MYTHBUSTER Is football better now than it has ever been?

Mythbuster is a series that critically fact-checks preconceived footballing notions and myths. This edition addresses the idea that modern football is the best version to have ever existed.

The recent passing of Pele was news that reverberated around the world of football. The only man to win three World Cups and by consensus one of the greatest to ever play the sport, the Brazilian was larger than life, and the many touching eulogies that accompanied him into the netherworld bore witness to this.

However, in the midst of all that adulation, there were some dissenting voices. While no one is silly enough to gainsay Pele’s stature within football, his popular coronation as the greatest of all time is frequently debated.

The crux of the argument against him, to boil it down to one central objection, seems to be based around the standard of football. Weeding out the puerile ‘farmers’ talking point, the thinking here is that, by virtue of having played in a time when the game was a lot slower and less professional than it is today, Pele should not be put on the pedestal that he is. Football is infinitely “better” now, so (in the minds of the dissenters) its greatest player(s) should be products of its “best” era. 

Just how true is this belief, though? Is football really better now than it used to be?

Setting the scene

There is no denying football is a vastly different product now than it was in Pele’s day. In fact, what we have today differs fundamentally from what was obtainable as recently as 35 years ago.

The backpass rule and its effects changed football forever, and the rise of television, combined with changes to the offside law, have led to a quicker sport. As 1986 World Cup winner Jorge Valdano tells it, “A moment of low intensity in a televised football game is seen by some as time to change channels. So the game is getting quicker and quicker because television demands it.”

There is doubtless more to it than that, but whatever the root causes, we have on our hands a sport that is played at an unprecedented speed. This is evolution: if the goal of practice is to maximise efficiency, and efficiency is partly a function of the speed at which an action is successfully executed, then it stands to reason that football was going to speed up anyway.

It makes some sense, then, to judge that the capacity to play at a quicker speed is indicative of superiority. Therefore, as football has tended toward optimum efficiency, its exponents per time must necessarily be better than those who came before them, and so on until we arrive at the beginning of time itself.

The counterargument(s)

This logic has two obvious pitfalls.

The first is to think of evolution as always a process of growth or improvement, when it is simply adaptation in response to a changing reality. In fact, in many cases, the evolutionary process involves the removal of the vestigial, or even the forgoing of a feature that may not be entirely superfluous in order to enhance another. 

In the case of football, advancements in science and nutrition, increased complexity in orders of thinking (particularly in terms of out-of-possession structures), and aforementioned factors such as rule changes, have altered the paradigm. The sport has responded by getting faster in order to maintain its ultimate objective: goalscoring.

That, however, does not by itself mean the sport has gotten better. 

The second flaw in the logic is to think of football as a purely biomechanical process. To be clear, all sports are underpinned by this element—it is the very basis of all recreational pursuits. However, there are certain sports whose sole aim is to maximise biomechanical function: this is particularly true for athletics, especially track and field. It is somewhat less so for others, especially team sports of an associative nature. For them, speed and distance are not the objective, but are simply means to an end. Therefore, faster would not necessarily equal better.

As such, there is a greater degree of legitimacy in saying that sprinting today is better than it has ever been, based on reduced times on average, than there is in making the same claim about football. Since the aim of football is not speed, it is possible to execute actions at a quicker rate without arriving at a better sport. 

A more exciting, more visually engaging one, perhaps. But it’s a bit like arguing that ‘Transformers’ is a better movie than ‘Dreamgirls’ because it moves at breakneck speed and has explosions. (It is interesting that those who try to make the argument for faster = better do not do the same when it comes to kicking, seeing as the frequency of long shots has gone down over the last decade. Applying the same flawed logic, one could also posit that football is, getting worse on that account.)

Another way in which this perspective is mistaken is that, in making the claim that faster sport equals better sport, it conceives of football purely as a consumer item. That is to say that it fails to reckon with the players, the actors on whose backs the sport itself is borne. Is the ability of modern footballers to play at increased (relative to previous eras) speeds necessarily indicative of a greater quality across the board?

One way to set about this question is to consider the explosion of transfer valuations in modern football. If you find yourself wondering why, for instance, the two Manchester clubs paid more for Antony and Jack Grealish in the early 2020s than Real Madrid paid for one of the two best footballers in the world barely over 10 years before, then know this: price is dictated by supply and demand. 

Increasingly, clubs are being forced to prospect, constantly in search of the next big thing. This indicates one thing: quality is scarce, and getting scarcer still. What the fixation on speed has done, arguably, is to both raise the ceiling and drop the floor: the very best players of this era are truly generational, but mean quality across the board is lower than it has ever been.

Verdict

No, it is not. It is simply different: sped up, busier; more stimulation for the animal brain. It is a product that has been curated for an audience with rapidly shrinking attention spans. 

It undeniably makes for a better spectacle, in the same way that watching a virtuoso play a stirring piece of music at breakneck speed would be. However, on its own artistic merit, as well as in terms of what is possible in terms of individual expression (and the appreciation thereof), it is certainly not better for being played at a higher tempo. 

• The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Pulse Sports

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