Why the Beautiful Game has made a Comeback

The Beautiful Game. El Jogo Bonito. A game that, in recent years, has seemed to be slipping away from us. More tactical game styles, more pragmatism, a bigger emphasis on stability in build up play, and a move away from the beautiful players and beautiful styles that made us fall in love with the game. The era of players like Neymar, Ronaldinho, Kaka, who’d take a game by the scruff of the neck and turn it into their own show, was over. Or so it seemed.

While football fans thought this was just the football we were destined to see now, that the natural progression of the game had finally turned to mass perfectionism, and that’d be the way it was. However, in the past year to two years, the dark gloomy skies over football, with dull as dirt tactics played across every level, corporations taking over the game, flashy players snuffed out, has turned to an actual bright future, great young stars, exciting teams at the forefront, and exciting ideas. 

How did the game make this turnaround in such a short period of time? How did we go from a dark age after the primes of Messi and Ronaldo to now, with the emergence of great youngsters like Lamine Yamal, Desire Doue, and many others who could define this new era of football.

One of the big factors in the resurgence of the game is the fact that the mid to late 2010s was a massive trough for young talent. There weren’t many, if any, young stars who made it big in their careers. I’ll be releasing something on the wonderkids of 2015 soon, but as to not spoil anything, let’s look at 2014’s biggest wonderkids, the players with the highest potential on FIFA 14.

• Marquinhos

• Simone Scuffet

• Bruma

• Lazar Markovic

• Anthony Martial

• Adnan Januzaj

• Balde Keita

• Samir

• Angel Correa

• Max Meyer

• Zakaria Bakkali

Besides Marquinhos and (debatably) Angel Correa, none of these players did anything at a high level. Martial was alright, but didn’t live up to a fraction of his potential. Now, let’s look at the highest potential wonderkids from FIFA 22.

• Pedri

• Florian Wirtz

• Ansu Fati

• Jude Bellingham

• Ryan Gravenberch

• Gavi

• Jamal Musiala

• Josko Gvardiol

• Eduardo Camavinga

• Bukayo Saka

Notice, immediately, the incredible difference. Instead of calling out the players who did anything at a high level, we’re calling out the players who didn’t. In this case, it’s just Ansu Fati who didn’t. Everyone else has, and is looking like they’ll just make a bigger impact as the years go on.

This is the first factor of football’s resurgence - the young stars are finally back. 

The next generation of football’s stars are here, and now we’re at a point like we were in the early 2010s - many of the world’s best stars are still very young. In the early 2010s, it was players like Messi, Ronaldo, Rooney, Neuer, Fabregas, and many more, and now we have players like Bellingham, Haaland, Mbappe, Vini, Yamal, Pedri, Saka, Wirtz, and so so many more young stars. 

I could talk about the game’s young stars all day, but let me take you to another factor which has caused the return of the beautiful game - the return of attacking play and entertaining football.

Before this year, I hadn’t seen a match where both teams scored (at least) four since Barcelona’s comeback 4-4 draw to Villarreal in 2019, over 6 years ago now. After that, before 2025, we would rarely ever see any high profile matches end that way, the luckiest we’d get is probably a 4-3 or in super rare cases, a 5-3 or 6-3. 

From the start of 2025, just 8 months into the year, after 6 full years of nothing, I’ve already witnessed FOUR matches to end with both teams scoring four.

The first was, in my opinion, the best, with Barca coming back from 4-2 to beat Benfica 4-5 in Lisbon with the final kick of the game. It’s still my favourite Barca game from the 24/25 season, a season which saw Barca put 16 past Madrid in 4 matches.

We then saw Barca draw 4-all with Atlético Madrid, Barca going down 2, scoring four consecutive, then bottling the lead and drawing before the second leg of the competition. 

Until now, we could have blamed this on a chaotic Hansi Flick style, but the last two matches didn’t involve Barca. The third may well be better than the Benfica match, United bottling a 2-goal lead, before getting a red card and going down 2 in extra time against Lyon, before staging the comeback of their lives, 2 goals after the 120th minute, winner by Harry Maguire in the 121st minute, and potentially the best extra time period we’ve ever seen.

The final match was at the Nations League, with a rejuvenated Spain putting France down 5-1 in 67 minutes, before France staged an epic comeback attempt, getting back 3 of the four goals they went down, but still losing 5-4. 

Apart from that, we’ve still seen some incredible matches. Of course, Barca has had entertainment for days, coming back from a 2-goal deficit to win almost 10 times through the season, and, of course, the PSG matches. 

PSG matches are rarely the spectacular backs and forths Barca games are, but they always have drama, and are always so fun to watch. From their 4-2 comeback vs City, their massive upset vs Liverpool, scare vs Villa, humiliation of Inter, and pretty much their entire Club World Cup campaign, it was all incredible to watch. Luis Enrique has PSG playing a bombastic pressing style, and quick attack, uncharacteristic to everything we’ve seen from him in his managerial career to that point. 

At this point, football needs a PSG-Barca matchup. We just do. It’ll be incredible. Hansi Flick and his ridiculous attacking play, against Luis Enrique’s terror tactics. The two clubs at the forefront of entertaining football returning, and if they don’t play in 25/26, it’ll be a waste.

One more factor of this new era of football being ushered in is the new tournaments. The 32-team tournament is slowly dying, with the Champions League being expanded to 36 clubs and the World Cup to 48 nations. Despite opposition, the new formats of the Champions League and Club World Cup took place for the first time this season, and fans surprisingly like them.

The new 36-team Champions League sees much more drama, and sees clubs facing a much wider variety of different clubs from different countries. In the old format, from the Group stage you could face a maximum of 7 different clubs, but now, you face a minimum of 8 and could face up to 13 in one tournament.

That, working in tandem with the new Club World Cup, has seen Europe’s top clubs able to face each other much more often, and legends like the unstoppable PSG 24/25 team being born. Between the Champions League and Club World Cup, PSG faced 16 different clubs, 8 of them being undebatable European giants, not even including the Chelsea team that finally beat them.

Speaking of the Club World Cup, it was one of football’s most successful experiments, with over 40 matchups happening for the first time, some crazy matches, such as Al Hilal’s 4-3 upset win over City that was unforgettable, and the general reputation increase of the Brazilian clubs. I have a video on the La Croqueta youtube channel reviewing the tournament as a whole. 

With the new World Cup format set to debut next summer, it will fully usher in the new era of football tournament formats, and football’s new era of great attacking football and dramatic storylines.

There are, as I see it, two more reasons that football is making a return. The penultimate reason is that now, as we get into the mid 2020s, actually the second half of the 2020s somehow, the world is now pretty much recovered from Covid at the very start of the decade. 

The world, and clubs, are recovering from Covid, which had massive effects on clubs’ finances. We’re now finally starting to see clubs get into good financial shape and build good, competitive winning squads, which goes hand in hand with my last point: The era of mass rebuilds from clubs is ending. Nearly every big club in Europe has undergone a massive rebuild in the past years, with their squads completely different to the ones just four years ago. Especially clubs like Barcelona and Chelsea, who’ve overhauled their entire squads in the past few years and now look like European contenders again.

For now, that’s all I’ve got as to why the game has made a comeback. Whether I’m right, or wrong, I’m just glad the game looks fun to watch again, after years of an uneasy relationship. Until next time.