As Franz Beckenbauer once pointed out as we lounged around the plunge pool at Daley Thompson's Swiss mountain spa retreat, there really is nothing worse than a name-dropper. With this in mind, and with a wave of insincere apology, I'd just like to mention that I saw Alessandro Del Piero play the other day. Yes. That Alessandro Del Piero. A player who for English football fans of a certain age still has an irresistibly narcotic appeal, the mention of his name opening up a kind of time tunnel – as the TV screen dissolves, wind chimes tinkle, the music of Haddaway plays seductively in the background – straight back to the glory days of the early 1990s when the world was still young and an Italian footballer with a soulful expression and a delicately nuanced right foot could still arrive fully formed as a genuine pre-YouTube revelation.

Del Piero currently plays for Sydney FC in the A-League, along with one or two other familiar faces. William Gallas is out here, looking oddly masterful and oddly frantic at exactly the same time. Newcastle Jets recently appointed a new manager who announced that he would be "basing our game a lot more around Emile Heskey", which is definitely one way to go. It's a good league with good crowds: plus of course it has Del Piero, although things have not been going that well of late for the A-League's own understated little superstar. There is talk of disaffection, of a certain gloominess in his half-speed trequartista stylings, so much so that Del Piero was recently the recipient of an open letter from a well-known Sydneyite, which ended with the question "'What have we done to you?' I have no answer."

This is a little sad, although watching him play there didn't seem to be that much wrong with Del Piero that being 10 years younger and much less hot wouldn't solve. It was definitely still him, that floating No10 with an air of being patiently, almost bashfully, quite a bit better than everyone else out there, but moving around the pitch now with all the urgency of a man trying to waddle across a bouncy castle without spilling his drink. Players are often accused of walking through games. Del Piero didn't even walk through this one very quickly, moving a little slower than the average person might walk to the newsagent, but still with that air of nonchalant old-world grace, so much so you half-expected to look down and notice he was playing in britches and a powdered wig. There was one unforgettably artful touch off his knee (afterwards we talked a lot about that touch: we'll always have that touch). And at the end there was the bizarre sight of Del Piero's extended family sat balefully in the posh seats while the home fans nearby shouted things like "youse are all a bunch of drongos!" at the retreating players.

Really, though, the reason for going on about Del Piero is the simple thrill of seeing a player who, 20 years ago, had such a profound effect on a profoundly impressionable generation of English football-watchers. This is not just about how good Del Piero was in his early pomp, that period where he seemed the perfect prodigy with the perfect haircut in the perfect position in the perfect league, announcing himself with that startling volleyed goal against Fiorentina, a 50-yard pass whiffled in to the top corner with the outside of his foot without even breaking stride.

It was the timing of Del Piero's emergence that made him doubly significant. He is perhaps the Italian player most clearly associated with the brilliant surprise of Channel 4's Football Italia coverage. It might seem hard to believe for those who have only really known the last 10 years of outright digital saturation, but in the early 1990s the appearance of Serie A on terrestrial TV was like a projection from some distant sporting galaxy, to be clustered around eagerly – that hazy screen with its urbane voices-off, the strangely grown-up looking players – like awestruck cavemen fawning over a crash-landed martian weather satellite.

Perhaps the most striking thing about how striking this all seems now is the fact that things will never be quite so striking again. Until very recently the shared moment of revelation of some grand dawning talent had been a natural part of watching football, which was still something of a wild frontier. There were international tournaments every two years and the European Cup and I can still remember the weird excitement of seeing Ruud Gullit for the first time doing alluringly impossible things in a 20-second clip on Saint and Greavsie. But, looking back, 1990 was probably the last proper "blind" World Cup, the last to feature what was essentially a bunch of strangers, rumours, half-glimpsed exoticisms in waiting. Roger Milla was, it turns out, the Roger Milla to end all Roger Millas.

This is now a vanished world, blown away within the space of a mini-generation by the all-seeing compound eye of digital media. The transformation of all football everywhere into a ubiquitous online presence has taken a little over a decade. Everybody knows everything now. There can be no real surprises, no culture shock, just a sense of glazed and dilute semi-revelation. Not that modern football seems staid or overfamiliar. There is a profound and far more detailed fascination in the insect-scale footballing infinity now available via YouTube, internet feed and subscription TV. Romanian third division regional derbies, Guinean Super League relegation play-offs, 47 minutes of every single diagonal pass ever played by Zvonimir Boban 1992-2001: this is the last great human wilderness.

For now at least Del Piero remains one of the few active members of that last generation of superstar footballers to emerge fully formed from behind the pre-digital curtain. He is still chugging on too, linked as his 40th birthday approaches not with retirement, or a nice cup of tea and a sit-down, but with a move to Thailand or perhaps China, carrying with him as he goes that first distant ripple of a wave that hasn't stopped breaking since.