Has Football ACTUALLY Got Worse?

Comparisons have always been made between teams and players in different generations, but recently, a lot of people have made the claim that footballers have got worse in recent years, and that the game has become less fun, entertaining, and enjoyable.

And yet, the sport has never been more competitive, in terms of the pool of players aiming to become professional, more popular, or more lucrative.

So in this video, HITC Sevens takes a look at the claims, counter-claims, and comparisons, and attempts to figure out whether football really has got worse and what we mean by that, or whether it is all just nostalgia.

June 25th 2006 the Franken stadium in yurg Germany Portugal versus the Netherlands two of world football’s big hitters in red hot heat facing off in probably the most eagerly anticipated round of 16 TI of the 2006 World Cup Portugal boasted a forward line containing LS Figo Cristiano Ronaldo and Deco meanwhile the Netherlands could call upon the VAR talents of Wesley Schneider Robin van persy and iron Robin it was a game however that wouldn’t be remembered for the flare or attacking prowess of those on either side but rather for the viciousness and sheer chaos that engulfed the game there was literal Blood Sweat and Tears In addition to a record-breaking 20 bookings including four red cards the game became known as the Battle of Newburg or the massacre of Newberg in Dutch as the Netherlands lost one nil and it is a game that still lives long in the memory for many football fans almost 18 years on it was just one of many iconic games and moments of the 2006 World Cup though from Rooney’s red card also against Portugal and gry and Paul’s three yellow cards to zenin ADV Dan panenka headbutts and red card all of his own in the final when you look back at the players that a whole host of teams had at that World Cup perhaps it ought to be no wonder that It produced so many memorable moments aside from Portugal and the Netherlands the hosts Germany had Bastian Schweinsteiger Michael balac and World Cup Maestro Miroslav closer in their ranks England were at the height of their so-called gold generation boasting the likes of Beckham Lampa Gerard Rooney Owen Ferdinand Teran Cole Argentina had Rael creso TZ and a very young lonel Messi France were blessed with zidan Mele Vieira HRI Ribery toram and trees Spain had sias Puyol Ramos Javi Iniesta Alonzo fabrigas rul Torres and via the holders Brazil could call upon the likes of Ronaldinho Ronaldo Kaka kafu Rabino Roberto Carlos and Adriano and of course the eventual winners Italy Nam the likes of Buffon canavaro Nesta zambot D rosi gatuso pilo delpiero Tony totty and inagi among a Litany of star players even the likes of Sweden had lber Ibrahimovic and lson the Czech Republic had nedved rosit in Czech at Australia had Cahill kulan veruka I recently saw it claimed online that the 2006 World Cup was the moment in which football picked and that it has all been downhill since then we no longer have so many super teams or star studded squads gone is the inspirational individual Brilliance of flare players like Ronaldinho or Rael May and gone to with the days of endless chaos and excitement that made football the most popular entertainment and participation sport on the planet replaced by athletes rather than entertainers the supremacy of systems over individual flare or invention and an obsession with control and ever diminishing the amounts of Chaos in the game or at least that’s the claim and it is one that you’ll find everywhere on group chats in the stands on a weekend and on social media but is it actually true her football has really got worse or at least less technically gifted and has football become less enjoyable and entertaining or are we all just getting older looking back with rose tinted spectacles and in the words of Harold McMillan we have never had it so good well having long pondered all of the above that’s what today’s video is all about so sit back relax and join me on a journey back in time back to the good old days before all of this Ticky Tacker gag and press V and XG nonsense as we take a look at whether football has actually got worse in recent years or whether it’s all just blind Nostalgia at the core of the debate about whether football has got worse or at least less enjoyable is a sense that something has been lost that’s something above all else I think is a sense of spontaneity eccentricity and fun throughout the history of football the most beloved players haven’t always necessarily been the best players but the most entertaining and inventive it’s why the likes of Len Shackleton and ra Carter captured the imagination even more than Tommy Lon or Stanley Matthews in the 40s and 50s why Garena not pet was nicknamed The Joy of the people and more recently why the likes of best maradon canona gascoin Zola and Romario always captured the Public’s imagination the fact that Stanley Matthews and Pelle for example who were objectively the greatest players of their Generations were so perfect squeaky clean media personas incredibly dedicated professionals and almost Flawless in terms of their decision making almost made them seem more alien make no mistake both were still adored and both were still incredibly gifted and creative but in a way that was difficult for fans to identify with but someone like Garena who was so flawed in terms of his personal life and so unpredictable on the pitch well that only made him more relatable it wasn’t just that Eric Cantona was brilliant at football but the fact that he Kung Fu kicked a Crystal Palace fan and then gave a bizarre speech about seagulls and trollers that no one quite understood when the seagull follow the troller it’s because they think sgin will be thrown into the sea thank you stuff like that only added to the appeal these were human beings who would lose the ball make mistakes every now and then and have moments of Shear Madness both on and off the pitch but also provide moments of pure inspiration that made you fall in love with the sport all over again and to that extent the mistakes and the madness didn’t detract from the affection for these players it strengthened it making them more human and more relatable it is why for a long time and even to this day in fact despite the 2022 World Cup Diego maradon is still much more adored in Argentina than lonel Messi by almost any metric now especially following the last World Cup Messi has had a far superior career to maradon one can argue about sharability or their respective Peaks though even there I think that there is a solid case to be made that Messi still comes out on top but in terms of goals assists consistency longevity trophies records and virtually whatever else you can think of there is no comparison both on the pitch and off it though maradon was pure chaos from the mid1 1980s onwards maradon was a cocaine addict which saw him banned for 15 months in the early 1990s he was sent off against Argentina’s great Rivals Brazil in a 3-1 defeat at the 1982 World Cup and he was sent home from the 1994 World Cup in disgrace and handed another Lent the ban this time after testing positive for the use of a band performance enhancing substance you might have thought that would have damaged maron’s reputation but his fallibilities only made him more relatable and added to the reverence that surrounded him Messi by contrast was viewed as being so polished and perfect refined and developed within the four walls of lamair in Europe rather than on the harsh streets of Buenos serus that it was somehow harder for M Mortals to identify with him Messi’s failures with the national team therefore engendered far less sympathy and it is ironic in some ways that it was as much messy’s change of personality the slight roughness and nastiness that he showed at the 2022 World Cup particularly against the Netherlands that changed the perception of him in Argentina as it was his starring role in actually winning Argentina the World Cup as maradon had done in 1986 with even more controversial moments footballers across the board not just using isolated examples have become much less relatable in recent years largely through no fault of their own no longer are players or even clubs themselves in many cases rooted within their local communities clubs have either become companies or even subsidiaries in many instances now forming part of soulless multiclub ownership models owned by hedge funds or the play things or propaganda tools of billionaires and despotic nation states players meanwhile are the highest level at least now earn more money than God whereas once footballers were not just embedded within their local communities but often actually heralded from them now they live entirely separate lives and have very little in common with most football supporters weakening those social bonds and the sense of affinity or connection with fans that is partly of course because of those ever expanding and now almost unimaginable wealth disparities but also because of social media and even more important l in fact traditional media which means that players now would pay a far heavier price than those in previous generations for showing personality and being relatable hence why I say that it’s largely through no fault of their own on the pitch likewise which I think is even more relevant here for the most part it’s not footballers themselves who have decided to become more risk averse fundamentally systems not individuals have taken precedence as the 21st centur is progressed Pep Guardiola the greatest manager of his generation if not of all time who will almost certainly go down as the most decorated manager that this sport has ever seen is perhaps the sharpest edge of this trend it’s well documented that Guardiola has an aversion to Big Egos and no amount of talent will compensate for failing to carry out his very specific set of instructions tiar enri often recalls the story of how he drifted inside of the Left Flank for barca in a a game against sporting in the Champions League as he so often used to do at Arsenal using his intuition in order to link up with lonel Messi and scoring the goal which put Barcelona 1 nil up Pep’s response was to substitute HRI at halime replacing him with an 18-year-old bojan this wasn’t a young Pedro or jeffron we’re talking about it was tiar enri a World Cup winner who had been one of the best players in the world for the preceding decade HRI tells the story to credit Guardiola and to celebrate the clarity of his game plan and the discipline with which he wanted it to be executed and whereas other players like Zlatan Ibrahimovic may have considered themselves too good or simply have grown frustrated at being reduced to playing the role effectively of pieces on a chessboard hry went on to embrace it and has talked about incorporating it into his own managerial style of course the reason why hry embraced it and why most players Embrace whatever Guardiola asks of them is because they can see the results this is a gross oversimplification and guardiola’s tactics have developed and evolved a great deal from his first season at Barcelona to now but in its purest form what Guardiola seeks is controll and minimizing risk because his teams tend to be so good their greatest enemy is chaos in which anything can happen that’s why the teams that are typically undone Guardiola at least on the big occasions have been Liverpool particularly at anfield where where they’ve been able to disrupt Pep’s game plan and Manchester City’s Rhythm breeding confusion and Real Madrid under Carlo angelotti with the notable exception of last season of course who is one of few Elite level managers within the modern game who doesn’t adopt such a strict system-based approach and still allows his players a great deal of freedom in the 2021-22 Champions League semi-final between Manchester City in Real Madrid which man city LED 53 on aggregate at the beginning of the 90th minute of the second leg but somehow still went on to lose the game 65 for over 180 minutes everything went to plan for Guardiola Manchester City controlled both legs they were the better team and they denied Real Madrid of many glaring opportunities in fact in the first 90 minutes of the second leg Real Madrid didn’t register a single shot but in those five or six crazy minutes the old school football of Madrid relying upon the individual ability of the likes of Rodrigo and Karen benzar and the intuitive relationship between players managed to undo Pep’s meticulous game plan nine times out of 10 however that isn’t the case which is why a more top-down approach to football has gained hemony over the last 10 to 15 years there are a few better examples of the pep ification of football than Jack greish at Aston Villa greish was the Talisman due to his unique talents and the fact that he was capable of winning a game for Villa on his own he was afforded a great deal of Freedom I’ve shown this before but if you look at gish’s heat map in the 201920 season this is very clearly Illustrated though he was ostensibly playing on the left wing you can see quite often how deep he would dropped to receive the ball the central areas he would routinely drift into and even a fair amount of red on the opposite flank now just compare and contrast that with gish’s heat map so far this season where he has basically hugged the touch line getting up and down that Left Flank and looking to make advancements into the box something which he is superb at no one in their right mind would suggest that man city or pep are currently getting the best out of Guardiola or that he has been anywhere near as fun to watch at the etad as he was at V Park in fact even from a purely numbers perspective gishes goals and assists are down as is his XG but then Guardiola has made Gish into a trouble winner something that he could never have done playing with freedom and expressing himself at Aston Villa or pretty much anywhere else for that matter Pep Guardiola doesn’t care fundamentally about whether he has the best or the most exciting version of Jack relish he cares about whether he is getting the best and most effective version of man city which wins the most points in trophies because In fairness whether you love it or loath it that is his job it’s his job isn’t it in a sense that is the paradoxical state within which modern football operates football is an entertainment business first and foremost its existence and certainly it’s flourishing is dependent on people watching it either live or on television and finding that to be an enjoyable enough experience to want to do it time and time again in that sense it’s no different to a television show or a movie franchise where maximizing viewer attention and satisfaction is the modus operandi however almost everyone who is directly involved in the sport managers owners players consider it to be almost solely a results business and their principal role being to win first and to entertain second if at all of course teams have won and been successful whilst being entertaining and there isn’t an objective best most fun or most exciting way in which to play football nonetheless there is a clear Collision Course between these two aims and ideal of entertainment versus results and as the money in football continues to ramp up and the people who run the sport increasingly care most about results and the bottom line that divide is only likely to expand and yet that money and that bottom line is entirely dependent on people still considering football to be good entertainment at a good use of their time and resources you can see how it becomes a bit of a paradox right now though the evidence is clear no significant damage has been done to interest in the sport by football becoming more results driven systems triumphing over individuals and a reduction in flare and expression in fact football has never been more popular or lucrative than it is now and it is still somehow continuing to grow despite already being by far the most popular sport on the planet whether there will be negative consequences in the long term not just because of the changing stars but also the reduced competitiveness and the fact that throughout Europe’s leagues we see the same teams winning domestic trophies and reaching the latter stages of the Champions League season upon season Still Remains to be seen my personal view is that to a certain extent football is in serious danger of losing one of its least recognized but most important USPS without wanting to upset anyone here or insult other sports most if not almost all sports are highly repetitive whether it be Cricket basketball golf rugby darts or Athletics what you are typically seeing is the same actions repeated time and time again almost like muscle memory and the person or team who repeats them with the most proficiency tends to win there are a few exceptions all sports have occasional Mavericks and innovators but broadly speaking that is the case football by contrast has never been like that the extreme contrast in Styles between teams players and coaches along with the very nature of the the sport itself meant that quite often something would happen in a game of football which had either never happened or at least you had never seen happen before the Dennis bur camps giori hajis and JJ coaches of this world tried things and pulled off things which created such random and unpredictable passages of play it wasn’t just those great players either football as a whole was much more instinctive and off the cuff players were taught how to play through coaching but not what to do when where and how and certainly not to anywhere near the same extent what we see now therefore is very repeated patterns of play formulated by intensely coached players with a very specific set of instructions we still get moments of Randomness unpredictability genius and Chaos it is in the nature of the sport but they are becoming fewer and farther between making football much more similar to those more repetitive and monotonous sports that it want had the edge over none of this is lost on footballers themselves at least outside of the youngest of them to whom it is all that they have ever known responding to a clip of a goal that he scored against Burnley in 2010 on Twitter CES fabrigas wrote to Samy nazri quote pass and move pass and move my friend nowadays they wouldn’t allow you to do this end quote when someone responded asking by they I assume you mean the opposing team fabrigas responded modern football modern coaches it’s important to note that while he is emblematic of this shift and a seminal figure purely by virtue of his extraordinary success Pep Guardiola is no longer the exception but the rule whereas Guardiola is coached the chaos and creativity out of the likes of greish Gabriel Jay Zeus and some would say already he is starting to with joku increasingly youth team players have already had these qualities diminished by the time that they reach the first team just take someone like Bayo sacka who is one of the funnest young players not just in English but in all of world football right now sacker is brilliant to watch in the sense that he is immensely talented and makes lots of goal scoring or chance creating actions however for someone so talented who broke through so young it is hard to imagine in any previous generation that sacka wouldn’t have had more flare maybe more rawness and more of a tendency to attempt outlandish things none of this is an insult to sacka whose decision making and efficiency are outstanding and he would only have had those attributes coached out of him regardless but he is symptomatic of a revolution in hypers specializing and some would argue over coaching which has swept the academy game at least throughout most of Europe we still tend to see South Americans come to Europe in their teens and early 20s with much more of that flare and sense of freedom and Adventure but it is soon zaps out of them the naive fools thinking they can come over here and enjoy themselves in this sense Neymar is an almost unique case of an Uber Elite player in his generation who has refused to Be Tamed or ton down the more elaborate aspects of his game on almost any occasion and in response he has also become perhaps the most heavily criticized player of his generation there are of course other reasons that Neymar receives criticism but this is undoubtedly a big part of it whereas Messi and Ronaldo who are were or at least ought to have been Neymar’s natural peers radically changed their game over the years Messi under Pep Guardiola incidentally who transformed him from being a technical Marvel in the mold of a Ronaldinho into one of the most prolific goal scorers of all time and Ronaldo under Alex Ferguson who oversaw his transition from being a tricky wide man obsessed with attempting ever more elaborate and carefully rehearsed tricks flicks and pieces of skill into a ruthless goal scoring and counterattacking machine Neymar has never really changed the fundamental way in which he thinks about football or plays the game he has been rewarded for that stubbornness by most people looking at the number of goals that he has scored still more than 350 at Club level it should be said which is more than Wayne Rooney did a Drogba and he will soon overtake tiar on re as well as being Brazil’s all-time leading goal scorer but they compare it to Messi and Ronaldo’s output more than than 800 goals each and they conclude that Neymar was never on the same level as those two and maybe he wasn’t that is a matter of opinion rather than the topic of debate in this video but if he wasn’t then it wasn’t solely because he scored fewer goals or enjoyed expressing himself too much on the pitch Johan C was much more prolific in his teenage years than he was when he won three successive European cups and Balon doors but that didn’t mean that he got worse at football quite the opposite some of you may recall the Nike or Nike to American viewers Risk Everything ad campaign from 10 years ago I will play a very short clip of it for you just in case you don’t clawed 76% probability of missing the target Reckless 50% chance of failure and this is not an acceptable way to arrive at training even the greatest players of our time make mistakes they take too many risks after all they only human but what if they weren’t I give you the future of football our clones Flawless decision making guaranteed results it’s what the people want in 2014 that seemed like a fun little advert now it feels like more of a prophecy of what was to come and is still playing out except the advert ended with the real players well the Nik endorsed ones of course overcoming the Clones a development we’re yet to witness in the real world all of this it should be said is quite different to the claim that footballers have actually got worse which has gained increased prominence over the last few years in a recent interview with the consorted ball bag and the Katy Hopkins of football punditry Mr Simon Jordan Michel Owen made this claim now if you can just run a bit further than everyone else and you can basically pass it from A to B you’re getting a decent career in the Premier League you don’t even have to be that good anymore I don’t think that it’s true to say that you don’t even have to be that good to have a career in the Premier League anymore the competition to make it in football at Academy in senior level has never been more intense but it is true that the requirements and therefore the players who make it have changed and fitness and athleticism have probably never been more important part of that is to do with the systems that we’ve already talked about and the rigorous demands in terms of pressing and intensity but part of it is another problem with modern football B which no one at the top of the game has any incentive to address and are actually making actively worse which is the number of games if Elite level footballers are being asked to play more than 60 sometimes more than 70 games a season at that’s intensity one we shouldn’t be surprised when their bodies break down and we lose them for extended periods of time thus reducing the quality of games by their absence nor should we be surprised to see a lowering of Standards due to General burnout and exhaustion and two we can hardly act shocked or dismayed about athleticism and physical attributes rather than technical ones becoming so pivotal to carving out a career at the highest level one of the brightest Minds in modern football Steve Bruce often used to say that footballers could play seven days a week no problem but don’t expect them to produce anything like their best form or what they would be capable of if they were fully fit well rested and properly prepared for games too much football is a problem which isn’t just impacting players and by extension the quality of football they are able to produce the requirements of them and the entertainment value provided to fans it’s also having a direct impact on the way in which fans engage with the sport in other words it’s not just that there’s too much football it’s that there’s too much football on television and it has removed a lot of the mysticism that once surrounded the sport whereas fans used to watch great players in maybe a handful of games each season and they would only be in the biggest games which are inevitably likely to be more tense and exciting the rest of the time they were seeing them through highlights this certainly does lead to an element of nostalgia when it comes to players from previous generations who are appreciated through the form of highlights which by their very nature tend to show exclusively a player’s best moments if Zinedine Zam played now you’d probably have people watching him play 20 or 30 times times a season instead of only four or five pointing out that he was quiet or did nothing in x amount of them sharing his five consecutive sub seven out of 10 scores on sofa score and taking to social media to call him a BAL frog eating fraud Instead at the time most people watched the Sera or Champions League highlights rather than the full Games Catching glimpses of zizu at his centilating best the full matches they did watch would be games like the 1998 World Cup final or the 2002 Champions League final in which zidan had iconic moments and everyone hailed him as being some kind of mythical figure of Legend as is so often the case perception matters far more than reality someone like Kevin De bruyne for example has been more consistently brilliant than zizu was but has almost none of the mysticism how the two are remembered and their respective legacies within the game are likely to be quite instructive I can still vividly remember getting home from school on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon eating my tea discarding my homework because I was a bad lad don’t be like me kids going up to my bedroom and putting the champions league on ITV that excitement to see the best players in the biggest competition in the infancy of social media when football seem to exist in more isolation and you could watch it for football’s sake and just enjoy it either entirely unaware or just unmoved by the discourse which surrounded it which is matched by my excitement levels for very few games now if any that is partly nostalgia in fact it is very nostalgic but it’s not just that for who so have too much of any good of that same good he shall be soon bed wrote John ligate in his poem the fall of princes in 1430 perhaps when it comes to football on television we have had too much of a good thing creating a s of saturation and disillusionment of course we still watch it though and the financial incentives ensure that there will only ever be more football as competitions everywhere continue to expand and the football calendar further bursts at the seams with zero consideration for the KnockOn effects in terms of player welfare or entertainment and by extension more football on television what’s more it’s not just that systems have changed in football they’ve also become much more univ veral I’d pose this as a question rather than as a statement of fact but any of you who are my age or above does it not feel at least as though teams used to have more distinct and unique identities I am thinking of Bolton Wanderers under Sam allise with even Campo JJ kotcher Yori jav and Kevin Davies among others Roy hodson’s Fulham featuring Mark schwarer Brea hangeland zultan Gea Bobby Zamora and Clint dempy pess ball at stoke perhaps most obviously typified by the likes of Ryan shawcross Robert Huth Rory deap abdelli Fay and Ricardo Fuller moy’s Everton O’Neal’s Villa and before that Keegan’s entertainers at Newcastle wimbledon’s So-Cal crazy gang and the early venger ER at Arsenal the list goes on and on it felt as though so many games were a clash not just of two football teams but of two fundamentally different styles ways of playing the game and profiles of player presenting unique and intriguing battles even as I am speaking though and even though I don’t think anything that I’ve just said is untrue I can feel the Nostalgia seeping out of my Paws the reality is to a certain extent every generation has done this as humans we tend to look back on our adolescence Youth and formative years with rose tinted spectacles if you go back and watch a lot of the games that I’m talking about say wenger’s Arsenal versus hodon Fulham though there was undoubtedly a huge culture on sty Clash some of the football was well pretty turgid even in a lot of the games between the top teams if you go back and watch them in full now again not just the highlights there are entire passages of play in which the ball barely touches the ground we fixate on the OTAs bur Camp Zas and canar of these eras for obvious reasons and tend to forget about the center backs who could barely complete a 5y pass or the center forwards who made a living by elbone people it’s like when I think about my time at school 10 years after leaving I think of spending entire lunch breaks playing football messing about in lessons disrupting other people’s education likely to the severe detriment of their grades and future job prospects sorry about that and not having a care in the world all of the bad bits which was most of it like sitting in detention spending 5 years trying and failing to learn anything about limestone or algebra or being forced to play rugby that all fades while the enjoyable bits are magnified it’s a bit for weird in well Dylan I suppose it is and it isn’t because in large part it is the exact same thing the idea that footballers are worse now I think is a nonsense as a collective footballers aals better now than ever before the standards are ridiculous League 2 and National League players can all trap and pass a ball which sounds basic but if you go back and watch League football from the 1990s you’ll know that that hasn’t always been the case the standard throughout the pyramid and indeed the talent of those who drop out of the sport entirely having been inmy is outstanding and it would be foolish to assume that those at the top aren’t also better than ever before but they’re also different and the sport is different and it’s not just Nostalgia much as we are all guilty of it to notice that change and to prefer what came before it that is it for today’s video as ever with video essays on this channel there is a whole load of stuff that I wanted to but haven’t had the chance to talk about from the rampant elitism and ever more uneven distribution of talent to the Advent of v and the impact of social media but this video is already rather long and Manchester City versus Arsenal is about to start yes football on the television I am part of the problem I should add that I have made entire videos about the lack of unpredictability in modern football and the concentration of talent why there are so few flare players now my opposition to V and the toxic impact of social media on the sport all of which you are free and even actively encouraged by me at least to go and watch after this which is why they were the topics which receive less attention or that I unfortunately had to leave out thank you all very much as ever for watching hit the like button if you enjoyed today’s video or found it remotely interesting I hope that was the case let me know your thoughts Down Below in the comments and of course goes without saying make sure that you are subscribed not just to this Channel h7s and have notifications turned on but also my second Channel Alfie poot both of which should be about to appear on your screens now you can also find me on Twitter uh Instagram or threads via the username @ hit tz7s on all three and all of those links plus a whole lot more good stuff should be down in the video description below cheers