I agree. On one side we must admit that many national teams grew a lot compared to the past because I remember that growing up results like 6-0, 7-0 or even 8-0 would happen quite often during the qualification phase; nowadays even a match against a smaller team is tough. At the same time the quality of many countries with a lot of history dramatically plummeted: there are no more players like Pirlo, Totti, Zidane, Henry, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Ballack, Lahm, etc. Football is changing, and not in a positive way.
I thought I'm the only one that has observed this recent trend in football history, even recently I had some discussions with fellow football enthusiasts and I raised this issue of declining rate of world class players we used to have in the past, and that very discussion was specifically on the issue of Champions league, where all the big teams/clubs we used to know as of 2015 backwards used to have at least 5 world class players in a particular team, ranging from defenders ,midfielders to classic strikers. BARCELONA for instance, Iniesta, Xavi, Messi, Eto, Puyol etc, in the same team, but today hardly you see this kind of players in one club, and same thing when it comes national or country Football. Football seems to have reached its highest level in the era of Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi.
Unfortunately this trend is very notable for anyone who is at least 30 years old. Nowadays you find younger generations saying that players like Zidane or Iniesta were hugely overrated because Bruno Fernandes has a better G/A ratio than them. How can you even compare football legends like Zidane and Iniesta to Bruno Fernades?!
And for example let's also take a look at the players that may win the Golden Ball: 10-20 years ago you had at least 6-7 players who could win, now, if you ask my opinion, I can't even come up with one name. The fact that Ousmane Dembele is the main candidate to win speaks volume, I mean, no disrespect to him, he had a wonderful season, but if we look at the player and his carrier is he actually worth the Golden Ball? Let's not forget that players like Maldini, Del Piero, Totti, Iniesta, Henry, Lewandowski, Ribery, just to name a few, never won it. I wouldn't even place Dembele next to those players, they are not playing in the same category. I'm sorry but football's technic and fantasy is long gone.