Summary
Lionel Messi will lead Argentina into the final of the World Cup, which will be the last major tournament in which he will compete. During the course of the greatest career in the history of football, Messi has never been able to win a major prize.
It’s hard to put any faith in the arc since it seems so well plotted out. The pursuit of excellence in athletics is almost never less painful than it is rewarding. On the other hand, Messi is the player who has given us more examples of immaculate play than any other. Could it be that everything has been leading up to this moment all along?
Those of you with sharp eyes will have picked up on the phrase “greatest ever,” which was used before. But what about the championship match to end all championship matches, Messi’s appointment with fate?
It would undoubtedly be the most perfect crescendo conceivable, delighting both completists and romantics in equal measure. Yeah, that word again. When one considers all that Messi has done during his career, though, it is clear that he deserves to be at the top of the heap.
It should come as no surprise that nobody in these arguments can be considered completely impartial, nor should they try to be. We all have preconceived notions about specific players based on what we’ve seen them accomplish, how they made us feel, and what they’ve grown to signify and represent in the context of the game and beyond.
The greatness of Messi, which has been displayed so artistically in Qatar, feels like something that should highlight rather than diminish the achievements of all three of these other players, who are often mentioned in the same breath as Messi in discussions about who is the greatest player of all time. This debate can go on forever.
Do you think Lionel Messi is a better player than Pele?
This comparison is the most difficult to establish out of the three for a few different reasons. If you believe that the discussion between Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo is unreasonably polarised (more on that below), then you will have a very difficult time locating a Brazilian who chooses Messi or an Argentine who chooses Pele as their favourite player. Good luck!
The passage of time is the most significant barrier to overcome in international football, even more so than the tribalism that underpins the sport’s most intense rivalry. Pele’s glorious farewell to the biggest stage occurred more than half a century ago, as Brazil’s dazzling canary yellow shirts were beamed around the world in over-saturated technicolour, burning indelible images of their seminal victory at Mexico 1970 in the worldwide imagination. Pele’s final game was played on the biggest stage as Brazil won the World Cup.
That first World Cup shown in colour was the latest step forward in football’s fledgling televisual age, and Pele was around for most of those big moments, from his breakthrough as an instant teenage superstar at the 1958 tournament, through injury heartache in victory and defeat in 1962, and 1966, respectively, to the redemption of full realisation of Jogo Bonito at the Azteca Stadium in 1970. Pele was around for most of those big moments.
It is difficult to comprehend how fleeting the superstars of Pele’s generation were. They were like magical aliens that were beamed into television sets every four years before vanishing into the margins of newspaper and magazine column inches, where their legends grew through towering deeds and tall tales. It is difficult to comprehend how fleeting the superstars of Pele’s generation were.
In contrast, Messi’s every move have been documented by hundreds of cameras whenever he takes the field since since he emerged practically fully formed at Barcelona, when he took part in a first victorious Champions League campaign in 2005/06. Even while some of the analysis of his exploits in Qatar has veered dangerously close to hagiography, it is astounding how his highlight reel moments continue to inspire such astonishment and surprise in each game. Shouldn’t all of us at this point have become used to his interplanetary carry-on?
One thing that Messi at Qatar 2022 and Pele at Mexico 1970 have in common is that the most important contributions they made were not the goals that they scored. Messi put in his best performance of the group stage in the game where he failed to score and missed a penalty, or outshining all five of his goals by attaching an invisible dog lead to Josko Gvardiol and setting up Julian Alvarez in the semifinal. Pele’s audacious shot from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia, his no-touch dummy to beat the goalkeeper against Uruguay, and the feather-duster pass for Carlos Alberto’s victory-
It is churlish to reduce Messi and Pele to simple statistics, regardless matter how spectacular those figures may be, as all of these cases have shown. Messi is closer on most other parameters and better off on many of them compared to Brazil, but Brazil supporters will especially relish the score of 3-0 in terms of World Cups. El Tri has won four Champions Leagues, two Copa Libertadores, and 11 domestic league championships, which is more than Pele’s total of seven domestic league titles.
Messi’s 758th career goal surpassed Pele’s 757 in official matches in December of 2021, despite the fact that Pele is famously known to have reached a career haul of 1,000 goals while playing for Santos before retiring at the New York Cosmos with 1,281 in all matches including friendlies and exhibitions. Messi’s 758th goal was scored in official matches.