1. Erling Haaland - Best player in the Premier League.
2. Mbappé - Best player in France going to La Liga.
3. Sean O'Malley - Best UFC fighter, pound for pound.
4. Shohei Ohtani - No player in the modern era of MLB does what Ohtani can do. None.
5. Giannis Antetokoumpo - Best player in the NBA today. (Not 10 years ago. Today.)
6. Patrick Mahomes - Best player in the NFL.
7. Connor McDavid - Best player in the NHL.
8. Florian Wirtz - MVP of the Bundesliga.
9. Sunil Narine - MVP of the Indian Premier League. (Cricket)
10. Luka Doncic - Second best player in the NBA.
11. Vinicius Junior - Champions League MVP
12. Lamar Jackson - 2-time, and reigning, NFL MVP.
13. Antoine Dupont - Arguably, will be the most watched Rugby Sevens player at the Paris 2024 Olympics. He is considered the "world's best rugby union player in the traditional 15-a-side format."
14. Oleksandr Usyk - Number one ranked heavyweight boxer in the world. That fight on Dec. 21 against Tyson Fury will be epic.
15. Gustav Forsling - Led the Panthers to the Stanley Cup and led the league in +/-
16. Mookie Betts - Going for all MLB First Team for 4th time in 5 years.
17. Jannik Sinner - On fire in Men's Tennis, currently ranked #1.
18. Lionel Messi - Best player in MLS.
19. Cristiano Ronaldo - Best player in Saudi Arabia.
20. Miles Garrett - Best defender in the NFL. By a mile.
You think my evaluations are garbage? I'll listen to that.
You demand to know my thought processes? Okay, basically soccer is the world's sport and the best players in the world run 7-10 miles during the course of a game. So we leaned heavily into soccer and then rounded out the list with the best players from the other most popular sports from around the world. I tried to sort through athletes with a huge media following versus what they actually did in their sport over the past year.
Major Omissions:
LeBron James - His prime years were 2010-2020. Is he still doing a great job on the court? Absolutely. But Young LeBron wouldn't have accepted 7th in the conference and out in the first round of the playoffs.
Tiger Woods -1- Tiger is way past his prime. -2- Golf isn't a sport.
Novak Djokovic - We actually considered Djokovic until the last revision
Faker (eSports) - See Tiger Woods
Caitlin Clark -.... ...... ......
And this is where our article REALLY begins.
Five years ago, ESPN published their annual WORLD FAME 100 list. They based their Top 100 off of Google Search Scores Endorsements, and Social Media following. Why did ESPN discontinue their list? Because they were criticized for not being inclusive enough. They focused on criteria that didn't include far-left talking points like sexuality or gender.
Is Beacon of Speech's list inclusive? I actually didn't check it until after I was done.
Race-wise? I believe it is.
Geography-wise? It definitely skews toward the United States and Europe.
Gender-wise? Uh-oh.
LGBT status? I did not do that deep of a dive into any of the athletes' personal lives.
In the year 2018, we wrote about track and field athlete Caster Semenya. 3 years later, we noticed our article was wiped from the Google Search Engine. Today, if you try to google best athletes in world, or best athletes in America, suspiciously few lists come up.
You know how many bloggers are out there in America? Thousands. How many of them thought of the idea of a Top 10 Athletes or Top 10 Players list? Probably hundreds.
How do I know? When I was a freelance writer at TopTenz, they got lists everyday like:
Top 10 Songs
Top 10 Athletes
Top 10 Movies
Top 10 Guitarists
They said they were specifically looking for unique and one-of-a-kind lists.
One of my most popular lists was: Top 10 Athletes Accused of Murder.
But as a search engine, why would you curb generic lists like Top 10 Athletes? I understand why TopTenz doesn't want to be repetitive, but what's the harm of hundreds of different lists on the same topic at Google?
The genius of Google when it started was that once you entered a specific word or a set of letters and numbers, what you searched for would just come up.
But after a while, Google didn't like what people where searching for and they started to manipulate the searches. Left and far-Left topics and sources gravitated to the top, Right and far-Right topics and sources were de-emphasized or disappeared.
Now Google can't check every article ever written, but they have the power to move the needle. If you search for a common topic like Abortion, they can make sure vetted pro-choice content comes up in the first hundred or so entries. Do you even look beyond the Top 10 searches in Google?
If it wasn't for WhatFinger, our web traffic would be down to a trickle.
Try googling Best Athlete lists for yourself, and see where my list ranks amongst them. Do you notice if the ones that come up slant a certain way? Or, better yet, are the lists loaded with people you WOULDN'T consider the best athletes.
Why do you think so many independent websites beg you to use alternative search engines?
Or ask for your email address.
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