Brazil great Pele believes there are just three great footballers in the current generation, compared to the wealth of world-class talent that played the game during his career.
The three-time Brazilian World Cup winner was speaking with The Daily Telegraph ahead of a summer of black-tie engagements in England, and was keen to heap praise on the quality of the English game from back in his playing days.
"My memories are of Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore, and not forgetting Banks -- Gordon was a proper great," Pele said. "And that was just in England. All around the world it was the same: brilliant Germans, Dutchmen and of course Brazilians."
But Pele believes that today's era cannot match that depth of world-class talent.
"Today you have just three great players in the world, [Lionel] Messi, [Cristiano] Ronaldo and maybe Neymar ... maybe," he said. "But in that time there were so many."
The Brazilian believes that one of the main reasons for the paucity of great footballers in the current era is the presence of agents.
With personal managers and agents keen to push their clients toward big-money deals before they are ready, some of football's brightest talents are having their development stifled before they have even reached their potential.
"I think one of the problems is that the players used to remain longer in the team they started with, in the country they were born," he said. "Before, the players belonged to their club, they had the chance to grow there. Now the players belong to the impresarios, the agents, their personal managers.
"We have this problem in Brazil. The best players start to play, then immediately comes the impresario, they pay a little too much, and hoping to make money straight away, they push them too early. They don't have time to develop."