How Will the World Cup Shape Lionel Messis Legacy? – GQ

The first thing you notice about Lionel Messi, quite possibly the greatest soccer player of all time, is that he looks basically like a normal guy. In the post-Beckham era of the Uncannily Handsome Footballer, when it feels like every great player is ridiculously good-looking, Messi is conspicuously nonconforming, standing a diminutive 5'6", squat and thick-necked and illogically pale, sporting a scruffy beard that only goes so far toward obscuring the distinct unchisel of his jawline and a hair-style that can only be described as Supercuts. The second thing you notice about Messi is that his name sounds an awful lot like messiah. The third thing you notice is that he plays like God. Which is why it was so jarring, last week, when he announced that this World Cup, his fifth, will be his last. Fans around the world turned their thoughts to life after Messi, and the position hell one day take among the games saints.

When thinking about Messis legacy, its worth remembering his origins. The son of a steelworker from Rosario, he was discovered as a prodigious 13 year old by Barcelonas scouts, who persuaded his father to sign a contract on a napkin and whisked his still-tiny son off to the clubs famed academy. Lionel struggled with a growth-hormone deficiency, but with a combination of the clubs medical care, tactical education, and his own preternatural skillset, he soon bloomed into the kind of phenomenon that even a club as fabled as Barcelona had never seen. After he made his senior debut, aged 17, the club proceeded to win 10 Spanish league titles and four Champions League trophies. Messi scored a club record 474 goals, many of them casually sublime. Indeed, deep into what shouldve been the autumn of his career, he was still scoring outrageous goals at an outrageous rate. It seemed like he might go on forever.

And then, suddenly, it was over. The club, reckless in its spending, teetered toward insolvency, and had to sell its favorite son in August 2021. With tears at his farewell press conference, Messi was offloaded to Paris Saint-Germain, the superclub bankrolled by the Qatari royal familya place where insolvency will never be a concern, and where, for perhaps the first time in his adult life, Messi foundered at the club level. In his first season playing in Paris alongside fellow megastars Kylian Mbappe and Neymar, he showed flashes of genius, but by his celestial standards it was a barren year. The joy that made him appear a demigod was gone, leaving Lionel to seem merely mortal.

Was his story winding down? It was not. With the World Cup around the corner, he now looks like a player reborn, scoring delightful free kicks, leading Paris Saint-Germain in assists, and looking rejuvenated for Argentina as well. He seems like his old self, which is to say: perhaps the greatest ever.

Like all great sporting argumentsJordan or LeBron, Federer or Nadalfootballs GOAT debate will reign eternal. Plausible arguments can be made for Pele, Maradona, Messi, or Ronaldo. So whether you consider Messi to be the best footballer of all time is a matter of personal preferencebut that he is the most famous player of all time is an indisputable fact. If you have never seen even a single minute of footballeven if you couldnt pick Messi out of a lineup of three men, all of whom were himyou know his name. You have heard it tossed about gleefully, chanted solemnly as incantation, cried out in religious ecstasy. It means Barcelona, it means Argentina, it means the World Cup, it means football in the modern era. Because to witness Messi is to witness a kind of dream, surreal and grand and moving, which is what modern football at its best has proven itself capable of producing.

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How Will the World Cup Shape Lionel Messis Legacy? - GQ