A huge referendum to choose the best footballers of all time came as a surprise, as former Italian star Andrea Pirlo led the referendum, beating the former and current world football legends.
The poll was launched on the 24th of last month, the American website "Ranker", which specializes in polls, and more than 3.7 million people have participated in it so far.
Just as Pirlo, the star of Milan and Juventus and the former Italian national team, the referendum shocked those who consider Argentine legend Diego Maradona and his Brazilian counterpart Pele the best players of all time, as well as fans of Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo and his Argentine star rivals Lionel Messi as well.
Although the Italian star who won the World Cup in 2006 obtained about 30,000 positive votes and about 18,000 negative votes at the time of publishing this report, which is much less than the other legends mentioned above, he managed to lead the referendum so far through his reclassification system The site according to several criteria followed it has in all referendums.
Maradona was ranked second in the referendum, followed by the Brazilian phenomenon Ronaldo, then his compatriot Ronaldinho, while Messi and Ronaldo ranked fifth and sixth respectively, followed by Pele.
The former French star and Real Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane finished eighth, followed by Dutch legend Cruyff and then Andreas Iniesta tenth.
The referendum in the first 200 players did not include any Arab player except for the Egyptian professional star in Liverpool, Mohamed Salah, who ranked 142 with only a few hundreds, because the vote was presented in the English language only and the Arab fans did not participate extensively, while the former Cameroon star Samuel Eto'o was the first African To vote and finished 33rd.