4-4-Who? Why I don't give a Monkeys for their list

By Albatross
March 3 2005

4-4-2 Magazine have published a list that claims to tell us the 50 best players in the Football League. While some Hartlepool United fans are questioning why some of our star performers haven't made the top 50, I couldn't care less.

While the initial reaction of Poolies is to question why the likes of Boyd, Nelson and Konstantopoulos aren't in there, my personal question is why the list has been produced at all. 4-4-2 are of course getting a lot of people talking about their magazine (if not exactly in a complimentary way in many quarters) and no doubt there will be more than a few debates about who should have been in it, with fans everywhere pushing the claims of their players over others in the list.

The criteria used for selecting the list seems to be more about players that the writers will have heard of rather than anything else, and I'd question why certain people have been included at all. There are a few "Golden Oldies" such as Teddy Sheringham, Nick Barmby, Paul Ince and Dean Windass for example; but they're hardly players to keep an eye on for the future. Beyond them, it seems to be mainly a question of "Do they have International caps" or even possibly "Have we heard of them", with a few obvious top scorers of the likes of Howard and Trundle thrown in for good measure. It's a confused list, a list that's not entirely sure what it's there for. Most promising? Most skillful? Highest profile? Most valuable? You can hardly say that they are the 50 best players, no question; after all, you'd then expect them to be concentrated in the top Division 1 sides rather than spread liberally across all three divisions.

I'm not exactly a great fan of lists of this sort in any case. I stopped subscribing to "Q" in part because I just didn't find a list of the 50 or 100 best whatever every other month very inspiring - such lists are always subjective, and I'd much rather read a piece of quality, insightful journalism that tells me about someone or something I hadn't known about, or provides a new angle on it's subject. A list of 50 players that aren't currently in the Premiership is hardly going to encourage me to go and visit my local newsagent - sorry 4-4-2, but I'm not that fussed.

I don't agree with Sir Brian Mawhinney's comments about the issue either - he talks of how this will get fans debating, and how it may "help people realise how many good players, including young players, there are at Football League clubs." I don't think many Premiership Scouts will have needed the list to identify promising prospects, and I can't honestly imagine that the likes of Tranmere or Boston will find their next games flooded by Premiership fans eager to witness the sublime skills of Kevin Hume or David Noble in preference to their normal heroes. Whether it was intended this way or not, it smacks of tokenism - "We're interested in all of you Football League lot as well as the Premiership, honest" and desperation - "We have some good players too you know!"

I don't doubt that the publishers of the magazine will be pleased that so many people are talking about this feature; it won't do their sales any harm at all, which is after all the game that they're in. But I seriously doubt it will make much difference either. Whether those players are the 50 best in the Football League or not doesn't matter; it's not going to help a club on the verge of Administration, it's not going to spur a team on to promotion, and the world will continue to turn on it's axis in the way it always has. I'm not remotely bothered that no Pools players made the top 50; players come and players go in any case. The progress of the team - now that's a different matter.