Seeing lots of debates on Twitter at the moment about how the sport has fallen off when players such as Saka as now called world class compared to what we used to define as that. (Bale, Robben etc). It got me thinking about why this is the case. Is it due to nostalgia goggles making us look at legend players more favourably? Has the bracket for being ‘World Class’ simply gone down so it does encompass more players? Or is there an actual decrease in the quality of footballers in the current game?
Interested in people’s thoughts here 😀
The game is simply more athletic, less physical. This means that world class players were gifted on the ball, off the ball, and hard as fuck. Now you only need to be the first two, which means half of each team are of similar ability. So nobody stands out as much to be considered in the same way until you get the rare anomalies - Haaland et al.