Greatest of All Time (GOAT)

What this page is, and what it refuses to do

"Greatest of all time" is an argument, not an award. But it has been conferred — by named bodies, on stated dates, by stated methods — and that is what this page records. Every entry below has an awarding body, a date, a winner and, where the body published one, a method. Where no method was published, the entry says so, because that absence turns out to be the most interesting fact in the whole subject.

The page carries no ranking of its own and no house pick. Where two bodies disagree, the disagreement is reported flatly, as evidence that the question is not decidable by vote. Nothing here weighs eras against each other or adjudicates between winners.

Four different things are constantly conflated and are kept apart throughout. A century award is a one-off retrospective designation and is the only one of the four that functions as a formal greatest-of-all-time honour — and even then only within one sport or one continent. An annual award names the best of a season. A career or state honour has no competitive field at all. And a fan poll is a fan poll. An honour with no competitive field cannot designate a greatest, however prestigious it is.

The methods matter as much as the names. Panel vote, editorial selection, public vote and journalist poll are not interchangeable, and most of the value of a page like this lies in getting that distinction right. For what this site does instead of ranking — counting things that are counted the same way for everyone — see the records sections on each sport's page.

The 1999 cluster: five bodies, five methods, four names

Within about seven weeks at the end of 1999, five major bodies each named an athlete of the century. They used five entirely different mechanisms and produced four different names.

Sports Illustrated, 2 December 1999: Muhammad Ali. Announced at the magazine's 20th Century Sports Awards at Madison Square Garden, broadcast live. There was no vote of any kind. The editors selected 42 nominees across seven categories and the magazine named the winners — Jim Brown, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Carl Lewis, Jack Nicklaus, Babe Didrikson Zaharias by category, and Ali overall.^[1] [2]

The Associated Press, 11 December 1999: Babe Ruth and Babe Didrikson Zaharias. This is the only one of the five that published its numbers, and its method verbatim was "a 16-member panel assembled by The Associated Press, with first place votes in parenthesis, points based on 100 points for a first place vote through one point for a 100th place vote." The top ten, with first-place votes in brackets: Ruth (5) 1551; Michael Jordan (4) 1524; Jim Thorpe (3) 1471; Ali (2) 1462; Gretzky 1368; Brown 1333; Joe Louis (1) 1327; Jesse Owens 1307; Didrikson Zaharias (1) 1254; Wilt Chamberlain 1235. The next-highest women were Martina Navratilova at 20th, Jackie Joyner-Kersee at 40th and Billie Jean King at 41st. Separate sport-by-sport century polls used their own juries — boxing's was a five-member panel, which put Sugar Ray Robinson first overall.^{[3] [4] [5]}

The BBC, announced 12 December 1999: Muhammad Ali. The only one of the five decided by the public. Ali "collected more votes from BBC viewers than the other contenders… put together" — the shortlist being six: Ali, George Best, Pelé, Donald Bradman, Jack Nicklaus and Jesse Owens. No totals or percentages were ever published, and the corporation's report does not say how votes were cast.^[6]

ESPN, 26 December 1999: Michael Jordan. Its method, verbatim, was "A distinguished panel of 48 journalists, historians, observers and administrators" determining "the 50 greatest North American athletes of the past 100 years". Two qualifications are usually dropped and both change the meaning. The list was expressly limited to North Americans, which is why Pelé and Bradman are absent from a ranking routinely described as of the century's greatest athletes. And ESPN's own wire copy disclosed that 25 of the 48 panellists were employees of or contributors to ESPN, ABC or Disney-affiliated businesses. It never published its balloting mechanics or any vote totals. Its top four were Jordan, Ruth, Ali and Brown; the web list ran to 100 names, the "50" referring to the documentary series.^{[7] [8] [9]}

The IAAF, announced 20–22 November 1999: Carl Lewis and Fanny Blankers-Koen — in athletics, and the subject of the next section.^[10]

A sixth exercise belongs beside them for completeness. ABC's Wide World of Sports ran a fan poll from 20 December 1999 to 28 January 2000 across fifteen candidates, announcing the result during the Super Bowl pre-game show on 30 January 2000. Jim Thorpe won it — as he had won the Associated Press's half-century poll in 1950, ahead of Ruth, while placing third in the same agency's 1999 panel poll.^[11] [12]

Athletics: the century award, and how it was actually decided

Carl Lewis and Fanny Blankers-Koen were announced as top male and female athletes of the twentieth century at the World Athletics Gala 99 at the Grand Hôtel in Monte Carlo, in a ceremony entitled "A Century of Athletics Excellence". The federation's own article is datelined 22 November 1999.^[10] [13]

The method is load-bearing and is almost always misstated. In the federation's own words, "The winners were chosen by the Council of the International Athletic Foundation from nominations received after a worldwide poll." A worldwide poll produced nominations only; the decision was taken by the council of the federation's award-giving foundation, reported as an eleven-member body. This was neither a public vote nor a journalist poll, and describing it as either is the commonest error about it.^[10] [14]

The only other candidate the federation names on its own page is the men's runner-up: "Lewis defeated another legendary sprinter-jumper Jesse Owens in the men's category." No vote counts, no electorate size and no full shortlist has ever been published, and no candidates list survives on the federation's site or in the web archive for the relevant period. Any shortlist circulating in secondary accounts should not be printed.^[10]

One point of precision that is routinely collapsed: Carl Lewis received three separate century honours from three different bodies in 1999 — the athletics award above, Sports Illustrated's Olympian of the Century, and, as widely reported, the IOC's Sportsman of the Century. The third of these could not be verified from any IOC source and is stated here as reported rather than confirmed.^[1] [10]

Football: the poll that split in two

The single best illustration on this page of why a vote cannot settle the question is that in 2000 FIFA ran two electorates in the same sport in the same year and got two different winners.

Its own pre-gala release describes the composite method: the male and female Player of the Century "have been voted by the readers of the FIFA web site www.fifa.com, the readers of the FIFA Magazine and an International FIFA Jury", from a list of 27 male and 8 female candidates, with the Club of the Century voted exclusively by magazine readers. The gala was held in Rome on 11 December 2000.^[15] [16]

The internet poll was won by Diego Maradona, on figures reported at the time as 53.60 per cent to Pelé's 18.53. The magazine-plus-jury poll was won by Pelé, on 72.75 per cent, that vote weighting magazine readers and the FIFA Football Committee equally at 50 per cent each — Pelé taking 58 per cent among readers and 87.5 per cent on the committee. Both men were given an award at the gala. They did not tie. Two structurally different polls produced two winners. The women's award split the same way, between Michelle Akers on the magazine-and-committee vote and Sun Wen on the internet poll. FIFA's own announcements of both results are no longer live and survive only in the web archive, and the percentage figures come from a table of FIFA origin hosted elsewhere; all of it is reported here on that basis.^[17] [35]

A third body ran the same exercise in the same period and produced a third ranking. The IFFHS organised elections for the footballers of the twentieth century "based on polls of journalists, former players and specialists", and its result read: Pelé 1,705 points, Cruijff 1,303, Beckenbauer 1,228, Di Stéfano 1,215, Maradona 1,214.^[18]

The same year, the same sport, three electorates — FIFA's public, FIFA's committee, and the IFFHS's specialists — produced Maradona first, Pelé first, and Maradona fifth. No adjudication between them is offered here, and none is possible.

The annual awards that function as running verdicts

Two annual awards are cited often enough as evidence in this argument to be worth setting out accurately, because both are widely misdescribed.

The Laureus World Sports Awards were first presented on 25 May 2000 in Monte Carlo, with Nelson Mandela as founding patron and 24 of the 30 founding members of its Academy on stage. The 2000 winners were Tiger Woods and Marion Jones, with Manchester United as team and Pelé taking Lifetime Achievement; two of that year's awards have since been rescinded and are marked as such on the organisation's own page.^[19] [20]

Who votes is misreported in two directions at once. The winners are chosen by the 69 members of the Laureus World Sports Academy — 68 in 2020 and 30 at founding. But the Academy does not pick the nominees. Shortlists in seven categories are created by votes from "more than 1,000 sports media from over 70 countries", and the shortlist for the disability award is supplied by the International Paralympic Committee. Discretionary awards, Lifetime Achievement among them, bypass the nomination process entirely and are granted by the Academy outright. The public votes for exactly one thing: the Sporting Moment award. A retrospective public vote on the sporting moment of 2000 to 2020 was won in February 2020 by Sachin Tendulkar, for being carried by his team-mates after India's 2011 World Cup win.^{[21] [22] [23]}

Lifetime Achievement, which the organisation calls its highest honour, has been conferred twenty times, most recently on Nadia Comăneci in April 2026. There is no Laureus century or 25-year greatest award: the 25th-anniversary ceremony in 2025 named none, and the retrospective-moment category does not appear on the official past-winners page at all.^[20] [21]

L'Équipe's Champion des champions is older than it is usually said to be and its method is published in unusual detail. It has run "depuis 1946 pour la France et 1975 pour le monde" — 1975 is when the world title was added, not when the award began. The voters are the newspaper group's own journalists, not the public. The ranking is established by secret ballot from a list of nominees closed in late November, each voter naming five athletes, with six points for first place, then four, three, two and one. Since 2012 the trophy has not been mixed: a man and a woman in each of the France and Monde categories, with para-sport winners added recently. The number of voting journalists is not published, and no century or millennium edition exists in either table — though that is a "not found" rather than a proof of absence.^{[24] [25] [26]}

Outside the anglosphere: what exists, and what does not

The pattern that emerges from looking outside the United States and Western Europe is that century designations were overwhelmingly an American and Western European media phenomenon of 1999 and 2000, and that most of the rest of the world confers career and state honours instead. This section is as much about absences as about awards, and the absences are stated as findings.

Africa. No African Player of the Century award by the Confederation of African Football could be found — no such award appears on its site or in its archived pages of the period. What it did do, in 2007, was run a golden-jubilee internet vote for the best African player of 1957 to 2007, tied to its fiftieth anniversary and never repeated. Roger Milla won it with 2,246 votes, ahead of Mahmoud El Khatib on 2,165, Hossam Hassan 2,011, Samuel Eto'o 1,840, Abedi Pelé 1,783 and George Weah 1,604, from a published top thirty. A separate confederation exercise is reported to have named Al Ahly African Club of the Century on 31 December 2000, ranked mechanically on competition results rather than by any vote; the confederation's own page for it is not retrievable, so that one is reported rather than verified. The IFFHS is reported to have run its own African century election, won by George Weah — on the title of its own article, the page itself having proved unretrievable. No African athlete of the century from the continental athletics body could be found and it may not exist.^[27]

Japan confers a real, state-level honour that is nonetheless not a greatest designation. The People's Honour Award was established by prime ministerial decision on 30 August 1977 and is conferred by the Prime Minister on those with conspicuous achievements widely respected by the people, after hearing the opinions of private-sector experts. Its recipients in sport run from Oh Sadaharu in 1977 through Yamashita Yasuhiro, Chiyonofuji, Takahashi Naoko, the 2011 women's World Cup squad — the only team recipient — Yoshida Saori, Nagashima Shigeo, Icho Kaori, Hanyu Yuzuru and Kunieda Shingo to the speed skater Takagi Miho in August 2026. It ranks nobody: there is no competitive field, and the same list carries film directors, singers and manga artists. No Japanese athlete-of-the-century designation was found.^[28] [29]

India's highest sporting honour, the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna, is conferred by the sports ministry and presented by the President, and is decided by a government selection committee chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge. Its own terms exclude it from this page: it is given for outstanding performance "over the period of the previous four years". It is a four-year performance award, not a career or greatest designation, and India has never named a sportsperson of the century by any government or federation designation that could be found.^[30] [31]

Brazil's Olympic committee instituted its Prêmio Brasil Olímpico in 1999, reportedly adding a trophy for a retired athlete in 2001 and a public-vote category in 2014, but there is no century category; no football confederation century honour was found either. The dates and structure here are drawn from secondary accounts.^[32]

The IOC appears never to have named an athlete of the century — but no IOC source was reachable during this research at all, so this is an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence, and the same caveat attaches to the reported award of an IOC Sportsman of the Century to Carl Lewis. What the IOC is understood to confer instead is the Olympic Order, established in 1975 for contribution to the Olympic Movement rather than for athletic greatness, and the Olympic Laurel; neither ranks anybody, and both are described here from secondary accounts.

The one continental federation exercise that was fully documented is the best on this page, and it comes from ice hockey. The IIHF announced a Centennial All-Star Team in 2008 "as voted by an expert panel" of 56 ice hockey experts from 16 countries, one of the 56 votes representing the collective opinion of a magazine's staff, with individual vote counts published: Tretiak in goal on 30 votes, Fetisov on 54 and Salming on 17 in defence, Kharlamov 21, Makarov 18 and Gretzky 38 forward. It is the only body in this research that published a full electorate, a full method and every vote count — and it produced the sentence quoted in the final section of this page.^[33] No basketball, tennis or other federation century designation could be verified.

One-offs, discontinuations, and the refusal nobody made

The most striking structural finding of this research is a negative one. No organisation was found that has publicly stated it will not rank athletes. The pattern is silent non-repetition, not declared refusal — and writing it up as a principled stand would credit bodies with a position none of them has taken.

World Athletics treated its century award as a one-off special award and has never repeated it; its own gala history shows the same pattern of one-off commemoratives in other years. It has since restructured its annual awards entirely, splitting the single athlete of the year into six category awards from 2023, and offers no century award of any kind. Several of its other awards have simply been discontinued.^[13] [34]

FIFA never repeated its century awards. All three — Player, Woman Player and Club of the Century — were billed by FIFA itself as "three exceptional awards" for the 2000 gala.^[15]

CAF's fifty-years poll was tied to a specific anniversary and never run again.^[27] Laureus effectively retired its retrospective-moment award: the fan vote of 2020 has no 25-year equivalent from the 2025 anniversary ceremony, and the category is absent from the official past-winners page.^[20] [21]

The BBC, the Associated Press, Sports Illustrated and ESPN have none of them repeated theirs. One later award is sometimes presented as a successor and should not be: the BBC's Golden Sports Personality of the Year, won by Steve Redgrave in 2003, was a fiftieth-anniversary award for a different thing. Redgrave was not on the 1999 shortlist, which was the six named above.^[6]

Each of these bodies ran a retrospective exercise of this kind exactly once, in a window of about thirteen months, and then stopped without saying why.

Why the question cannot be settled — and what counting does instead

Five reasons the question is not decidable, each anchored to something established above rather than to an opinion.

One: the electorate determines the answer. FIFA ran two electorates in the same sport in the same year and got Maradona and Pelé; the IFFHS's specialists put Maradona fifth. That is not a close call between competing judgments. It is the same question producing different answers because different people were asked.

Two: the field is drawn before the vote. ESPN's list was limited to North Americans, which is why the two most commonly named non-American candidates do not appear on it. The BBC's public vote had a shortlist of six that somebody else chose. The Associated Press's panel ranked a pre-drawn hundred. Sports Illustrated's editors picked 42 nominees and then picked the winner. Whoever draws the field has already done most of the deciding.

Three: the number of events available to win is not constant. Fanny Blankers-Koen was limited to three individual entries at the 1948 Games by the rules then in force; Carl Lewis competed across a programme, and a professional era, offering far more opportunities to accumulate. A count of gold medals compares two different opportunity sets.

Four: equipment, surface, training and field size all move. Comparing marks across eras is comparing different sports that share a name.

Five: professionalisation changes who is even eligible. Half the century's Olympic record was set under amateurism rules that excluded, disqualified or impoverished the best available athletes. Jim Thorpe is the obvious case — and he won the Associated Press's 1950 half-century poll and ABC's fan poll of 2000, while placing third in the same agency's 1999 panel poll.^[11] [12]

The clincher belongs to the most rigorous exercise in this research. Fifty-six named experts from sixteen countries voted on six positions for the ice hockey centennial team, and the federation published every count. It also published this: "None of the 56 voters individually matched the final voting results." The consensus was nobody's opinion.^[33]

What this site does instead. The records section on each sport's page counts things that are counted the same way for everyone — titles, medals, appearances, wins, margins — and publishes the count with its source. A count is not an argument, and it does not become one by being large. The site takes no view on what the counts mean.