA World Club championship.
Individually, he has been the FIFPro World young player of the year, PFA young player of the year and the PFA fans’ player of the year.
That is a pretty impressive list for a twenty-three year old player.
Scoring
A look at the scoring record of the two players shows that at club level, Rooney has found the net one hundred and fourteen times in three hundred and fifteen appearances. Zola managed two hundred and one goals in six hundred and nine games. This means that so far, Rooney has managed a goal every 2.76 games whereas Zola had a career average of a goal every 3.03 games.
So there we have it, two different players from two different eras. Both have been regarded as great in their time. One has finished his career and one has, in effect, only just started. It is difficult to decide but we have to ask the question.
Is Frank Lampard right that Wayne Rooney is better than Gianfranco Zola was?
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