That's a good distinction Glavisted...most people only consider players they have seen as the best. Ometimes one would wonder if there have been good players before 1990 or 1985.
Maradonna is obvious but opinions about other great players like Pele, Cruijff, Beckenbauer, Muller, Garrincha, Piet Keizer, Eusebio, Bobby Charlton and other are very mixed...strange...
Problem is, I wouldn't really want to rate players who played before "my time", so to say, because no matter how often I watch repetitions of their greatest triumphs, I'll never experience them in a way I did and do experience current players, with all their ups and downs, weak and strong points during a whole season in different competitions.
Maradona, Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Pele etc. had their bad days as well. They had periods where it seemed to go downhill for them, too, but in present you never hear anybody talk about that cursed 13th matchday of the 79' season, where xyz played like shite, getting booed by thousands of his own fans.
Those guys have the "privilege" of the legendary status, which even seems to lighten even the biggest shadows they've drawn in their lives. Some to greater, some to lesser extent. Maradona would be the prime example of a person whose gross and immature behavior caused major scandals nobody really seems to care about anymore, since he was so good on the pitch.
Eventually, that'll happen with players I watched in their prime, and I'll find myself forgiving some of them all their misbehaviors, no matter what ...
That said, my top German player I can claim to have watched over a long period of time would be:
Lothar Matthäus, closely followed by the likes of:
Mehmet Scholl, Matthias Sammer, Andreas Möller, Oliver Kahn, Stefan Effenberg
My all time favorite German eleven would probably look like this, starting from the early nineties onwards to recent times:
GK: Oliver
Kahn
RB: Philip
Lahm
CB: Matthias
Sammer
CB: Jürgen
Kohler
LB: Christian
Ziege
DM: Lothar
Matthäus
CM: Stefan
Effenberg
RM: Andreas
Möller
LM: Mehmet
Scholl
FW: Jurgen
Klinsmann
FW: Miroslav
Klose
Though I doubt it'd be a good idea to play Sammer alongside Matthäus, since they were both pretty much sweepers. Klose would have a hard time with Klinsmann as well, since he never was the most gifted player technically.
Though I'm a die hard Kahn fan, one could easily replace him by Andy Kopke or Bodo Ilgner without much of a loss of quality. (in their prime, of course! Nowadays ...
...........or Norman Whiteside.
