#Paul Scholes

[existence-is-overrated]

clocked them 10mins into the vid x

[player1064]

happy pride month to a man who feels normal ways about other men

[michaelowenfever]

[k-ky]

A character study of 2000’s English players

[storyshark2005]

Scholsey and Carra, Fan Debate 2024

our usual cheeky scouser, Scholsey actually cracking some smiles and a few little chuckles!!

[notjustagame7]

"The only great English midfielder in my career was Paul Scholes. He has elegance in him. Others were pretenders."

Andrea Pirlo

[brun00u11]

[endofbeginings]

Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, 2010.

[carravillecore]

All their holiday jumpers are super adorkable!!!

[dailyreddevils]

[soomovic]

Paul Scholes, Manchester United - the FA Premiership Trophy 1995/96 🏆❤️.

[player1064]

Was gonna go to bed early tonight bc I didn't sleep last night but uh needless to say that plan was not successful.... have a supercut of Gary embracing men

[lisbs]

[k-ky]

Yeah I love the Northwest Derby I hope both sides lose

[harrison-abbott]

Cristiano & Lionel

I wanted to write a lil thing about a ‘debate’ which I’ve always found bizarre:

Who is better: Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi?

This discussion has baffled me for fifteen years or so, and I find it odd to understand why so many people compare these two soccer athletes. So I thought I’d offer my opinion on it.

Who is the most attractive supermodel on the planet? Bianca Balti or Kate Bock … Hmm. How would you rate something like physical attractiveness? Is this possible? Because isn’t such a thing [finding a person physically pretty] based on subjective interest? You could compare Balti and Bock with, perhaps, the amount of money they earn and the amount of fashion shows they’ve achieved, or similar things. But why would that even matter?

People endlessly compare Cristiano and Lionel objectively. As to how many goals they have, and trophies won. Football icons are powerful people. Because soccer as a sport is the most popular on the planet; because they are famous, wealthy and successful: and lots of the eight billion folks on the globe covet such attributes.

At the same time: many people have zilch interest in soccer. Doesn’t intrigue them; they couldn’t care less. Instead they’re interested in pop stars or movie actors.

So which actor is the ‘best’? Or who is the greatest band in pop history?

Well – if you were to look at the music example objectively, it’d hands-down be The Beatles. But many, many folks say they despise the Beatles: can’t stand them. If you were to judge who is the finest writer it’d be William Shakespeare.

To know Bill Shakespeare personally, you would have to invent a time machine and travel back 400 years and go speak to him in a grimy part of London, where the entire population of the city drank from the same river that they used to dump their sewage in. Bill would not be able to understand what you were saying. Because Old English had a totally different accent to how English is verbally used today. This man would also be about five foot tall.

Furthermore, Shakespeare was deeply unhappy, and you can see this in his sonnets; which is the only autobiographical information we have of him. He was just as vulnerable as any of us are, and had a personal life in tatters. But in the modern age we know almost nothing about a man who changed the English language, and whose quotes and quips we still use in everyday talk, perhaps without realising it. [Football pundits love to use the phrase ‘comedy of errors’ when the defenders get all clumsy in the lead-up to conceding a goal.]

Cristiano Ronaldo was a man who built, paid for and directed a museum for himself. I.e., he made a building/museum and funded it personally, to prove how great he is. Does this sound like a man who feels secure with his own ego? 

If you were to go back to the history of the Premier League, and ask fellow footballers/managers who they thought was the best player. Paul Scholes was regularly the number one. Thierry Henry, Zidane and Vieira all said that he was the top player. And they were part of that French clique which won the World Cup, Euros – alongside the famous Arsenal side that were victors in all kinds of ways too.

Paul Scholes wasn’t a star in the glitzy sense of the word. Not goodlooking like David Beckham was; hated that sense of celebrity. But Ferguson [the most successful football manager ever] said he was the best midfielder of his tenure.

My whole point is that there are many contradictions and ironies within fields like sport or artistic achievement, and many clashing opinions which don’t seem to make sense if you look at them in an alternative way.

Do you know the Andrei Tarkovsky films? I looked at a list of fan-voted TOP 100 movies ever, from magazines like Empire and Total Film, and the internet movie site IMDb. Not a single Tarkovsky movie features in any of these lists. Thus we can assume that they are not popular in a mass sense?

There was another poll conducted by the BFI whereby they asked 400 of the top directors internationally what their favourite films were. Two of Tarkovsky’s movies made their top 10. Indicating that Tarkovsky is perhaps a ‘filmmakers’ filmmaker’: in much of the same way that Scholes was a footballers’ footballer.

When people say things like ‘Ronaldo is better than Messi’, is it not the individual who is making a fallacy? By saying person X is superior to person Y, this is essentially negative and minimalistic. The comment is supposed to be provocative and offensive, in order to undermine the abilities of an athlete which the commentator does not have. And most of it is subconscious.

There is no ‘best’ sports athlete. Even if you analyse it objectively, it’s not quite possible to label one man or woman who is the greatest ever. It’s just that people like that idea – of being the most superb, the ultimate gladiator, whatever you wish to call it.

Those who have a larger sense of knowledge in a particular field tend to answer differently to people who have a smaller knack of information. And knowledge is the key to harnessing a threatened ego. They will be less fearful of famous people because they are wiser, and such comparisons between figures are made trivial. In short: they won’t be as judgemental.

When a mind has a spanning resource of information it tends to not think between subjectivity and objectivity as black & white slates; rather looks beyond both of them and focuses on further intellect, because that is boundless and unlimited.

Please can we stop comparing Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi? It’s so tiring, and people have missed the point for such a long time.

Fallacies like status get lost in history and individuals with ‘greatness’ are only as scared as the rest of us. Of course it’s hard to be less afraid of other people. But with learning we can grow a bit, expand, and keep on being informed, rather than judging others.

[notjustagame7]

Cristiano Ronaldo and Paul Scholes ❤️