Barcelona, Man Utd, Liverpool: The 50 greatest teams ever ranked by stats

Pep Guardiola is the proud owner of the two greatest teams in football history.

Well, at least, that’s according to statistics with the Manchester City manager having held the reins of the 2012 Barcelona and 2014 Bayern Munich sides that have conquered all other male squads.

Guardiola is already revered as one of the greatest managers in history for his uncanny ability to win trophy after trophy after trophy and now the data has given him a major argument in the GOAT debate.

Over at clubelo.com, a complex algorithm is used to rank the greatest male teams in history with the peak of their ‘Elo Rating’ comparing the sides by how incredible they truly became in their prime.

You can read more about how the totals are calculated here, but the moral of the story is that it measures a team’s capacity to beat another in direct competition with only one value per club at any one time.

So, if we’re being truly accurate then the data shows that Guardiola’s Barcelona side on April 15th, 2012, is the greatest in history, followed by his Bayern team on March 26th just two years down the line.

And with the clubelo.com rankings factoring in teams from across footballing history, whether that be the Real Madrid sides of the 1960s or Hungarian outfits of the 1950s, it really is nothing to be sniffed at.

As such, we figured that it only made sense to put Guardiola’s remarkable achievement into perspective by checking out what the algorithm believes to be the 50 best teams in history down below – check it out:

50. Paris Saint-Germain (2020)

49. Villarreal (2008)

48. Barcelona (2000)

47. Paris Saint-Germain (2016)

46. Inter Milan (1990)

45. Sevilla (2007)

44. Liverpool (1973)

43. Borussia Monchengladbach (1976)

42. Torino (1948)

41.