Former Premier League striker Michael Owen has told William Hill’s podcast, Up Front with Simon Jordan, that modern footballers are merely athletes and that you don’t have to be “that good” to play in the Premier League anymore.
Featuring on William Hill’s Up Front with Simon Jordan, a podcast hosted by the former Crystal Palace owner who speaks to sports stars and celebrities and challenges their opinions whilst scrutinising their careers, Owen said: “Back in the day there were loads of great players that were absolute ballers, properly talented footballers. Now, if you can just run a bit further than everyone else and pass the ball from A to B, then you can have a decent career in the Premier League. You don’t even have to be that good anymore.
“You used to have to have real skill and attributes to be a top player – you had to be a footballer. Now you have to be an athlete. If I was playing in today’s game I would be scoring at the same level as all of the top strikers. I absolutely believe that.
“You look at some of the players in my generation, Brazilian Ronaldo for example – is Erling Haaland really better than him? Thierry Henry is another. I love Haaland but can you really say that if you put Henry or Ronaldo in this Manchester City side, that they wouldn’t score at the same rate? Of course they would.
I wasn’t the best in the world when I won Ballon d’Or
Michael Owen became the fourth Englishman ever to win the Ballon d’Or when he won it in 2001, but the former Galactico doesn’t believe that he was the best player in the world when he won the award.
“I wasn’t the best player in the world when I won the Ballon d’Or,” said Owen. “But in a sense I was. Realistically I knew I wasn’t the best in the world. You had the likes of Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane playing at that time – there were better players than me. However, when I stepped on the pitch I felt like I was the best. But when I sit here today, I know that there were better players than me at the time.
“I think footballers were more pure back in the day. Now you have to be an athlete, you have to be able to run, you have to be big and you have to be fast. If Matt Le Tissier, one of the most gifted players of our time, were playing today, would he even get into a team?”
I would’ve played double the games with today’s medical support
Owen had a career ravaged by injuries, most notably a tear in his right hamstring. The former Liverpool man claimed that had he been able to access medical care of the standard that it is in football today, he would’ve played twice the number of games.
“If the state of play medically was as it is now, then I would have played double the amount of games,” he said. “And I probably would have won a lot more and scored a lot more goals. I did what I did for four or five years and then I regressed, but if I had today’s medical support then I would’ve been able to continue that for longer.
“In my mind I had one injury, I ruptured one of the hamstrings in my right leg. When you rupture it, it acts like an elastic band. Nowadays, you can have it surgically reattached, but we didn’t have that back then.
“When, at the age of 19, I snapped my hamstring and it recoiled, it basically reattached down by my knee at one end, and by my backside at the other end,” he continued. “It just naturally reattached at the nearest point. From 19 onwards I was running on two hamstrings in my right leg.
“Obviously the immediate effect was that I was out for five months, but I became totally imbalanced. I had so much more power in my left side. Over time that creates a real imbalance so eventually everything starts to be affected from your groins to your hips – then everything was totally out of kilter. If I had surgical intervention straight after the game when it happened, who knows where we would be now.”
You can watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/@UpFrontWithSimonJordan
