The Century: 40-21 countdown featuring Wayne Rooney, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Roy Keane and more
The Century: This week, The Independent is counting down the 100 best players of the last twenty years
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.This week at The Independent we are counting down through the 100 greatest players of the 21st century.
We asked ten of our football writers to identify the 50 greatest players of the past two decades, with each player assigned a number of points determined by their rank, before an overall list was then worked out.
In voting for the greatest players of the 21st century, our team of ten considered a few broad factors: a player’s ability and the actual application of that ability; the consistency of that application; the level they reached; their influence on the competition and – of course – their level of achievement.
Here is our Chief Football Writer Miguel Delaney explaining exactly what we were looking for and how the process works.
Each day this week at 8am we will be revealing twenty players, with the winner finally crowned on Friday.
Check the above gallery to see the second twenty players in our Century countdown.
The fourth part of our countdown features a number of World Cup, Super Cup and Champions League winners, highlighting just what a difficult task it was to rank the 100 players in question. Let us know what you think of our choices in the comments section below, or on social media.
The Century
This week, we are counting down the 100 greatest players of the 21st century, revealing 20 per day until the winner is announced on Friday.
We asked 10 of our football writers to select 50 players, with each pick awarded points contributing to a final score.
Join us throughout the week for a wide selection of exclusive interviews and features, as we celebrate the best players of the last twenty years.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments