That is just nuts. Brady is generally regarded as the best QB of all time, and James the no. 1 or 2 NBA player of all time. Even Froome's staunchest defenders wouldn't claim that he is the best or close to the best rider of all time. His legacy is all about GTs, and he's tied for fourth in those, fifth in TDF wins. He has nothing to add in terms of classics.
You could make a case for Froome as a top 10 rider all time, though I'm sure it would be vigorously disputed by many cycling fans, but Froome is nowhere remotely close to the standing in his sport that Brady and James have in theirs.
But then Marca's list is a joke. They have Kobe Bryant ahead of James--there is almost no NBA fan in the world who would claim that. Pacquiao ahead of Mayweather--when the two were both active, Mayweather was consistently ranked over him, and defeated Pacquiao in their one, sadly past their prime match. Wiggins ahead of Barry Bonds!!! I can't take their list seriously, not unless by sportsmen, they are referring to the athlete's personality or public demeanor, it certainly has no relationship to athletic accomplishement.
The thing is though, a lot of these lists are massively biased by the sports that that country's catchment includes. Spain has a pretty good basketball league of its own and some interest therein, but much of the league is made up of imports, and it has nothing like the pull of, say, football. People like Barry Bonds? MLB has, of the four big American sports, easily the least currency in Europe. The NFL used to have NFL Europe and retains a cult audience in some countries, especially the UK which sells out game after game in London. Most of southern Europe has a decend level basketball league, including small countries in the Balkans. Ice hockey is wildly popular in a number of countries, most notably Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, Finland and Russia, with also decent interest in Germany, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland and a few ex-Soviet countries further east. Baseball has very little of that; Spain has the biggest likelihood of there being enough of an interest to fairly rate baseball players in a list like this, thanks to a sizable population of Latin American origin from countries where the sport is king - Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and so on - whereas NFL is comparatively small. In a country like Germany or the UK where there is a bigger NFL following, you might see them higher, similar to how you would seldom see soccer given the level of prominence in a US equivalent article that it has in Europe or South America. I'd be willing to bet that a Marca equivalent in the US would not name Chris Froome 17th best sportsman of the 21st Century. He might be in the list, but he'd be some way down it, granted the same credit as part of a largely European-dominated niche sport that the likes of Bonds have got from Marca.
Similarly, there was a US 'best sportsmen and sportswomen of 2010' list back in the day. It included Ole Einar Bjørndalen but not Emil Hegle Svendsen despite the latter doing better in the Olympics and the World Cup that year. This was largely because after his heroics in Salt Lake City, Bjørndalen was better known to the pundits and compilers eight years down the line when they felt they needed some Winter Olympians in there. And yet, no Magdalena Neuner, who was more dominant in the women's competitions than either of the male biathletes there, took multiple Olympic golds and the World Cup overall, and won outright in Germany in the sportswoman of the year competition, because in Germany, biathlon is a hugely important sport with massive TV audiences.
Quite a lot of the time, therefore, a sport that has little currency with the compilers or the audience it is intended for will receive a sort of token interest, in a sense of 'yea, this is a big sport so we ought to include somebody, but we don't know much about it, let's find a couple of big names and find a spot for them somewhere'. Would a list compiled in, say, Brazil, include Martin Fourcade, Sidney Crosby or Dan Carter? Likely not. But to those who follow those sports, those are names who would be considered essential. A similar list compiled in India would be full of cricketers that most of North America outside of the Caribbean islands and most of Europe outside Britain and Ireland would struggle to name or rate objectively. A list compiled in Australia would include AFL players that nobody outside of the Antipodes would likely have any knowledge of. A German list would be full of wintersports athletes like lugers, biathletes and ski jumpers that have niche interest only in any country outside of the select 10-12 that compete at the highest level in it.
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