Roger Federer and the ‘GOAT’ debate

Roger Federer’s announcement that he will retire from top-level tennis after the Laver Cup in London this month has reignited the debate over whether he is the game’s “GOAT” – the greatest of all time.

“My body’s message to me lately has been clear,” wrote the 41-year-old on Twitter yesterday. “I have played more than 1,500 matches over 24 years,” said the 20-time Grand Slam champion. “Now I must recognise when it is time to end my competitive career.”

Leading the tributes, Federer’s great rival Rafael Nadal said it was a “sad day for me personally and for sports around the world”.

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The ‘greatest in an era of greats’

Federer was “the greatest player in an era of greats”, said The Guardian’s Barney Ronay. Even as part of the “Federer-Nadal-Djokovic tripod of power”, the Swiss was “without any reasonable cause for argument” the “greatest tennis player ever”, argued Ronay.

Federer retires from tennis “as the GOAT”, said Mark Cannizzaro for the New York Post. Although his 20 Grand Slam titles place him third behind Rafael Nadal (22) and Novak Djokovic (21), Cannizzaro insisted that Federer is “the GOAT for the entire package that he was as a player and a human being” because “he was flawless at both”.

The game’s greats have also positioned him at the top of the tree. “Roger Federer is a champions’ champion,” wrote Billie Jean King on Twitter. Taking to Instagram, Serena Williams wrote that “Retirement just got the GOAT.”

“Certainly, Roger will be the greatest player of all time,” agreed International Tennis Federation president David Haggerty, speaking to Sky News.

‘Greater than the Pope’

Even some of those sitting on the fence on the question have tended to lean in Federer’s direction.

“There is no absolute answer” to the question of whether Federer, Djokovic or Nadal “was the greatest tennis giant of them all”, wrote Owen Slot for The Times. However, he added, “no player ever raised the aesthetics of hitting a tennis ball to a height quite like Roger Federer”.

He was “tennis’ avatar, a dazzling representation of tennis’ possibilities”, said Tennis.com, which also looked beyond the sport to consider where Federer lay in the wider scheme of things.

It recalled that a poll in 2011 found that he was the second most respected person in the world “behind only Nelson Mandela” and “ahead of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama and Pope Benedict XVI”.

Writing for The Guardian last month, Tim Joyce tried to bring the GOAT discussion back down to earth. He described the debate as a “tiresome, simplistic and one-dimensional approach to assessing greatness” and a “myopic, insecure and immature reflex by sportswriters and commentators who feel the need to declare their own generation is undoubtedly the best”.

In fact, he argued, “comparing players across generations is a futile activity”.