When you take away any titles that they have won (as football is a team effort and not a one man show), as footballers the 2 mentioned above had it all, in great quantities and were very much at the same level.
They played in very different eras, and managers and tactics were so different that to compare them, you need to more or less dissect their skills and abilities one by one.
There is a fair shout from many people to say that we must forget about Pele and Diego and crown the new king of football Messi.
Messi does things that neither of the other two did often on their repertoire. Not because they did not have it or were incapable of it, but because the positions that they played in meant they did not need to.
Pele and Messi both had more of an eye for goal than Diego.
Maradona’s ability to see his team mates runs were far superior to those of the other two, and he used that to his advantage and to his team’s too.
While in many occasions Pele and Messi go for goal themselves, Diego would have carry it and at the least expected moment find an unmarked player and produce the impossible pass.
Pele’s heading skills top that of his two rivals here by a considerable margin.
Messi’s speed beats that of his crown contenders.
Alfredo Di Stefano, a guy who knows a lot about football, said once “Pele can do everything in the book with a ball. Maradona has his own book”
He meant that for Diego, the imaginary book of what to do with a ball, did not cover all the magical things he could improvise when he had one at his feet.
Michel platini said, that what most players train hard all their life to do with a ball, Maradona does it with an orange (referring to when once Diego played keepy-uppy for 3 and a half hours with the same orange)
Messi is without a shadow of a doubt the best in the world today, and one of the best ever players, but when you leave fanatism behind, and compared these three geniuses of the game part by part, his overall game is still behind that of Diego Armando Maradona and Edson Arantes Do Nascimento (Pele)