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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 he’ll one day take among the game’s saints.
When thinking about Messi’s legacy, it’s worth remembering his origins. The son of a steelworker from Rosario, he was discovered as a prodigious 13 year old by Barcelona’s scouts, who persuaded his father to sign a contract on a napkin and whisked his still-tiny son off to the club’s famed academy. Lionel struggled with a growth-hormone deficiency, but with a combination of the club’s 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 should’ve 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 family—a 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 arguments—Jordan or LeBron, Federer or Nadal—football’s 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 preference—but that he is the most famous player of all time is an indisputable fact. If you have never seen even a single minute of football—even if you couldn’t pick Messi out of a lineup of three men, all of whom were him—you 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.
There are no real words to describe the experience of watching Messi, which is why his name itself has become a kind of shorthand for it. He makes football look like an individual sport. Not to say that he is selfish, which he is not, nor that he is solely responsible for his teams’ successes, which—despite what it may look like at times—he is also not. It’s simply that when Messi is on the ball, everything else fades into the background. With other players, you talk about ball control, but Messi is beyond control. He never appears to be moving the ball so much as moving with it, the two of them—Messi and ball—performing an intricate, magnetic pas de deux, slaloming hypnotically around everything in their path. It is a primarily physical experience, watching Messi: You feel it rustling in the pit of your navel, swelling up in your chest, prickling the back of your neck.
In Qatar, Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are set to become only the fourth and fifth players to ever appear in five World Cups, alongside Germany’s Lothar Matthäus, Italy’s Gianluigi Buffon, and Mexico’s Antonio Carbajal and Rafael Márquez. And with all due respect, Messi feels like the only one from that group who’s entering his fifth tournament as the force driving his team, and a player capable of guiding them, at last, to victory. And if he does? How would that reshape his position in the pantheon of greatness? Messi is most often compared with that other diminutive left-footed Argentine genius, Maradona, and by almost every metric, for both club and country, he’s surpassed his predecessor. Except at the World Cup, where the burdens of the Argentina shirt appear to have weighed him down. Losing finalist in 2014 has been the closest he has come to glory. Now is his final chance to change that, and place the cornerstone in the cathedral that is his career.
We tend to ascribe our greatest athletes with a sense of unnaturalness—we call their abilities freakish, accuse them of being from another planet. That they are often abnormally attractive reinforces this sense, and we reminisce about their feats in terms of how impossible they felt. With Messi, the opposite is true. What he does feels startlingly natural—truthful, even. I once interviewed the Uruguayan poet and football eminence Eduardo Galeano, who summed it up best, telling me, “Diego Maradona played as if the ball was glued to his shoe but Lionel Messi played as if that ball was stuck inside his sock.” Like he is playing football—real, honest to god, Plato’s Cave football—and everything else is just shadows. He is the materializer of our dreams.
Roger Bennett is the cofounder of Men in Blazers and the coauthor of Gods of Soccer, from which this essay is adapted.