The paper treated the exercise as a piece of football memory rather than a formal ranking: who wore a number, for how long, what they won in it, why they chose it, and, in some cases, how death fixed the association.
The paper did not pretend the list would settle argument. It invited readers to be shocked and furious, and left the relationship between a player and a number where it found it: personal, disputed, and hard to retire.
Squad numbers, it argued, can outlast a career. A goal can write a player into a club’s history; when the goal is seismic, the shirt he wore can take on the same status.
It also recalled Ronaldo, the Brazilian it called R9, wearing No 10 for Inter, a detail it treated as a paradox because that shirt would not remain his. The Guardian called him the first PlayStation footballer and a model of Brazilian brilliance, and said the young Ronaldo was the greatest young player it had seen, combining power, speed and skill.
The Guardian also noted the lonely distinction of No 1: in football it lets a goalkeeper stand apart, under different rules and in different kit. It said it would be a crime against flair not to give one of the traditional full-back numbers to a Brazilian. The Guardian has drawn up a subjective list of the male footballers it most closely associates with each squad number from 1 to 50, and the stories it says sit behind those shirts.
The Guardian said many factors were weighed, including longevity in a shirt, achievement while wearing it, the original reason for the choice, and how distinctly a number had come to mean one man. The paper said a player’s hold on a number can be so strong that his blessing is required before it is passed on.
It said the tie between players and numbers is long established, full of memory and odd detail, and warned readers that the list was highly subjective and meant, in part, as fun.