It has often been observed that the Brazilian national team never lost a game when they had both Pele and Garrincha on the pitch. Have there been any other "invincible" player combinations in football history?
Is there a minimum number of games that they need to have played for that team? I doubt you will find any club teams with a player combination that never lost a game (at least not with players that played regularly for the team...I'm sure you can find some random player that played only one or two games for a team and won them both, and then pair him with someone else who was also played those two games).
Shearer and Ferdinand were unstoppable, almost 50 goals a season. Every game you expect one on the scoresheet. Another that comes to mind is Hyypia - Henchoz! at their prime they were a fucking wall!
Unfortunately, they lost the biggest game of their lives, but I'd say the best candidates would be the early-to-mid 1950s Hungarians with Puskás, Kocsis, Bozsik and Hidegkuti. If memory serves correctly, they went half-a-decade with only that 1954 WC Final defeat (with an injured Puskas and a perfectly good goal disallowed) blemishing their record, and they played a lot more internationals back then. At the club level, it's going to be just about impossible to find teams that went undefeated for too long, so we'd probably just be talking about domestic domination, instead of being "invincible." There's Real Madrid in the 50s and 60s (and that includes 5 straight European Cups). Other candidates would be Liverpool in the late 70s/early 80s, and as much as I hate to admit it: Arsenal's 2003-2004 squad.
Good call on the Hungarians. Yeah, sorry guys, wasn't trying to stump anyone I just wondered if there were any other player combinations like that that people knew about. Sometimes I am surprised how sparse the statistics keeping and historical record keeping in football seems to be. If one had the records in a database of every major club and national team for the past seventy years, you could write an algorithm to find out players who never lost when they were on the same pitch together. I bet there are some interesting examples you would find to go look at of guys who played 10, 15, or even more games together and never lost when they were both on the pitch. For a football manager I am surprised if this kind of statistical analysis of how their squad performs together is not pretty standard fare in this day and age. A lot might be coincidence, but I bet some interesting aberrations in team chemistry or tactics are revealed when you look at how different combinations of players in your team have fared when placed on the pitch together. Anyways.... Just thinking out loud.
In the 80's or 90's (forgot my dates hehe) - Golden years of Juve when Boniek & Platini were in attack. Awesome duo.
I know argentina had unbeaten runs of upwards of 20 matches over 2-3 years at the beginning of the 1990s and 2000s, but I don't think we regularly played any pair of strikers during either of those runs bielsa switched between crespo, batistuta, and cruz..probably because back then he could only hope their respective sides would cede them once every few months the amazing thing about bielsa's argentina was that until wc02 (and the anti-football of england and sweden) the team performed equally well no matter who played or who we played against it was a steamroller of a squad to be sure
yeh cole and yorke were almost unstoppable. they seemed to be crap before and after they played together though!
