Well, best I can do is early 90s, but: It's better, much better.

You of course had brilliant gifted technicians in the 90s, you even had teams full of them at the top. But you're average run of the mill center back was often enough absolutely awful on the ball. The hard fucker whose entire job is defending, playing a 5m pass to the midfielder and then waiting for the next attack doesn't really exist anymore. Partly because they can get away with a lot less hard tackles.

Everyone has to be decent on the ball now. It's also much faster and more compact. The game is effectively played on a smaller area, meaning less time on the ball. Offensive midfielders don't regularly get time to stop and actually think for a second before doing something outrageous, it has to be instantaneous. So old school playmakers aren't really around that much anymore. "10s" with a couple of exceptions (Özil!) are very direct players now and the cerebral part has moved back into central/defensive midfield. It also seems like you get less individual players running the whole game. Matthäus was goddamn everywhere, seemingly running offense and defense at the same time. But that would be tactical suicide today. No time for that.

And off the pitch, to me in the 90s it was all more down to earth. It felt a lot like your football club around the corner. Only someone had made the stands bigger and put some cameras around the pitch, but otherwise it seemed like roughly the same world, filled by the same kind of people. It was a bit less Hollywood. Fewer fancy haircuts, fewer 19 year olds with sports cars. And everyone wasn't professionally trained in public relations. So you'd get a more honest view. Oh and very rarely were young footballers the crush of teenage girls. Less glamour. Basically only the top teams were comparable in that respect to how every club throughout the top tiers is now.

There was also more mystery. When we were 6 or 7,Maradona was still synonymous with a footballing god, like I suppose Messi is now. But we didn't get very many full time games on TV, just international tournaments and highlight shows. So while I've seen many dozens of Messi games, I'D only every seen maybe 3 or 4 of Maradona. So you'd build him up more, he was less human than Messi. More concept than man. Same thing when Ronaldo got like 98 or 99 out of 100 in FIFA '98. No one knew very much about him apart from his Brazil games, but in our minds he immediately became a perfect player.