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 😀
It’s definitely gone up. The difference is we don’t have the same gap between the worst and best players in the Premier League. There are a lot more good players today than there were in the past, so we have a harder time saying certain guys are so clearly above everyone else. Still happens of course, but still.
Nostalgia definitely plays a part as well. I remember playing games on my PS3 when I was a kid and thinking of how good the graphics were. Then, when I play the same games today, it’s clear that they’re a product of their time, and not even close to the same level of graphical fidelity we have today.
The younger and less knowledgeable we are of the game, the less likely we are to notice the flaws in what we see happen on the pitch, erasing the negatives and amplifying the positives in our memory.