There is a genre of YouTube video with hundreds of millions of cumulative views and a single shared flaw. The best goals ever compilation ranks goals by how good they look in slow motion from the broadcast camera. That is not the same as how hard they were to score.
What the camera rewards
The broadcast camera sits high and wide. It is built to follow play, not to measure difficulty. From that position, three kinds of goals look spectacular: long-range strikes, bicycle and scissor kicks, and solo dribbles.
Those three categories dominate every compilation because they are the three categories the camera flatters. The clip economy then compounds the bias.
What the camera cannot show
The single variable that separates a hard goal from an easy one is defensive pressure at the moment of contact, and the broadcast camera is the worst possible instrument for capturing it.
A tight-angle finish into the near top corner with a center back ducking into the shooting lane and the keeper set and square is one of the hardest goals in football. On the broadcast camera it looks routine.
The camera measures drama. The difficulty methodology measures pressure. They disagree constantly.
The goals the compilations always miss
Every best goals list overweights free kicks, halfway-line lobs, and long solo runs against backpedaling defenses. It underweights first-time finishes from cutbacks, weak-foot strikes taken off balance, and finishes scored without a clear sight of the goal.
Watch the compilations. Just know what they are.
The videos are entertainment, and they are good at it. The problem is only that they present themselves as rankings of greatness when they are rankings of watchability filtered through a camera that was never built to measure the thing they claim to measure.