The post talking about Robinho below has made me reflect on how I followed football back in the day. Those were good times, I'm feeling very nostalgic about how things used to be.
Football and life in general was so different then. Not necessarily better, but surely a lot simpler. No mobile phones, no internet, no computers. We just had a TV and following football was hoping to catch some highlights or recaps on channels that showed cricket 90% of the time.
All of my narratives about who was good and who wasn't came from shitty newspaper articles that I wouldn't give 5 seconds to now and all football discussions amounted to fighting over who dribbled better and who had better flair moves during breaks from playing football on uneven gravelly fields with intermittent thick and thorny vegetation with no boots on. Things like scoring, finishing and positioning were never discussed.
It's amazing how much the technology has affected everyday life. It seems like the days of following football on the TV without mobiles and access to a wider spectrum of people here in r/Barca has changed how I view football. I never used to think of a player as being good beyond being a good goal scorer and dribbler - following football through the internet has changed what I value in good players a lot.
This pandemic seems to be a culmination of all the things that slowly divorced me from the football actually played on the field. Mobile phone and computers and the internet slowly took away the evenings I used to spend running and playing on the field. The pandemic has merely completed that transition. Going out and playing football freely with friends seems to be such a far off thing now that I am out of college and working/studying from home. Football for me now is only discussing things here on r/barca and not the fun we had on the field.
It's such a sad thing now that I think about it. But it's also natural maybe? I feel like I'm having a midlife crisis in my twenties being cooped up all the time now. Especially with not having incentive to go outside for anything beyond buying stuff, most of which I order now anyway.
No idea why I typed all this too, I wanted to say something about being reminded of Robinho being such a huge prospect back in the day and then went off on a tangent.