Hello and welcome to Libero. My name is Jack Pitbrook. I'm joined today by

Rory Smith, Tarat Panja and John Brin as the second half of the week squad. And we're

going to talk about a phenomenon that we have been thinking about, which is what has happened to

footballers born in the 1990s, or more specifically from the second half of the 1990s.

This might be a strange thing to talk about it, given this is the week defined by Declan

Reis' heroic, it's obviously born in 1999, but it's felt to quite a few of us

as if the best players in the world are increasingly from that 2000s-born generation,

you know, Harlan, Foden, Venetia, Saka, Petri, Palmer, Bellingham, Verti, Amal, and so on.

And that the guys you would expect to be on top of the game now, these are players born in the, you know, let's say in the second half of the 1990s, who would now be in their late 20s, they're not really so much on the scene. Rory, do you agree with this analysis? And where do you think it's come from? What do we call those people? So we're, I'm a

geriatric millennial because I was born in 1982. I'm going to guess that Bruin, who I think is a little

bit older than me, is a gen Xer. Yes. Yeah. Pange's a year older than me, but I think he counts as

geriatric millennial. Bindi, you're yonder, aren't you? 1998.

So are you, you're a pure millennial?

Yeah, I would say, I would say I'm kind of in the middle of the millennial cohort.

So is it, is it Gen Z that were born in the 90s? Is that right?

I thought Gen Z was born in 2000 in the 21st century.

So what are these players struggling as they don't know what, like,

age demographic cohort they belong to?

Is that?

That must be it.

They can't define themselves.

They lack self-identity, so they're struggling.

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