Sports was made for arguing, and if you want to take part in the world's most common sports arguments, you need to know how to rank the world's best soccer players. Walk into this discussion empty-handed, and you'll be a laughing stock from London to Rio. Take ten minutes to read this guide, and you'll be able to win over your interlocutors with your nuanced arguments and sound logic. To really develop an opinion on the best in the world, you need to put in hours watching the Beautiful Game and forming and then refining your own impressions, but this guide, which requires nothing more than your eyeballs and a functioning computer (which presumably you have), will help you develop the framework with which to judge.

If you want to find the world's best players, you can start at the best clubs in the best leagues. This means the players leading powerhouses in Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Chelsea in England; Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain; Inter, AC Milan, and Juventus in Italy; as well as players sprinkled around Germany, Portugal, Holland, and France. Following that path, you'll fill the top spots on your list with players like Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta, Didier Drogba, Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres, Gianluigi Buffon, and many others.

However, sticking to the top teams in the best leagues is not an absolute method (more on that later).

It's a virtual rule that at any given time, the consensus world's best player will be a goal scorer, either a forward or an offensive midfielder. Today, for example, everyone has their favorite, but most people argue that either Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Wayne Rooney is the best footballer in the world, with most settling on the first.http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=757470&sec=uefachampionsleague&root=uefachampionsleague&cc=3888 You could make a good case for each of the three, and all should be high your list, but as you move on down the list, it's important to start focusing on non-scorers.

For instance, Andrés Iniesta may not be a big-time net-finder, but no top ten list is complete without the Barcelona midfielder. Likewise, defenders like Nemanja Vidic, Dani Alves, and Maicón deserve a spot in the top 20 or 30 players as well. Unlike in, say, hockey, the defenders in soccer do little to support the offense, so don't look to goals to measure their value. Indeed, none of the above-named defenders has close to ten goals in international play in their entire career. For the goalies, Iker Casillas of Spain and Real Madrid, is usually the highest ranked net-minder, followed closely by Gianluiggi Buffon, who plays for Italy and the club team Juventus, and Julio Cesar, whose the starting keeper for Brazil and Inter Milan. None of them find their way into anyone's top ten list very frequently, but Buffon and Iker are more often than not in the top 25, while any top 50 list missing Julio Cesar would be incomplete.

Soccer is a team game, so you want to take a look beyond individual stats and to the team's performance. A truly great player should elevate his team's performance to the elite level of his league. Uruguayan Diego Forlan, a forward for Atlético Madrid, is a good example. He has led the Spain's La Liga in goals on multiple occasions, but he has never lifted his team to a major title, so Forlan doesn't usually (if ever) crack the top 20 in the world.

At the same time, it's important look beyond the main clubs. In the mid-2000s, unquestionably one of the best players in the world was Andriy Schevchenko, who played for a third-tier soccer nation (Ukraine) as well as a club team in a third-tier league (Dynamo Kiev). Even though Schevchenko didn't labor on one of the world's great clubs (though he would later), his skill level was such that the Dynamo Kiev was for a time comparable to the best teams of the world.