Luck factor can't be dismissed in club Football.
Were 2012 Chelsea a better side than 2012 Barca Real Bayern? Fuck No! The best always doesn't win.
This is true now as it was true in 90s - quality difference between teams has diminishing returns on who wins. Team A is 2 times better than team B - A will win 70% of the time. A is 10 times better - it will win 80% of the time. A is 100 times better - it will win 90% of the time. I've seen UCL-winning Bayern lose to some 4th bundesliga farmers in a non-friendly game.
So tournament style competitions where 1 game changes the whole ladder - are MOSTLY determined by luck. Even if quality differences between teams in 90s were 10x and now they are 100x - luck still matters a lot in tournaments, cause with 90% chance of winning the best team has a good chance to lose to worse teams at least once. And that loss might knock them out or at least make the ladder significantly worse for them, which gives advantage to slightly worse teams.
So you have Man City and PSG who never won UCL and Chelsea has 2
No point trying to read too much into this, it's just inherent randomness in the tournament format. I prefer double elimination format (like in starcraft tournaments) - less random and more fun cause if you knock someone off to losers' bracket - he might win all its matches in that bracket and meet you in the final for revenge.
As for player quality - in general it's better now. You might not see it, cause the pace increased so much that flashy skills are much harder to pull of now than in 90s. And there's less focus on 1v1 because of tactics. This doesn't mean modern players can't do flashy 1v1 skills - if you put them in 90s game they would do it no problem.
But there are exceptions like Ronaldo Phenomeno - I have no doubt peak R9 would do great in modern football cause of how physical (and still skillful) he was. I have my doubts about Maradona cause he was quite slow.
Stop it.
