Sports have the power to provide entertainment, joy, despair, camaraderie, and playful banter among friends or family. They can also inspire us to achieve new heights and elicit the best, both mentally and physically, from ourselves in the endless quest to surpass our competition. In the process, there are an elite few who showcase incredible feats of human performance and shatter all the record books, demonstrating to humanity the true summits that we can reach in the pursuit of excellence. This is why keeping stats and record books is so important; so that the new generations know where the bar is and what needs to be done to surpass it.

The main purpose of this site is to try to establish who the best athletes have been in their respective sports throughout history. It is fairly easy to decide who the best athletes are in recent years given the vast amount of stats available nowadays. Comparing athletes across generations, however, is incredibly more difficult. The sports themselves change slightly over time, and the data available to measure performance tend to be very limited in the earlier years. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating endeavor to discuss who the GOAT (greatest of all time) is in a particular sport. There are endless discussions in online forums and sports shows on TV dedicated to this topic with each person listing the merits of their favorite player. The arguments, however, invariably end up being quite flawed with some prioritizing stats, others the “eye test”, and others simply favoring a player due to sentimental reasons. There can be a real bias towards favoring modern athletes over their earlier counterparts due to all the media available now, the “eye test”, and the large amount of stats that are collected every year. Earlier athletes tend to be forgotten or devalued over time, largely because of the lack of video evidence that can be independently reviewed, and the sports themselves being regarded as “weaker” than the future iterations.

And yet I believe that with the right approach and the right understanding of a sport, fairly strong, albeit imperfect, comparisons can be made across generations. For instance, if we can agree that the best players are not necessarily those that excelled in specific stats but those that simply won the most and had the most impact in their teams in the process, then this gives us a blueprint for which data categories to focus on for comparisons. Winning, after all, is the ultimate measure of success in any competitive endeavor, not necessarily excelling in individual skillsets. Now, I do not intend to suggest that my approaches to all-time rankings are the definitive method for doing this. After all, this is a hobby, and I am merely using my own personal methods and ideas. However, I do intend for them to, over time, become as accurate as possible once all the most relevant categories for comparisons are implemented. I do plan to tweak things here and there as I learn about new strategies, hopefully using constructive feedback from the community in the process. Ultimately, this project is meant to be a joint search for the truth.. or at least the closest thing to it. Let’s enjoy the journey together!

The Rankings Guy (September 2025)