Man, trying to figure out who the absolute best player on that 1998 French World Cup team was is a total nightmare. Everyone remembers Zidane, sure, but that squad was absolutely stacked. I mean, Petit, Thuram, Deschamps—they all deserve massive props. I decided I wasn’t going to just throw out my own opinion because frankly, my bias toward Lizarazu is too strong. I needed actual data, or at least, something that looked like expert consensus.
The Initial Setup: Defining “Expert”
I started this project about two weeks ago. I was chatting with a buddy who insists that Barthez was the real hero, stabilizing the whole defense, and that got me thinking: how do you measure greatness in a team where everyone played their specific role perfectly? If you’re going to claim “Expert Picks,” you can’t just ask Reddit. I knew I needed historical context.
My first step was gathering the source material. Since I don’t have the budget or connections to interview Aimé Jacquet or Marcel Desailly, I had to define ‘expert’ as the major European football journalists reporting at the time of the tournament, and immediately afterward. This meant digging out old archives. I scraped data from post-tournament review magazines from the UK, and then I spent an embarrassing amount of time translating articles from French publications like L’Équipe and Italian sport papers, checking out who they named in their ‘Team of the Tournament’ lineups.
This process was a huge pain. I kept running into broken links and subscription walls. I wasted an entire Saturday morning just trying to bypass the digital archives of one major Spanish sports daily. It was like a treasure hunt, only the treasure was grainy text from 25 years ago. I managed to download about fifty separate articles, mostly focusing on player ratings and post-match analyses, not just the match reports.
The Grind: Building the Metrics
I realized quickly that just counting how many times a name came up wasn’t enough. Zidane missed two games due to that red card, so pure appearance count was unfair. I had to implement a weighted scoring system.
I assigned scores based on three categories derived from the expert write-ups:
- Consistency Rating (40% Weight): How often did the player receive a 7/10 or higher rating in their match reports across the entire tournament? (This favored defensive stability and workhorses.)
- Impact Score (35% Weight): This was based on direct involvement in goals (goals/assists) or game-saving defensive interventions (cleared off the line, key saves, penalties saved). I focused heavily on performances in the knockout rounds.
- Leadership/Intangibles (25% Weight): How often was the player cited by journalists as the “engine,” the “commander,” or the “heart” of the team? (This was purely subjective but based on repeated terminology in the articles I collected.)
I spent the next two evenings creating a massive spreadsheet. I entered every single rating I found for the core 15 players who saw significant minutes. It was mindless work, but essential. My fingers ached from typing in names and scores over and over. I caught myself almost giving up when I had to go back and re-read the difference between Petit’s rating against Denmark and his rating against Paraguay—the handwriting on the scanned PDF was terrible!
The Result and The Rationale
Once all the data was inputted and the formulas ran, the results were fascinating, if not surprising. My personal favorites didn’t dominate, but the players who truly defined consistent excellence did.
I processed the final ranking, and I found out that the consensus wasn’t a landslide victory for Zizou, although he was certainly up there. The metrics pointed squarely to two unexpected heavy hitters who delivered week after week, regardless of flashiness.
I wrote up the final piece, detailing exactly why the experts from 1998 had placed these three players where they did. The list ended up being highly defensible based on the archives. I constructed the final segment to be a countdown, starting with the bronze medal pick and climaxing with the number one spot, explaining the scores for consistency and impact along the way.
This is what I learned: If you want to make an objective pick, you have to ignore your own emotions. I wanted to put Petit at number one because of the final goal, but the numbers forced my hand. The experts overwhelmingly prioritized the players who played every minute, every game, and never dropped below an ‘excellent’ rating, even in defense. It was a tough lesson, but the final list is solid, backed by months of archival pain. That’s the real practice record I wanted to share: the sheer amount of manual labor it took to turn nostalgia into quantifiable proof.