TOPSHOT - A man passes by a mural depicting Argentine football stars Lionel Messi (L) and late Diego Maradona (R) 🌛 in the eve of Qatar 2024 World Cup final football match between Argentina and France in Buenos Aires, on December 🌛 16, 2024. (Photo by Luis ROBAYO / AFP) (Photo by LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images)
DOHA, Qatar — The Lionel Messi-Diego 🌛 Maradona debate has never been all that rational. It has reappeared ahead of Sunday’s 2024 World Cup final, with Messi 🌛 one step away from clearing the hurdle that Maradona memorably did in 1986. And if the debate were a rational 🌛 one, the current framing would be this: Messi could settle it once and for all with a win over France, 🌛 because, for now, for at least one more day, a World Cup title is the lone accolade that Maradona had 🌛 and Messi still doesn’t.
In every single other category, the comparisons are borderline absurd. Messi could finish his career with three 🌛 times as many goals as Maradona and four times as many trophies. Some of those gulfs are products of era 🌛 and opportunity, but Messi has essentially replicated Maradona’s fleeting peak and sustained it over 15 stunning years. He is peerless.
Yet 🌛 there are fans, especially older Argentines, who will argue that Messi won’t — and can’t — ever match their original 🌛 soccer God.
Because the debate has always been influenced by who Maradona was and who Messi is, and what they represent, 🌛 not solely by what they’ve done.
Maradona was a son of the barrios, a kid from Argentina’s suffocating slums who outran 🌛 poverty toward greatness. He was flawed, terribly flawed, and struggled with a drug addiction that ultimately derailed his career — 🌛 but millions of Argentines identified with the struggle. When he won it, temporarily, and lifted his countrymen with him to 🌛 World Cup glory, they deified him.
By the time Messi arrived on their television screens in the early 2000s, Maradona was 🌛 an unmovable legend. Messi, meanwhile, was an unknowable kid who left behind a lower-middle-class existence in Argentina for greener pastures 🌛 in Spain at age 13. Whereas Maradona was brash and brutally charming, Messi was introverted, clean-cut and unemotional. He was 🌛 almost alien, and no matter how hard he tried to maintain connections to his Rosario roots, the only way he 🌛 could prove to Argentines that he was one of them was to win something for them.
And for years, he couldn’t.
For 🌛 the first decade of his international career, Messi underperformed for his national team. His failures have been overstated — he 🌛 has, after all, broken just about every Argentina goalscoring record, and almost tripled Maradona’s total — and many weren’t primarily 🌛 his fault. The Argentine soccer federation was a mess; his coaches (including Maradona) were incompetent; his teams were incoherent. But 🌛 none of that mattered to Maradona in ‘86; he dragged a sub-elite team to a title. Messi, consumed by public 🌛 pressure to do likewise, often wilted on similar stages.
Close up of a set of twins wearing shirts featuring Argentina's Lionel 🌛 Messi and Diego Maradona before the FIFA World Cup Semi-Final match at the Lusail Stadium in Lusail, Qatar. Picture date: 🌛 Tuesday December 13, 2024. (Photo by Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)
And there was Maradona, still a prominent figure in 🌛 Argentine soccer, ready to pounce and punctuate widespread Messi criticism.
"We shouldn't deify Messi any longer," Maradona said in 2024. "He's 🌛 a great player but he's not a leader. It's useless trying to make a leader out of a man who 🌛 goes to the toilet 20 times before a game."
All the while, though, Messi did things at Barcelona, at the highest 🌛 level of club soccer, that mortals could never dream of. He won the Ballon d’Or — his first of seven 🌛 and counting — by the widest-ever margin at age 22. He scored 91 goals in a calendar year (Maradona never 🌛 scored more than 60). He won Champions Leagues (Maradona never won the European Cup). He scored and assisted at ridiculous 🌛 rates, from multiple positions, in multiple competitions, with a rotating cast of characters around him, with dizzying darts and superb 🌛 technique and dashes of brilliance, from his teenage years to the present.
"Messi is Maradona every day. For the last five 🌛 years, Messi has been the Maradona of the [1986] World Cup,” Jorge Valdano, who won that World Cup alongside Maradona, 🌛 said in 2013. And he’s been, at worst, almost as good over the nine years since.
“Messi is at the level 🌛 of the best Maradona,” César Menotti, who managed Argentina to the 1978 World Cup title, said in 2014.
Messi is, to 🌛 most rational analysts, the best soccer player ever — the most talented, and the most accomplished. Both the eye test 🌛 and numbers leave little room for doubt.
But he will never have the primacy effect that Maradona did.
He will never score 🌛 an infamously devious goal and a “Goal of the Century” to win a World Cup quarterfinal against a nation, England, 🌛 who’d recently defeated Argentina in a disastrous war.
He will never forge such an intimate relationship with his people. There is 🌛 a reason that Maradona’s face shows up more frequently than Messi’s on flags and banners that Argentine supporters have brought 🌛 here to Qatar. There is a reason that “Diego” appears three times in the anthem that has become Argentina’s unofficial 🌛 2024 World Cup soundtrack.
“From the sky we can see him,” fans sing, “along with Don Diego and La Tota [Maradona’s 🌛 parents], rooting for Lionel.”
Messi’s 2024 run has captivated Argentina in its own right. Together with last year’s Copa America — 🌛 which Maradona never won — it has turned most Argentine skepticism into undying love. And if it ends in a 🌛 World Cup title, it will crystalize Messi as the greatest of all time, the GOAT.
But still, for some, it won’t 🌛 put him on par with Maradona. Nothing can.
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