Instead we got this young duo / lightning in a bottle situation; and I expect that both Sinner and Alcaraz are likely to be playing dominantly into their mid 30s barring injury, or maybe Alcaraz buying a nightclub in Ibiza and retiring.

Edit. A quick investigation shows there is not a significant age difference between men and women for both top 10 player lists and top 100 player lists

Any time you have a system with feedback loops and economies of scale / network effects, the natural iterated behavior over time is an increasingly steep power law distribution.

With the digital world where zero marginal costs mean huge economies of scale and social interaction means huge network effects, we are clearly seeing a world dominated by a small number of insanely powerful elites. Seven of the ten richest people in 2025 got there from tech.

Our society wasn't meant to be this connected with this much automated popularity aggregation. It leads to huge inequality until we figure out damping or counterbalancing systems to deal with it.

They found more success when they bought the best team i.e. the best players in each position. Winning in football is difficult enough that you still need great tactics, management, experience, and luck to have actual sustained success. Money helps buy a lot of that, though.

But beyond Real Madrid your point is correct. More and more money is aggregating at the top, especially the English Premier League, and others are getting left behind.

Rosters have some restrictions in terms of size, in terms of home grown talent, talent from outside Europe, etc. There are also a ton of great football players out there. One team can't buy up all the talent, but a clique of elite teams can.

There is some concept of financial fair play too, but that still rewards bigger teams who are already rich.

There are probably studies written on this topic...