Exactly. Legendary players like Zidane, Maradona, R9 etc have a handful of these type of performances.. no one complains about the level of opponent and when you watch their career highlight videos you see the same clips again and again which usually make up about 10 minute videos. Messi has literally hundreds of unbelievable games and highlights, when his career is over his highlight reel will be multiple hours.
I think that Messi is better than them.
But this remark about videos is related to the era of television back then.
When Maradona played in 80s and 90s, you couldn't watch all of his matches (iirc) on a tv.
There was no internet, there was no pay per view channels.
So, you could have gone to a stadium, listen to a match on radio or watch a 30 seconds clip of 2:0 goals in the evening news.
Now, if you wanted to make a 20 minutes clip of Maradona's season, you would have to go to a local Tv station and ask for videotapes.
The only other option was to manually record a few matches shown on a tv back then mixed with 10 seconds clips of goals shown on an evening news. Or use videos from documentaries about him, which again used the same World cup videos and some most goals from Napoli.
Today, you have streams of every single league, cup, NT and a friendly match.
You even have videos of training sessions.
Today, it is quite easy to collect goals and dribbles of any player in the world, unlike in 80s or 90s.
For example, any fan could today create a 60 minutes video of dribbles, passes and moves from Riki Puig who is 20 and plays for Barca B.
Now try to make a one hour video of Maradona or Crujff.
Guess what, 80-90% of clips will be from matches from World cup since those are the only matches shown on a Tv for a wider audience, more or less, plus CL semis and finals.
Does that mean that Riki is doing more wonders week in, week out than Maradona and Crujff?
Also, another thing to consider is that in 70s, 80s or 90s, we didn't have super rich world and super rich clubs.
Let's say that Barca and Real had 2 millions to spend.
And other teams had half a million or a million.
While today, Barca can spend let's say 500m and weak La Liga teams can spend 10-30m.
So, you see, 30-40 years ago, big teams were only 2-3-4 times richer than their opponents.
While today it is closer to being 10-20 times richer.
That also means that current big teams like Barca, City, Psg, Bayern are often able to demolish their league opponents with 6:1, 7:1, 9:0 or 11:1.
Those big teams have turned their leagues into a one horse race and all of them are padding stats with an insane number of goals, assists, all sorts of domination and records.
Which almost never happened in 90s when the results were mostly 1:0, 2:0 and 2:1.
People often say: Messi can't play with a donkey midfield.
Now imagine with which kind of donkeys Maradona had to play at Napoli or at a World cup 1986.
Messi is the best, but it is hard to compare the eras.
If someone like Cr7 is getting so much hype today and if he is scoring way more goals than all other strikers from the past, you really have to wonder:
Are the current players THAT good or there are 100s of factors which have changed in football?
If you look at the number of goals by Cr7, his league goals, NT titles, hype, Ballon D Ors, it looks as if he is the best or the second best ever.
He looks better than Ronaldinho, R9, Maradona, Crujff, Henry.
Not to mention tons of players from the past whom we don't know too well.
The numbers from the current era says that he is top2 of all time.
While in reality, he is surely not in Top5 players of all time.
Maybe even not in Top10.