There is an old saying about writing. "Nothing is scarier than a blank page." Well, I submit to you that people who say that have never stared at a blank spreadsheet and tried to rank the 100 best men's soccer players in the world. That's what we asked over 35 experts here at CBS Sports to do. We provided no criteria, and no restrictions. Whatever the 100 best meant to each individual voter, that's what they ranked.
Over 30 voters across CBS Sports soccer departments and the Golazo Network, including the hosts of Morning Footy -- Susannah Fuller, Charlie Davies, Nico Cantor and Alexis Guerreros -- alongside Nigel Reo-Coker, Ian Joy, Chris Wittyngham, Michael LaHoud, Jimmy Conrad, Guillem Balague and Anita Jones participated in this exercise.
This, as you may imagine, led our variety of panelists to examine things in multiple different ways. For some, players who left Europe to pursue the big contracts that the Saudi Pro League offered simply disqualified players from consideration. For others, significant weight was given to past performance, even if stars of years past suffered precipitous declines. All those lists were then averaged together to present the final product. Different views, different opinions, and different methodologies combing to make the first ever edition of the the men's Golazo 100.
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How the Golazo 100 voting works
Each expert ranked players from 1-100 with players receiving 100 points for first, 99 for second and so on all the way down until 1 point for 100th. For tiebreaking purposes, if two players finished with the same number of points, the edge would go to the player with the most individual points. Fortunately, no players finished tied on points after all the votes were tallied.
Over the course of voting, 297 different players received at least 1 point and the 100th player on the list got 342 points across our pool of experts.
