Was 90s Premier League football actually better, or is that just nostalgia?

[Thor]

Older fans constantly claim 90s Premier League football was genuinely more physical, more unpredictable, and had more personality than the heavily tactical, data driven version played today. Tackles that would draw an immediate red card now were routine then, and genuinely bad teams could still occasionally beat the best sides on a given day in a way that feels rarer now. But sports nostalgia is famously unreliable, and modern football is measurably faster, fitter and more tactically sophisticated by nearly every actual metric available. Curious whether people think the 90s genuinely had something worth missing or whether this is just standard generational nostalgia talking

The case for today's version usually points to genuinely higher fitness levels, more tactical variety between teams, and video review technology actually correcting more obvious officiating mistakes than existed before. The case for the 90s usually centers on unpredictability and genuine characters, arguing that modern football's increased professionalism has ironically made matches more predictable and less chaotic. Feels like a real tension between measurable improvement and something harder to quantify getting lost along the way

Where do you actually land on this, and why specifically. Genuinely curious how people weigh nostalgia against measurable modern improvement here

[DarkFreddy65]

Today's football wins on pure fitness and tactical sophistication by basically any measurable standard, and I think a lot of the 90s nostalgia specifically comes from people romanticizing genuinely reckless tackling that actually ended careers unnecessarily. Player safety improvements alone make the modern game the objectively better product to me. Nostalgia shouldn't override actual welfare concerns