There is a particular kind of argument that never truly ends. It surfaces in pubs at closing time, in stadium concourses during half-time, in comment sections that spiral into hundreds of replies by midnight. It is the argument about greatness — about which collection of players, under which manager, in which era, produced something that genuinely transcended the game. English football has no shortage of candidates. But ranking them? That is where friendships fracture and loyalties are tested to their absolute limit.
GiveMeSport have waded into exactly this battlefield, publishing a ranked list of the 13 best teams in English football history — featuring legendary sides from Liverpool, Manchester United, and Arsenal among others. It is a list that will delight some supporters, infuriate others, and — most importantly — beg a question that trophy counts alone cannot answer: what does greatness actually mean?
The Trophies-First Argument and Why It Falls Short
The instinctive response to any "greatest team" debate is to reach for the silverware cabinet. And fair enough — trophies are the only objective measure the game provides. A league title is a league title. A European Cup is a European Cup. Nobody disputes the numbers.
But the moment you lean too heavily on trophies as the sole metric, you run into problems. You risk ignoring context entirely — the era, the financial landscape, the quality of opposition, the circumstances that made a given achievement either routine or miraculous. A side bankrolled into dominance operating in a weakened league is not the same creature as a provincial club punching so far above their weight that the entire football world stops to stare.
Which brings us, inevitably, to Brian Clough and Nottingham Forest.
The Case Nobody Wants to Make — But Has To
If you are building a list of the greatest English club sides ever assembled and Nottingham Forest's back-to-back European Cup-winning teams of 1979 and 1980 are not near the very top, you owe someone an explanation.
Consider the raw facts for a moment. Forest were promoted to the First Division in 1977. Within a year, they had won the league title. Within two years, they had conquered Europe. Then they did it again. The club had never won the league before Clough arrived. They were not a superpower with generational infrastructure. They were a mid-sized city club from the East Midlands who, under one of the most singular managerial minds the game has ever produced, became the best team on the continent.
Two European Cups. Back to back. With a squad assembled on a fraction of the budgets their rivals commanded. Peter Shilton in goal. Viv Anderson at right back. Trevor Francis — England's first million-pound player — brought in as the final piece. Kenny Burns and Larry Lloyd at the heart of defence. John Robertson terrorising fullbacks on the left wing. This was a functioning, suffocating machine built by a man who trusted his own instincts above everything else.
The argument for Clough's Forest being the single most remarkable achievement in English football history is not sentimental. It is structural. The gap between what that club was and what they became under Clough is wider than any gap you will find anywhere else on this list. Context matters. Resource matters. The degree of difficulty matters.
Liverpool's Red Machine — Redefining English Football on the Continent
And yet Forest's European dominance existed within a broader era of English supremacy — one spearheaded, above all others, by Liverpool Football Club.
The Liverpool sides of the late 1970s and, particularly, the 1980s were not merely the best team in England. For the better part of a decade, they were the best team in Europe. Under Bob Paisley — a man so quietly brilliant that the football world took years to fully appreciate what he had done — Liverpool won six league titles, three European Cups, and operated with a consistency that remains almost incomprehensible when viewed in full.
What separated those Liverpool sides from contemporaries was not just the results but the manner. A high defensive line. Intricate passing combinations through midfield. The relentless pressure of a system that swallowed individuals and produced a collective. Kenny Dalglish gliding between the lines. Graeme Souness bending midfield to his will. Ian Rush finishing with the cold efficiency of a machine. Alan Hansen reading the game from centre-back as though the opposition were running through patterns he had already memorised.
When Paisley stepped back and Joe Fagan briefly took the reins, then Dalglish himself as player-manager, the identity held. Liverpool were not dependent on any single figure. The culture was the system, and the system was the culture. That level of institutional coherence is extraordinarily rare in football at any level — almost unheard of across a full decade of elite competition.
Ferguson's Treble Winners — The Modern Benchmark
Jump forward roughly twenty years and the conversation shifts entirely to Old Trafford. Manchester United's 1998-99 squad — the Treble winners — occupy a unique psychological space in English football. They are the reference point for modern era greatness. The standard against which subsequent dominant sides are measured.
The Premier League. The FA Cup. The Champions League. All three in a single season, completed in the most dramatic fashion imaginable — two goals in injury time in Barcelona to claim Europe's biggest prize from the jaws of defeat. No English club has won the Treble since. The scale of the achievement, combined with the manner of so many of those victories, cemented Ferguson's United as something genuinely special rather than merely very good.
Peter Schmeichel marshalling the box. Jaap Stam bringing aggressive authority to the back line. Roy Keane driving the team through sheer force of will in midfield — producing what many still consider the greatest individual Champions League performance in Old Trafford history during the semi-final against Juventus, despite being suspended for the final itself. David Beckham's deliveries. Andy Cole and Dwight Yorke's telepathic partnership up front.
The '99 side were not the most aesthetically dominant team on this list. They were not always the most comfortable in possession. But they were ruthless. They were relentless. They had a psychological resilience that Ferguson had spent years deliberately constructing. When the game was lost, they did not accept it. That mentality is not something you can coach on a training pitch — it is something that accumulates over seasons of building, losing, learning, and refusing to stop.
Arsenal's Invincibles — Technical Perfection as Legacy
Five years after Ferguson's Treble, Arsène Wenger produced something that stands entirely apart from everything else in English football's domestic history. Arsenal's 2003-04 season — the Invincibles — remains the only unbeaten top-flight campaign in the modern era. Thirty-eight games. Twenty-six wins. Twelve draws. Zero defeats.
The numbers are extraordinary enough in isolation. But it is the how that makes this side so enduringly fascinating. Wenger had been building toward this for years — an evolving philosophy of technical excellence, physical athleticism, and high-tempo pressing that was genuinely ahead of its time in English football. Patrick Vieira was the spine: a combative, ball-playing midfielder who could dominate physically and dictate technically in equal measure. Thierry Henry was operating at the very peak of his powers — quick, intelligent, lethal, and almost impossible to plan against. Robert Pires was producing moments of artistry that drew comparison to the continental game at its most refined.
The Invincibles season did not produce Champions League glory. That absence is the one argument their detractors always reach for. And it is not nothing — a truly complete side, the argument goes, would have converted domestic dominance into European success. But to use that as a reason to significantly downgrade what Arsenal achieved domestically is to misunderstand both the scale of the achievement and the inherent unpredictability of a knockout competition across a handful of games.
Going unbeaten for a full top-flight season is harder, in many ways, than winning a knockout tournament in which fortune plays its inevitable role. One bad afternoon, one injury crisis, one refereeing decision going against you — and the record is gone. Arsenal absorbed all of it for ten full months and remained undefeated.
The Ones Who Always Get Left Out
Every list like this carries casualties — sides whose contributions to English football history are substantial but who fall awkwardly outside the traditional power narrative.
The great Ipswich Town side of the early 1980s under Bobby Robson — FA Cup winners, UEFA Cup winners, league runners-up — deserves more recognition than it typically receives. Chelsea's back-to-back Premier League champions under José Mourinho. Blackburn Rovers' title-winning side of 1994-95 under Kenny Dalglish, who broke the Liverpool and Manchester United duopoly at a time when that felt almost impossible. Manchester City's dominant sides of the 2010s and beyond, who redrew the tactical landscape of the English game entirely.
The problem is not that these sides lack credentials. It is that greatness in football is judged through a lens that combines achievement, era, cultural impact, and style in proportions that no two people ever quite agree on. Which is exactly why this argument will never be settled.
What Greatness Actually Means
Here is the honest conclusion: trophies tell you what happened. They do not tell you what it meant, how hard it was, or what it cost. A side with ten league titles and average wage bills dwarfing their rivals is not automatically greater than a side that won two European Cups from a standing start with a fraction of the resources.
The most intellectually honest version of this debate acknowledges both dimensions simultaneously. Liverpool's 1980s dominance was structurally extraordinary and aesthetically beautiful. United's Treble was the ultimate expression of winning mentality. Arsenal's Invincibles were technically perfect. Clough's Forest were the most improbable thing English football has ever produced.
None of these things are mutually exclusive. The ranking that bothers you — whatever position it assigns to your club — probably bothers you because football history is not a spreadsheet. It is a story. And stories resist tidy ordering.
Every supporter reading this will feel their club has been robbed of a higher position. That friction — that bone-deep certainty that the list has got it wrong — is not a flaw in the format. It is the entire point. Because the day we all agree on which English side was truly the greatest is the day the game loses something essential about itself.
That day is not coming anytime soon.
Source information via GiveMeSport Football. Original reporting by Dribblestack editorial team.
