Lionel Messi with the Argentina team at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar
Updated: December 17, 2022 7:12 am IST
On November 22, when Argentina lost to Saudi Arabia and it looked as if Lionel Messi was never going to win a World Cup, I found myself pondering an old series of what-ifs.
What if Jose Pekerman had brought Messi on, instead of the tall and lumbering Julio Cruz, against Germany in Berlin in 2006? Messi was a few days past his nineteenth birthday; could he, like Pele in 1958, have declared his talents to the world on the biggest stage, and won a World Cup as a teenager? Messi stayed on the bench, and Argentina went out on penalties.
What if in 2010, with Messi at his physical peak, Argentina had gone to the World Cup with any coach other than Diego Maradona? Out of pure caprice, Maradona had left at home two essential players, Esteban Cambiasso and Javier Zanetti, who had just won the Champions League with Inter Milan and would have provided Argentina with structure and tactical nous. With Messi, but without any structure, Argentina were knocked out 4-0, again by Germany.
What if Gonzalo Higuain had converted his chances in the 2014 final (yet again, the opponent was Germany)? In 2006, even in 2010, Messi’s fans had no cause for real anxiety; he was young, and his time would come. 2014 was meant to be that time.
What if Diego Simeone, arguably the greatest coach Argentina has ever produced, had offered his services to his national team?
Argentine football has a long history of what-ifs and if-onlys. The world remembers the 1958 World Cup for Pele. Argentinians remember it differently. One year previously, Argentina had won the Copa America with devastatingly fluid football of a kind rarely seen before or since. They brushed Brazil aside, 3-0. That team was built around five brilliant attackers known collectively as the carasucias(“dirty faces”, in reference to the James Cagney film Angels with Dirty Faces).
That summer, three of the carasucias were signed by Italian clubs, and were duly excommunicated by the Argentine Football Association. You’d struggle to find a better illustration of “cutting off your nose to spite your face”. By 1962, all three were playing for Italy. Argentina crashed out of the 1958 World Cup at the group stage.
Many of the themes of Argentina’s football history, and Messi’s career, can be seen in this episode. Football administrators known for imperiousness and folly, rather than practical thinking; accusations of disloyalty; above all, money. The three stars of 1958 were tragic pioneers. Every half-decent Argentine player now moves abroad; to Europe, the USA, Mexico. A century ago, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, and attracted European economic migrants by the shipload. Since its first military coup, in 1930, Argentina has been a case study in how to wreck an economy and democracy.
Messi left Argentina at 13. His gifts were outrageous, but he needed daily injections of growth hormone to grow tall enough to make use of them. FC Barcelona, unlike clubs in Argentina, were willing and able to pay. By 2005, he was in Barca’s first team, and the star of the Argentina side that won that year’s U-20 World Cup. By 2010 or 2011 at the latest, Messi had indisputably entered the circle of the six or seven contenders for the title of greatest male footballer of all time. He has spent his career narratively chained to two of that circle. Forget an article, it is often difficult to find a single paragraph about Messi that does not contain the names Maradona or Ronaldo
Messi was the last in a line of “next Maradonas”, and the only one to live up to the tag. For football fans too young to have watched Maradona or his predecessors (other names commonly included in that magic circle are Pele;, di Stefano, Puskas and Cruyff), he is one half of a “GOAT debate” that requires everyone to pick a side: Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.
Maradona himself recognised Messi’s talent early. The similarities are only too obvious: size, low centre of gravity, otherworldly close control and vision, left-footedness. Yet until recently Messi has never been loved in Argentina to quite the same extent as Diego Armando Maradona. The heart of the difference was less Messi’s failure to win a World Cup than the old business of disloyalty. Messi had never played for an Argentinian club; he was based at one of the richest clubs in the world, a team that had literally been constructed to fit his needs. Maradona’s best years in Europe were spent at Napoli, a club of working-class outsiders whose culture was almost more Argentinian than western European (a common word for Italian Argentines is “tano”, from Neapolitan). For years, Messi – with his Argentine wife and pristine Argentine accent – was accused of being more Catalan than Argentine. Never mind that he could have played for Spain if he wanted to.
The Messi-Ronaldo debate is sadly representative of modern football culture. A generation ago, Socrates – the legendary Brazilian midfielder who was also a medical doctor and political columnist – said that the only two people who cared about this “GOAT” business were Pele and Maradona; football was a team sport. Now football fans, especially those outside Europe, are as likely to sport an individual as a team. They are as thin-skinned and defensive as fanatics in cinema or politics. Football to them is zero-sum; you have to choose a side.
Messi vs Ronaldo is, too often, framed as talent or artistry vs hard work. In truth, Ronaldo is as talented as anybody, and Messi is one of the most disciplined workers in any sport – in this regard, he is much more Ronaldo than Maradona. Part of the difference can be encapsulated by Messi’s assist against the Netherlands last week; there are many things Ronaldo can do that Messi cannot, but he could not have seen or played that pass.
The greatest difference may be physical. Messi is in the tradition of Maradona, and Puskas, and Garrincha, and Gerd Muller – footballers who looked like ordinary men until you gave them boots and a ball. Ronaldo, like the best players of the next generation – Mbappe and Haaland – is a pure athlete, a creature of speed and agility and power as physically removed from the rest of us as Michael Phelps or Michael Jordan. This is why aging has been so much more painful for Ronaldo than for Messi.
From an Indian perspective, Messi’s life and career seem most akin not to any other footballer but to Sachin Tendulkar’s. The beloved boy wonder who lasted long enough to become the beloved paterfamilias; baby-faced and diminutive, but freakishly coordinated and unexpectedly fast and strong; not just a sportsman but a brand, marketed to within an inch of his life; stepping on to the field, each time, with a team and a nation’s hopes on his back. We watched them grow up in public, and their lives were pure sport. In private, Tendulkar’s teammates sometimes remark that he had no interests beyond cricket; like Messi, he was never given the chance to develop any. Both have been called “humble”, which is misleading – they were always aware of their greatness. If anything, what they lack is not pride but insecurity.
It may be objected that Tendulkar bore the weight of a billion hopes, Messi merely 45 million. But I’m not sure that makes any emotional difference. Besides, football is if anything more significant to Argentina than cricket to India. Tendulkar lived through, and benefited from, India’s fastest-ever period of economic growth. In Messi’s life, Argentina has lurched from one traumatic crisis to another. Cricket no longer plays the same compensation-for-national-suffering role in India that it once may have, and many more Indians than is generally credited have no interest in cricket. Tendulkar, unlike Messi, more or less escaped the era of social media. Sunil Gavaskar did not exert remotely the same narrative pressure as Maradona. And he never had to deal with bogus charges of disloyalty.
Tendulkar never needed to win a World Cup to be loved. Neither, at this point, does Messi. No one accuses him any more of being insufficiently Argentine. The Argentines have eventually found that the question “Messi or Maradona?” does not require a debate; it has a single correct answer, “Both”.
Winning a World Cup will not end the Messi-Ronaldo debate, either. If Argentina win tomorrow night, the Ronaldo camp will discover a new suitcase full of excuses. What it will do is the same thing that the 2011 World Cup did for Sachin Tendulkar. In thinking about their career, no one will have to ask, “What if?”
Source: NDTV-Opinion