wco81 wrote:History and tradition may be big but do people really believe that winning the league 50 years ago is the same as it is now?
NBA has the same debates, whether players from the '60s and '70s can play in the NBA today.
Team sports are now international so rosters are full of international players which wasn't the case long time ago. Athletes are better trained. Long time ago, athletes would have to take second jobs in the offseason rather than train year round.
In European football, titles won 50 years ago still hold a lot of weight and halcyon eras are often perceived as cultural landmarks for fans. Ask any long-time Liverpool fan about the club's proudest days, and they will almost always talk about Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and their European dominance in the late 70s. When you consider how much Liverpool have won since then, the importance of that can't be understated.
Bear in mind, professional basketball is still a relatively young game. You had the NBL and BAA mergers, the ABA, and finally the NBA and ABA merger. At the point this started to happen, the top tier of English football had already existed for 70+ years. When Tottenham won their league titles in the 60s, the club had already existed for 80 years. Even as the last people who remember certain eras or successes start to pass away, the impact of those times is still felt and is visible for everyone to see. I don't mean to imply that American sports aren't as important, obviously sports are a huge part of American culture, it's more that there's a greater sense of transience in US pro sports, whereas in European football the game bled into the public consciousness during formative periods in society.
Sunderland are currently languishing in the third tier of English football, and yet they still fill their stadium with nearly 50,000 fans in home games. That's what it means to be a big club. It's not really something that waxes and wanes so easily, it's culturally ingrained from our fathers and their fathers and their fathers.
So, to answer your question, winning the league 50 years ago isn't the same as it is now from a playing perspective, but it's of equal or even greater cultural importance so it doesn't really matter. Recency bias still exists but it isn't quite the same as it is with American sports.
I agree with your broader point about the quality of athletes and depth of teams, the game has certainly changed, especially in the past 30 years. But that doesn't mean that the players back before then weren't any good, or that their accolades don't matter as much. If Jimmy Greaves, Johan Cruyff, Diego Maradona, George Best, Alfredo di Stefano, etc. had access to present day training and fitness regimes, played on better pitches, and weren't viciously attacked by defenders every game, there's little to suggest they wouldn't be as good or even better than their modern day equivalents in Messi and Ronaldo. I think about that often.
