The best player in the modern game without a doubt

In football’s catechism of cliché it is customary to claim that some one-season wonder is “frighteningly good”.

Lionel Messi is simply the best. The best player in the best team, surely destined to be voted the best in the world for a record fourth time, and now the best striker of all time.

Records can lie, or at least distort the truth. This one doesn’t. Gerd Muller’s 40-year-old record of 85 goals in a calendar year was a monument, an impossible achievement. It was a record that included 36 goals in 33 league matches and 12 goals in six European Cup ties, but was also boosted by a further 12 in the German Liga Pokal (league cup), a one-off competition that was played in 1972 because the start of the football season was delayed for a month by the Munich Olympics.