Messi-Ronaldo GOAT tale comes to an end: Game over, football is complete

FIFA World Cup final was about the man who has inspired a new category to describe brilliance: "Apart from Messi"

No anthology, no poetry, no commemorative essay could have summed it up better. Why waste a thousand words when three would suffice. An Instagram caption — a perfect illustration of where literary prose is headed — with the picture circulated a billion times already. A tender moment, a private moment in the public gaze. After Lionel Messi had collected the Golden Ball (awarded to the best player of the World Cup), he crossed the World Cup trophy, pausing for the briefest of moments to kiss it. He’d lift it 10 minutes later, but this kiss was just for him. That photograph, accompanied by the three words that say it best — Messi completes football. 

Finally. This long dance is over. The multiple La Liga titles, the Champions Leagues, the Copa Del Reys, the Club World Cups… None of it mattered as much as this one, the last piece of his destiny, which seemed he would always be denied. Thirty-five years old now, an old man by footballing standards, in his 26th World Cup game, and surely the most absurd World Cup game he’s ever played in, nothing made sense till it all did. When he was standing in front of the Argentine fans, serenading and being serenaded, a relationship that seemed fractured six years ago, now repaired, resurrected, redone. 

To discuss Messi without discussing Argentina would be incomplete. To talk about his greatness without acknowledging the fans that consider this game a religion, their religion — the Pope is Argentine, so is God, El Diego, and then to cap it off, they also got the Messiah — would be unfair. The great ESPN writer Wright Thompson travelled to Rosario — Messi’s hometown — in 2014, in the lead up to the Brazil World Cup, hoping to learn something about the genius and the town that spawned him. He found nothing. 

The biggest sports bar in Rosario, near Messi’s neighbourhood, had posters of Rafael Nadal, Muhammad Ali, Maria Sharapova, but no Messi. There are documentaries about this. How the Argentines didn’t think of him as their own, the man who left a boy, taken by Barcelona, winning everything for them before failing in the albiceleste (“the white and blue sky”). Unargentine, they called him. 

Maybe that’s true. Messi isn’t Argentine. Isn’t just Argentine. He still speaks with a Rosarino accent, and always bought his meat from an Argentine butcher, eating in Argentine restaurants. "Barcelona is not his place in the world," the influential Spanish football writer Aitor Lagunas wrote once about him. "It's a kind of a laboural emigrant with an undisguised homesick feeling." In many ways, a man without a country. Because everyone wants him.

Go back to Instagram, that mosh pit of popular culture, the cesspool where darkness spawns but lotuses bloom too. Thousands of videos of fans in Kerala, in Kolkata, in Malaysia and South Korea celebrating Argentina’s victory — Messi’s World Cup victory. There is closure at last. The world, everyone, getting the ending they wanted. 

The Argentines most of all. Theirs is a unique fandom. Jorge Valdano, the striker part of the 1986 World Cup winning team, said it best when describing football’s importance in this fragile world. “Of the least important things in life,” he said, “football is the most important.”

His own countrymen will disagree. This country that has produced Messi, Maradona, Batistuta, Riquelme, Aimar, Kempes, and many more, is burdened by debt, inflation rising to 100 per cent as they endured one of the most brutal Covid-19 lockdowns in the world. Through it all they cared only about football, castigating, criticising, crying, abusing, cursing the failures of their team, their inability to win a trophy despite boasting the best player in the world*. They transferred all these emotions on him, the man who reached four finals in a row, losing all four, pushing him, burdening him so much that he finally decided he’d had enough, retiring from international football in 2016, a Copa America final loss against Chile, breaking him. That lasted a few months.

Now finally, they know how to play with him. They serenade him, celebrate him, and protect him. And he, older, wiser, now, saves himself too, not playing games, but instead playing moments within them. Statistics show he walks 3.5 miles every game, undoubtedly not because he wants to get his steps in. This is calculated, observatory, an elite player computing, processing, finding flaws and gaps no one else can. Think about that pass against the Netherlands, or that goal against Australia, his ability to turn the Croatian defence inside out, saving his energy for when it was needed. 

A tweet did the rounds during extra time last night. It said, quite funnily, that “true to the French labour market, le Bleus [the nickname for the French team] played fewer but more productive hours”. The tweet was predicated on France winning despite losing for a majority of the game. Qatar, no irony here, isn’t the ideal place to base labour theory on. 

It is the hope that kills you. Twice Argentina led, twice France came back. And then in the penalties, Messi did enough, just enough, to inspire confidence, keep the fatalism at bay. His coolly taken penalty sparked something in Emiliano Martinez, the goalkeeper who attended the previous World Cup as a fan, and is even now a fan of Messi. “This was for him,” he’d said after Argentina lifted the Copa America last year, his penalty saves in the semi-final coming after Messi had missed his. And again, yesterday it was him, the man at the back, who literally doesn’t wear the blue and white of Argentina, who won them the World Cup. Won Messi the World Cup.

This is how this story ends. Except it wasn’t a story, it was a storyline, every step about him. The man who has inspired a new category to describe brilliance — “apart from Messi”. Game over, football is complete.

* How do you measure the GOAT? What kind of flavours do you like in your goat soup? Goals? Assists? Leadership? Jaw-dropping moments? Longevity? Trophies? Two years back, this may have been a tough debate, Cristiano Ronaldo always close, competing. Now? Game over.

MESSIah’s field days

• From never having scored a goal in the knockout rounds of a World Cup (a dubious record Cristiano Ronaldo still holds), Messi has, in this edition, scored in the round of 16, quarterfinals, semifinals and the final — the first and only player to ever do so 
• Messi made his World Cup debut in 2006 against Serbia, and scored a goal in that game 
• His 26th game in the World Cup was his final, and he has now played the most games by an Argentine ever 
• Messi has now also scored the most goals by an Argentine in World Cups (13). His goal against Croatia in the semis saw him surpass Gabriel Batistuta’s 10-goal record