I'm not sure I agree with that...

They slurp up ambitious people, put them in charge of something, work hard to convince them it's important, layer endless amounts of bureaucracy on top and around them, and pay them just enough to make sure they don't leave - I think this may be more accurate...

Yes yes yes!! There's this great essay from Stephen Jay Gould on why we haven't had 0.400 hitters in baseball for so long. His argument was that the overall pool of baseball players got too good so you're not seeing strong outliers anymore! I'd say that this is a phenomenon we see across all kinds of life, not just sports.

From a paper reviewing the evidence of Gould, I can't find the original essay online:

>Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century.

https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theo...

Chess is a great example of this because it has no barriers to entry and an absolutely enormous player pool. And at the top there's this sort of oscillating pattern where everybody will be more or less equal, but then suddenly some outlier among outliers will show up and just completely dominant the game for many years, and in some cases even decades - to the point of being the best player across multiple generations of players.

Getting a ball past several defenders and scoring a goal on the other hand can be done in a near infinite number of ways, meaning there is much more room for variation, improvement and evolution.

The closest equivalent I can think of in football is a penalty kick, and I don't think there is any evidence that players are getting significantly better at scoring off penalties.

I agree, with the caveat that football is becoming more and more like baseball and other similar (mostly US) sports which are very heavy on numbers and on stats. The recent Norwegian sensation, Haaland, seems exactly to fit that trend, as he's not particularly super-good at anything but his numbers have just been phenomenal in the last 3-4 years (when he's been fit to play, that is).

We'll see if the future will bring more Kevin De Bruyne-type of players (i.e. a very creative guy) or more Haalands.

Mostly by cracking down on violent play and letting forwards use their skills without being injured.

However, watching any random league game from the big five (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France), the standard is very high. Most players are amazingly fit and skillful, control ball extremely well. Teams play with cohesive plans. A lot of nice team movements. It shows that the standard at the professional level has risen considerably in the last few decades.

The downside of course is that it makes games more mechanical and less emotional, and it's harder to tell one team from another.

> Messi having a decent chance of being named the best football player of all times.

There is no such thing. Being considered by many, yes.

This is based on hearsay, but there's a fairly common sentiment surrounding certain big tech companies that they'll often hire highly skilled engineers to work on fairly mundane problems in order to restrict the available talent pool. Sometimes large companies will acqui-hire full teams just to avoid having to compete with them. Which is to say: I'm not sure that the allocation of talent is in an optimal configuration. But I'm also unsure how this hypothesis could be adequately falsified or measured.

For instance in a parallel world Elon Musk ends up going to work at Boeing and perhaps even gradually works his way up to becoming their chief engineer. But in this world it's unlikely he would have even been able to create fully reusable rockets. That was not only an expensive and extremely high risk venture, but one which many key people, such as Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA - a Boeing/Lockeed partnership), were aggressively dismissive and even mocking of, until SpaceX proved it. Let alone all his other ventures like Tesla or big picture goals like creating human colonies on Mars.