CF: Lionel Messi
‘The next [insert player name here]’ is a poisoned epithet for the overwhelming majority of players. 99 times out of 100, the standard set by their esteemed forebear is impossible to live up to – and never more so than when the sentence is completed by ‘Diego Maradona’.
Inevitably, that’s precisely what the talented young Argentine making his way through La Masia got throughout his time there. There can be no greater accolade for Lionel Messi than to say he not only lived up to that billing, but surpassed it.
In an age in which image often seems more important than the football itself, the unassuming Messi has become the biggest name in world sport purely by virtue of what he does on the pitch.
If Maradona had been a tortured genius, Messi is quite simply genius. The list of world records attributed to him cannot even fit on a single screen, but includes the most ever Ballons d’Or (eight), including the most in a row (four) and the longest gap between his first and last such gongs (14 years, from 2009 to 2023).
At his 2012 peak, Messi registered 91 competitive goals for Barcelona and Argentina in a single calendar year, the most ever reliably recorded at an elite level. He is the fastest player ever to reach 300 goals and 400 goals in Europe’s top five leagues.
Messi is the only man to be named the best player at two separate World Cups, the most recent of which saw him end Argentina’s 36-year wait to lift the trophy and become the first player to score in every round of a five-round World Cup. Those heroics contributed to his 35 goals in cup finals, with 15 assists to boot. To be called ‘the next Messi’ is now the ultimate albatross for young players to wear, because there will only ever be one.
Steven Chicken
