Explaining the lost generation of footballers who came after Messi and Ronaldo

On October 28, at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, there will be a new winner of the Ballon d’Or, the highest individual accolade in men’s football.

By common consent, the leading contenders are Brazilian winger Vinicius Junior, who scored in Real Madrid’s Champions League final victory, and Spanish midfielder Rodri, who excelled in triumphant campaigns for both Manchester City and his national team.

Should Vinicius Jr, 24, win the award, he will be the first player born in the 21st century to do so. More remarkably, Rodri would be the first winner born in the 1990s. Either would be the first winner to be born since December 1987. Such was the dominance of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who have respectively won eight and five of the last 15 Ballon d’Or titles, a run punctuated only by victories for two of their contemporaries: Luka Modric in 2018 and Karim Benzema in 2022.

Messi, Ronaldo, Modric and Benzema were all born in the mid-to-late 1980s. All were regarded as prodigious talents in their teens. All have excelled deep into their thirties and only now, in the twilight years of their careers, have they begun to wind down: Messi, 37, in Major League Soccer with Inter Miami, and Ronaldo, 39, and Benzema, 36, in the Saudi Pro League with Al Nassr and Al Ittihad. Modric, 39, is still going strong at Real Madrid.

The brilliance of Messi and Ronaldo often overshadowed that of a group of players now in their early-to-mid thirties that includes Neymar, Toni Kroos, Kevin De Bruyne, Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk, Harry Kane, Antoine Griezmann and the retired duo of Eden Hazard and Gareth Bale.

A new generation of superstars, proven or potential, has emerged, including Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Jr, Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Jamal Musiala and Lamine Yamal. Of this group, Mbappe is the oldest at 25. The rest were all born since the turn of the century (as late as 2007, in the case of Yamal, the prodigiously talented Barcelona winger).

But what of those who came after Neymar, De Bruyne, Salah et al but before Mbappe? When it comes to the group born in the mid-1990s — a group who, logically speaking, should be around its collective peak — there is a gap, not necessarily in talent, but certainly in profile, recognition and, upon deeper analysis, representation in top-level football in Europe.

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Nobody would describe the Ballon d’Or as the perfect barometer of individual performance, but take a look at this graphic that illustrates top-20 rankings by age group since 2008.

Away from the clustered centre of the graphic, what jumps out is that red area containing just a handful of dots. Selected findings include:

• Rodri finishing fifth in last year’s vote is the only top-five place for a player born between 1994 and 1997
• Beyond that, the only player in that age group to have earned a top-10 placing is Rodri’s Manchester City’s team-mate Bernardo Silva (ninth in 2019 and 2023)
• The only other top-20 placings in that age group have been Frenkie de Jong (11th in 2019), Raheem Sterling (12th in 2019 and 15th in 2021), Sebastien Haller (13th in 2022), Luis Diaz (18th in 2022) — none of whom was nominated this time — and Lautaro Martinez (20th in 2023)
• By contrast, from the younger age group, Mbappe has already recorded six consecutive top-10 placings while Haaland (twice), Vinicius Jr (twice) and Victor Osimhen have also finished in the top 10
• Of this year’s 30-man Ballon d’Or longlist, Rodri is one of just seven players born between 1994 and 1997. The other six are Ruben Dias, Hakan Calhanoglu, Artem Dovbyk, Alejandro Grimaldo, Ademola Lookman and Martinez, of whom only Dias and Martinez have been nominated previously.

Admittedly that is just the Ballon d’Or, an award voted for by journalists, drawing on subjective evaluations and, almost inevitably, coloured to some extent by players’ profiles as well as their performance. As a barometer of individual excellence, it is far from perfect — even if its less prestigious rival, the ‘Best’ FIFA award, has produced broadly similar results.

But it certainly tells you something about the way footballers are projected and valued. And when it comes to that group born in the mid-1990s, there is certainly a deficit.

In the cases of Rodri and Bernardo, highly sophisticated players who excel in understated roles at a club that lacks the media profile of the traditional superpowers, that has long seemed more a question of image than of quality. We will come back to that issue.

But there is more to this. Taken more broadly, that mid-1990s age group seems to be struggling for recognition — not just by fans or the media but within the game.

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When the FIFA technical study group, led by former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, published its report on the 2022 World Cup, it briefly mentioned the tournament had been “defined by the performances of young talents and experienced masters”.

Wenger cited the technical prowess, physical strength and mental fortitude of Musiala, Bellingham and Saka at one end of the spectrum and, at the other end, of the enduring quality of players in their mid-to-late thirties such as Messi, Ronaldo, Modric and Olivier Giroud.

“In the modern game the young players are ready to perform earlier on the biggest stage,” he said before turning his mind to a generation of players who had continued to excel well into their thirties. “This,” said Wenger, referring to the latter group, “did not happen 20 years ago, so it looks like there is an extension of the career at the highest level.”

What Wenger and the technical study group did not address was the relative lack of impact made on the tournament by players in the in-between age group.

That was reflected in the age distribution of players at that World Cup. Of the 832 players called up for the tournament, the highest representations by birth year were for 1997 (ie, aged 25) and 1992 (ie, aged 30). Those born in 1994, who might logically have been at the optimum age for a World Cup held in 2022, came in at seventh.

That might be a mere statistical quirk rather than anything deeper, but there follows a graph illustrating the number of minutes played in the Premier League from 2018-19 to 2020-21. The findings are mostly as you would expect: the dominant group is the one born between 1991 and 1994 — those who were between 23 and 27 when that cycle began and between 26 and 30 when the cycle finished. Think of it as the De Bruyne, Kane, Salah generation.

There is a significant drop in the number of Premier League minutes in that time by players born in 1995, i.e. those aged between 23 and 27 over the period in question.

Again it could just be a wrinkle, indicative of nothing much. You would expect that age group to become more dominant over the next three-year period.

But they didn’t. As it transpired, that 1995 age group got barely more playing time between 2021-22 and 2023-24, a period during which they were between the ages of 26 and 29. The minutes played by those born in the early 1990s fell, as you would expect, but so did the numbers for those born in 1993, 1994 and 1995, who might otherwise have expected to become the dominant groups over that period.

Instead, the dominant age groups now were those born in 1996 and 1997 — those aged between 24 and 25 when the cycle began and 26 and 27 when the cycle ended. Those born in 1995 were drastically underrepresented. Even those born in 2001 (players aged between 20 and 23 over the period in question) came close to the total playing time of those born in 1995.

To put some names to the numbers, think of it in similar terms to England’s Euro 2024 squad selection, where players in their mid-to-late twenties such as Sterling (born in 1994), Kalvin Phillips and Jack Grealish (1995), Ben Chilwell and James Maddison (1996) and Marcus Rashford (1997) found themselves usurped by younger players such as Anthony Gordon (born in 2001), Cole Palmer (2002) and Kobbie Mainoo (2005)

It seems to reflect a wider trend. Using the same three-year cycles, the dominant age group in terms of playing time across Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues (Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1) has shifted from those born in the early 1990s to those born from 1997 onwards. Again the mid-’90s group that theoretically should have been in the ascendancy over the past few seasons has been overtaken by a younger group.

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Jose Chieira, who has been a scout for more than two decades at clubs such as Sporting Lisbon, Porto and Panathinaikos, considers the question before declaring, “I don’t believe in generational gaps” — at least not in terms of talent and quality.

But he believes market forces have created a gap. “In the last six or seven years, the strategies of the dominant forces in the market are increasingly based on a different logic,” he tells The Athletic. “It is increasingly a trading business — a typically American trading culture.

“Clubs don’t (today) go looking for players who were born before 2000. We’re already filtering for players under 23 years old. Any older and it’s not a good deal, it’s not attractive. And that has consequences for the way the market has evolved in terms of the talents or the profile of the players who dominate the game.”

As Chieira suggests, there has been a decisive shift as many clubs’ business models have moved towards developing and selling young players to those clubs higher up the food chain.

Of the 50 biggest transfers to Premier League clubs this summer, according to Transfermarkt, only eight involved players aged 26-plus (Tottenham Hotspur’s Dominic Solanke, West Ham United’s Max Kilman and Niclas Fullkrug, Arsenal’s Mikel Merino, Fulham’s Joachim Andersen and Sander Berge, Southampton’s Aaron Ramsdale and Newcastle United’s Odysseas Vlachodimos). Ten years earlier, in the summer of 2014, that age bracket accounted for eight of the 25 biggest deals. The market for players in their mid-to-late twenties is nothing like it was.

Real Madrid’s Champions League-winning squad last season was dominated by a cluster of players born in the 1980s and early 1990s (Thibaut Courtois, Dani Carvajal, Nacho, Antonio Rudiger, David Alaba, Lucas Vazquez, Modric and Kroos) and a group of young stars born in the late 1990s and early 2000s (including Federico Valverde, Eduardo Camavinga, Aurelien Tchouameni, Vinicius Jr, Rodrygo and Bellingham). Again, that mid-1990s group was barely present: just backup goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga (1994) Ferland Mendy (1995) and Dani Ceballos (1996). When Nacho and Kroos moved on this summer, the incoming players were much younger, notably Mbappe (1998) and Brazilian prodigy Endrick (2006).

It is similar at Barcelona: a handful of players born either in the late 1980s (Robert Lewandowski) and early 1990s (Inigo Martinez and Marc-Andre ter Stegen) and a core of players born in from the late 1990s onwards. Between Ter Stegen (1992) and Dani Olmo (1998), there are just three players: Andreas Christensen and Raphinha (both 1996) and De Jong (1997).

An extreme example concerns Chelsea, whose strategy over the past couple of years has appeared to exclude almost any player born before 1997. Their squad last season comprised primarily of Thiago Silva (born 1984), Sterling (1994), Chilwell (1996) and a vast core of younger players, the majority of them born since the turn of the century. Sterling and Chilwell found themselves frozen out completely before this season began: big earners in their late twenties, said to be incompatible with the technical demands of new coach Enzo Maresca.

“This tendency to focus on trading in the talent market has been decisive in creating this apparent gap,” Chieira says. “It will become increasingly difficult to find players in that exact age range — between the ages of 24 and 30, say — who can be true standout players and reference points like Bernardo Silva and others are today. More and more clubs don’t really want to ‘waste time’ working with players over the age of 24 because there’s a commercial logic that tells from that, from 25 or 26, the player will lose value. Therefore the effort and financial resources are directed towards younger players.”

That has certainly appeared true of Chelsea. But there are notable exceptions.

One is Bayern Munich, whose core group includes Leon Goretzka, Joshua Kimmich, Joao Palhinha and Serge Gnabry (all born in 1995) and Leroy Sane, Kingsley Coman and Kim Min-jae (1996).

And there are the Premier League champions, Manchester City, who have John Stones, Mateo Kovacic and Bernardo (all born in 1994), Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji and Grealish (1995), Rodri (1996) and Dias (1997).

In some ways, that seems instructive when it comes to the profile — technical and otherwise — of the more successful players in that age group.

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Since calling time on a playing career that took him from Port Vale to Luton Town, Leicester City and Fleetwood Town, Joe Davis has launched a digital marketing agency that supports professional footballers and athletes build their brand.

He has studied that subject in depth from a commercial and a sporting perspective. “The Messi-Ronaldo era is unique,” he says. “They created this unrealistic expectation of what it means to be a football megastar. They redefined the ceiling, which has overshadowed much of the incredible talent that came next.”

Davis feels it is only as Messi and Ronaldo have begun to wind down, away from the intensity of the European football spotlight, that “we have allowed ourselves to recognise the talent of players like Haaland and Mbappe. It was the in-between group that, with Messi and Ronaldo in their prime, were overlooked for so long”.

With his marketing head on, Davis wonders whether there was a commercial aspect to this, talking about the “immaturity of athlete branding” through much of the 2010s. The opportunities for the modern players to promote themselves are far greater, he says, which is one reason why “this new wave of young talent” — Mbappe, Haaland, Vinicius Jr, Bellingham, Musiala, Yamal and so on — “has become so big so soon”.

The word “wave” is apposite. Whether it is music, film, sport or just about anything else, we are conditioned to see such phenomena in those terms. Sometimes it takes one band, one star or athlete to force a way through and blaze a trail for others to follow. Sometimes there is a desperation to anoint new stars. Sometimes it is the opposition: a desperate refusal to look beyond the zeitgeist and its leading characters.

But away from off-pitch image and profile, Davis suggests another factor that has played into the hands of the new wave: a subtle shift in playing styles which he says has been “arguably more accommodating to ‘luxury’ players” — or at least to those such as Haaland and Mbappe, whose goalscoring talents are so extreme that, breaking into elite-level football, they were not encumbered with as many out-of-possession demands as, say they might have been had they been born five years earlier.

Davis cites his experience as a 20-year-old defender for Port Vale, playing against an 18-year-old Grealish, who was on loan to Notts County. “He was everywhere: tracking back, covering the full-back, pressing our winger, then getting back out to the byline to receive the ball,” Davis says. “At that time, making it wasn’t just about talent; it was also about hard work and discipline, that, ‘Don’t let us down’ mentality. You see it with Bernardo Silva as well — tremendous quality and intelligence but defensive intensity and adaptability as well.

“That era — my era — possibly had different values instilled in them during their breakthrough years, which is probably why they play their game a little more under the radar and in a more structured and workmanlike way. That naturally takes the limelight off them and places it on the more exciting, carefree, creative players — those that immediately capture the imagination of the casual fan.”

That makes perfect sense. That group of players now in their mid-to-late twenties broke into senior football when demands were changing due to an increased emphasis on the type of work they did off the ball — not just “tracking back” but closing down in a structured, organised way. Through the 2010s, the role of the traditional centre-forward seemed to be under threat, which is perhaps why, beyond Martinez, there are so few “pure” goalscorers in that age group.

There is a strange paradox. In terms of profile and projection, the cult of the individual has grown over the past decade like never before, such has been the explosion of social media and global branding. At the same time, the cult of the individual on the pitch has diminished. In the past, leading teams might have been able to carry a “luxury” player or two. That changed Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp built teams whose commitment to creative football came with non-negotiable physical and tactical demands on every player. It is easy to imagine that, if they were five years older or five years younger, Bernardo and Valverde might have been deployed as mercurial wingers or No 10s rather than cerebral, multi-functional midfielders.

But individualism seems to be back in vogue. So does what might be termed ‘main-character energy’. Mbappe, Haaland, Vinicius Jr, Bellingham, Musiala, Yamal… this is a generation of leading players who are encouraged to “do their thing” and play to their enormous strengths — which, in the cases of Mbappe and Haaland, has meant scoring goals at an extraordinary rate rather than worrying unduly about the structure of their team’s pressing game.

They are players whose rare talents merit indulgence — and all of the hype and adulation that comes with their exploits.

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The brilliance of Kylian Mbappe

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Maybe the story is less complicated than that. Maybe the development of top-class athletes is analogous to wine production. Some years, for reasons that can be hard to explain, yield better crops than others.

To put it in blunt terms, 1987 was a vintage year that brought Messi, Benzema and Luis Suarez; 1992 brought Neymar, Salah, Courtois, Son Heung-min and Sadio Mane; 1998 brought Mbappe, Osimhen, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Valverde and Martin Odegaard; 2000 brought Haaland, Vinicius Jr, Foden, Julian Alvarez and Aurelien Tchouameni.

By comparison, the mid-1990s age group is strangely underwhelming. Transfermarkt’s most valuable footballer born in 1995 is Ollie Watkins, whose career has been a slow-burner, coming up through the leagues with Exeter City and Brentford before establishing himself as a proven goalscorer in the Premier League with Aston Villa in his mid-twenties. The second-most valuable player born in 1996, behind Rodri, is Maddison, who, as he approaches his 28th birthday, has seven caps for England and is yet to play in the Champions League.

It is fascinating to look back at the list of winners of the Golden Boy award, established by Italian football newspaper Tuttosport to recognise the best player under the age of 21 in each calendar year.

Early winners of the award include Wayne Rooney, Messi and Cesc Fabregas. The past four editions have been won by Bellingham, Haaland and the Barcelona duo of Gavi and Pedri. Before that, it was Joao Felix, Matthijs de Ligt and Mbappe.

For the 2014, 2015 and 2016 editions, which covered the age group we have been talking about, the winners were Sterling (then at Liverpool), Anthony Martial (then at Manchester United) and Renato Sanches (then at Bayern Munich) — exciting talents certainly, but even at that stage of their careers they did not command the same hype or expectation as a young Rooney, Fabregas or Bellingham, let alone a teenage Mbappe or Messi.

Neither did the other names who featured in the top three for the Golden Boy over those years: Rashford, Divock Origi, Marquinhos, Kingsley Coman and Hector Bellerin.

They have had long and successful careers; Marquinhos is captain of Paris Saint-Germain and has won 91 caps for Brazil; Coman has won the Champions League with Bayern Munich and played for France in the 2022 World Cup final; Origi scored for Liverpool in a Champions League final.

But even if Martial, Renato Sanches, Rashford and Origi can be accused of falling short of their potential, we are not being wise after the event to suggest they were exciting teenagers whose promise was pockmarked with inconsistencies, rather than dead certs to thrive at elite level. Maybe, for reasons that defy explanation, these were just non-vintage crops.

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The ‘lost generation’ phenomenon is far starker and far more unambiguous in men’s tennis. The dominance of the ‘Big Three’ of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic was so extreme that they won 53 out of the 61 Grand Slam tournaments held between June 2005 and June 2020.

There were break-out victories for Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka (three majors each) and Juan Martin Del Potro and Marin Cilic (one apiece), but all four of those players were in roughly the same age bracket as Nadal and Djokovic.

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How Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic reconfigured tennis

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The real lost generation in men’s tennis was the one that that came later and, sharing the circuit with players whose genius was matched by their powers of endurance, found there was no way through. Austria’s Dominic Thiem (born in 1993) and Daniil Medvedev (1996) are the the only men born between 1989 and 2000 to have won a Grand Slam.

The latest ATP rankings tell a story: beyond Djokovic (1987) in fourth place, Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov (1991) is the only player in the top 20 who was born between 1988 and 1995. It is Carlos Alcaraz (2003) and Jannik Sinner (2001) who are leading men’s tennis into the post-Big Three era.

The idea of a lost generation is certain to be far hazier in a team sport such as football, where individual performance is so much harder to quantify. The term does not truly fit when a) we are talking about a period spanning four years or so and b) almost every top-level game you watch features high-performing players from that age group, one of whom, Rodri, would have a claim to be considered the most influential player in world football over the past three or four years.

But it seems unarguable that, as a collective, the players born in the mid-1990s have been overshadowed by the group that went before and, increasingly, by the group that has emerged since. The Ballon d’Or rankings will never tell the whole story but they help illustrate the deficit of big personalities and show-stopping talents that command the greatest attention and recognition.

The absence of a Ronaldo/Messi figure is entirely normal, but it is also a group that is strangely short of A-list goalkeepers, central defenders, wingers and centre-forwards. Almost without exception, the best players in that age group are sophisticated, adaptable ‘system players’ rather than marauding box-to-box dynamos and mercurial playmakers.

Beyond that, market forces have begun to conspire against them as the focus has switched decisively towards youth. What might have expected to be the pre-eminent age group in 2024 has begun to struggle for playing time and to be squeezed out, particularly where wages or wage demands are deemed excessive. Adrien Rabiot, 29, has been unable to find a new club since leaving Juventus in June. Memphis Depay, 30, found numerous avenues in Europe closed and ended up joining Brazilian club Corinthians. It is not clear where Sterling, 29 and surplus to requirements at Chelsea, would have ended up had Arsenal not offered him a lifeline on transfer deadline day

And Sterling, while his returns have diminished over recent seasons, has certainly been one of the standout performers in his age group: a Golden Boy winner as a teenager at Liverpool, four times a Premier League champion at Manchester City, 82 England caps and, yes, a couple of top-20 finishes in the Ballon d’Or rankings, which is more than almost any other player in that mid-1990s age group.

Should his former Manchester City team-mate Rodri be crowned the best player in men’s football in 2024, it would represent a departure in terms of profile, playing style but also age. In many ways, Rodri would be the perfect choice, the quietly brilliant standard-bearer of an age group that has largely gone unheralded.

Unshowy, undemonstrative and, this sudden, long-overdue wave of Rodri appreciation notwithstanding, largely unheralded — fanfare, at last, for football’s jilted generation.

(Top photos: Getty Images; graphic: Meech Robinson)