Footballers like Pirlo, Nedved, or Zico don’t exist in our mind today because we are overexposed to football. If a new movie was released by an actor every week instead of every other year, that actor would feel less special to us.

A live match was an event you could not miss. A scarce exclusive experience to watch living legends.

There were fewer channels. You couldn’t watch every match; you had to watch the match. The match everyone else was watching. You could only watch it now.

Pull out your phone. You can watch every match from this week, on demand right now, whenever you want, forever.

Open Instagram. You can see Erling Haaland dressed as the Joker for Halloween.

Open YouTube. You can watch a twelve-minute edited video of the England squad training from a day ago.

Open Twitter. You can argue with Mohamed Salah about the state of affairs in the Liverpool dressing room.

And then they play a 90-minute match every three to four days.

A good portion of the population are like you. They are obsessed. They can’t resist consuming everything. But when you consume everything, you never get time to miss the players.

They aren’t special; they are relatable. They are doing special things, but they don’t have the star power of a Wayne Rooney or Ronaldo Nazario. Why? Because we never had this level of access to them.

You saw them once, maybe twice a week. You read about them in a newspaper when they were cheating on their wife or if they put in a transfer request.

There was a larger distance between them and us. They had otherworldly powers we would never possess. We were the mere mortals who got to watch them.

If the aliens invade, they’ll become less magical when you get to know them, when you can relate to them.

That is why it feels less like we are watching living legends today.

The spotlight has to be on someone, though. The legends today are in the dugout, the manager. They are the significant characters in this play with the least exposure. That is who you tune in to watch.