I was watching some all-time XI’s by former footballers and analysists and was asking to myself: “Did football start in the 90’s for these people?”
I understand that people will always be biased towards the players that they got to experience and have an attachment to, but do you think that players from the old era like Eusebio, Rivera, Meazza, Di Stefano, Etc… are underrated compared to modern legends?
There is definitely recency bias and it happens across all sports. I would say it should be expected because, even if those sports remained the same (which they don’t), the people who were alive to see those sportspeople die off. As they die. Less people get to hear how great those sports people were.
Also, people have different definitions of what an all-time great is. I define it as how great they were in relation to their peers (as I think it’s fairer), however some people define it transporting people from older eras into the current era.
I always had a problem with the latter definition as it biases towards contemporary players by failing to give older generation players the benefit of modern medicine and coaching techniques and also fails to take into account what would happen if current players were transported back in time.
My favourite example is Messi. He is arguably the greatest footballer of all time, but transport him back to the 1960’s as a 12 year old and it’s possible he doesn’t even make it as a professional footballer, yet alone one of the best ever.
Also regarding older era players smoking and drinking. It obviously wasn’t everyone and many current players also drink (Buffon and Veratti smoke too) so I don’t think that alone is a reason to dismiss older era players.
Current football is just more competitive, the talent pool is massively bigger so logically the competition is better.
Also it’s nost just thay they drunk but that they were in very poor physical conditions. Nowadays a footballer must be in peak form to play in Europe.