General Football forum • Re: Was football better?

My theory is that It all comes down to free flow of information.

Older fans will still remember what it was like when you had these legendary players who you'd only see in international tournaments or the odd televised European Cup game. Now you can see their every game all year round. (And they're playing a heck of a lot more games.)

Similarly, sports and fitness science has become much more accessible to everyone, which made players significantly fitter, but that resulted in turning football much more into a physical contest, rarely leaving any space for players who used to survive on their wits, skills or agility alone. Can you imagine Le Tissier playing these days anywhere higher than League One? Even someone like Arjen Robben would probably struggle. You've got to be almost a Messi-level talent to make it. (This is one reason I really like top-level women's football, as that transition hasn't happened there yet.)

Next, we have scouting data. In the past a new signing would often be an almost completely unknown quantity, certainly to us fans, but often to the coaches as well, they'd go with their gut instincts and the reports the scouts would write up after seeing a handful of games. Of course managers still fuck up signings but we can easily see hour-long youtube compilations of anyone linked with us.

And lastly there is all the match and training data. The amount of data collected and distributed about a single match today would've sounded insane twenty years ago. And it should come as no surprise that performance analysts working with the same data and largely similar algorithms tend to reach similar conclusions, making the game (at least on the top level) far more uniform. It's unlikely we'll ever see someone like Rehhagel do what he did with Greece in 2004, bringing back two obsolete concepts (man-marking and sweepers) and making them work again, although admittedly in this case that's probably a good thing as they were dull as fuck to watch. But the point is, there's much less space for a manager to try out something revolutionary and shock the world with it.

Statistics: Posted by biziclop — Wed Jan 10, 2024 11:33 pm

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