Gareth Keown, with your statements you have once again proven that you know relatively little about football. Maybe you should read some biographies and autobiographies of players from sixties and seventies and find out that back then you were pretty much kicked out of the game if you were any good. Only the best and strongest survived. If you don't know where your local library is then you can type
www.youtube.com in your browser and search for clips of George Best and other great players of the aforementioned era and you'll see it was not nice what was done to these players.
Of course, 40 years ago footballers had a bit different lifestyles, they smoke and drank more, visited nightclubs until early hours and shagged women (not team-mates' wives, I assume) but some of the players such as Best, Greaves, Jennings, B. Charlton, Moore, Hurst and Peters would probably still fit in the game. Norman Hunter and Ron Harris probably not as they would miss more matches through suspensions than they would actually play. I'm not sure many of today's footballers would have survived back in the old days.
Oh, one more thing - 40 years (even 20 years ago) players had to play in awful conditions and still they managed to score and play beautiful football.