Anyone who says professional sport is all about what happened is seriously delusional. The myriad variables involved are so random that I don’t even think concepts like law of averages etc do justice. The chances and the challenges are so varied. Human intervention is very necessary to weed out the unfairness of sport or anything in life in general.
1. Roger made to 5 finals of RG and Nole lesser, so Roger has a superiority there? Isn't it pretty obvious the seeding worked against Nole? Ok wait. Roger's better seeding is his own credit right? But we are comparing clay here. Roger didn't get the better seeding at RG based on his performance on clay, but for his overall performance everywhere.
2. I also find Nole's superior clay record against Rafa a very weak argument for Nole's case. In tennis greatness, h2h doesn't matter. Period.
I will solve it this way:
1. Though there are few more parameters to look at, I will just see the win % of Roger and Nole on clay biggies (Slam as well as those mandatory tournaments - masters, tour finals, davis cup, olympics etc) for now.
2. There are a few corner cases that can bias the results. I will include another metric that corrects the following:
a. Since Rafa is a much superior player to both on the surface, there shouldn't be a situation where one player gets too many easy matches while the other always lost to Rafa. In other words, both Roger and Nole should meet Rafa equally in Slams and outside Slams. In Slams they both met Rafa 4 times during their respective periods, so that's fine. In Masters 1000, Nole unfortunately had two meet Rafa two more times than Roger did, so I have ignored results of Nole's matches and two from Roger's additionally to compensate that.
b. In tournaments where both players met Rafa, the player who met in earlier round is in an unfair position. In such cases I will exclude their results against Rafa. The problem doesn't end there. Let’s take RG 2008 for example. Nole met Rafa in semis, so if I ignore it, Nole’s record will be 5/5 (5 wins in 5 matches). But since Roger met Rafa in the final and by the same measure Roger’s record is 6/6. This skews the result in favour of Roger since he gets one more non-Rafa match and hence his "overall" percentage improves. So I count Roger’s record too as 5/5. In other words, in a tournament where both participated and one happened to meet Rafa in Round X, then I will include results of both players only up to X – 1. The two other cases are Hamburg 2008 and Madrid 2009.
c. DNP in a mandatory tournament is counted as 1R loss. Roger hasn't played 3 Masters during 04-06. Nole hasn't played 2 Masters (one in 2010, another in 2014). Both has skipped one non-mandatory Masters each.
d. I excluded Davis cup matches as well since the two have played unevenly there. So in essence they have to play 7 Slams, 20 Masters and 0 Davis cup matches on clay.
e. Before 2007, top players played R64 which today is "bye". This skews the result in favour of Roger. I have ignored the result of 6 R64 matches Roger played from 04-06.
2. I will consider their prime years to be from 2004-2010 for Roger and 2008-2014 for Nole, on clay. In any greatness analysis, measuring for equal time period is really important regardless of for what duration the players were really at their best.
Result:
What happened:
1. In Slam
Federer 85.00%
Djokovic 82.50%
2. Combined result in Slam, Masters and Davis Cup
Federer 84.21%
Djokovic 81.97%
What could have happened (correcting various anomalies and disparities as described in point 2):
1. In Slam
Federer 86.84%
Djokovic 84.62%
2. Combined result in Slam, Masters and Davis Cup
Federer 82.00%
Djokovic 83.04%
My take is that Federer wins if Slam alone is considered. Otherwise Djokovic has the edge. In the end Federer wins for me, because he has the most important clay title, RG. Not merely for the fact that he has an RG title, but because he made the most out of the lone opportunity, an opportunity even Djoker could have snatched. Both of them suffered at the hands of Nadal equally, but when Nadal was absent it was Federer who won, so advantage Federer. If Djoker wins at RG, then I will tip Djoker as the winner.
Djoker is amazing. He has a "claim" for the second best player on all surfaces - clay, hard and grass - among the Big3!!