Spartans weren’t super warriors.
“Part of this, to be fair, is about time – tactical sophistication increases quite a bit from 500 to 50 B.C. But that’s the thing about judging the Spartans – the claim is often not “they were a couple of strokes better than par for their day” but rather “they were the best ever.” As we’ll see, this second statement is pretty clearly nonsense – the Spartans manage a profoundly disappointing 0-and-2 record against the Macedonian phalanx (plus one ‘no contest’ where they let Philip II just walk all over them without a fight). They were thus quite clearly second best at most even in the limited pool of “Greek speaking armies in Classical antiquity.””
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/