This is the problem of the Messi vs. Maradona for the Argentine fans
DOHA, Qatar — The Lionel Messi-Diego Maradona debate has never been so rational. has reappeared before Final of the World Cup Russia 2022 on Sundaywith Messi one step away of overcoming the hurdle that Maradona memorably did in 1986. And if the debate were rational, the current framework would be this: Messi could settle it once and for all with a win over France, because, for now, at least one more day, a World Cup title is the only award that Maradona had and Messi has not yet.
In all other categories, the comparisons border on the absurd. Messi could end his career with three times as many goals as Maradona and four times as many trophies. Some of those chasms are a product of age and opportunity, but Messi has essentially replicated Maradona’s fleeting peak and sustained it for an impressive 15 years. He is incomparable.
However, there are fans, especially older Argentines, who will argue that Messi will never be able to match his original God of soccer.
Because the debate has always been influenced by who Maradona was and who is messiand what they stand for, not just for what they have done.
Maradona was the son of neighborhoods, a boy from the stifling slums of Argentina who rose from poverty to greatness. He had flaws, terrible flaws, and he battled a drug addiction that ultimately derailed his career, but millions of Argentines identified with the fight. When he won it, temporarily, and lifted his compatriots with him to World Cup glory, they deified him.
When Messi hit your television screens in the early 2000s, Maradona was an unshakable legend. Meanwhile, Messi was an unknown child who left behind a lower-middle-class existence in Argentina for greener pastures in Spain at age 13. While Maradona was brash and brutally charming, Messi was introverted, clean and emotionless. He was almost a stranger, and as much as he tried to maintain his connection to his Rosario roots, the only way he could show the Argentines that he was one of them it was to win something for them.
And for years he couldn’t.
During the first decade of his international career, Messi underperformed his national team. His failures have been exaggerated (after all, he has broken almost all of Argentina’s goalscoring records and has nearly tripled Maradona’s total) and many were not primarily his fault. The Argentine soccer federation was a disaster; his coaches (including Maradona) were incompetent; his teams were inconsistent. 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 the same, often withered in similar scenarios..
And there was Maradona, still a prominent figure in Argentine soccer, ready to attack and add to the widespread criticism of Messi.
“We must not deify Messi anymore” Maradona said in 2018. “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 bathroom 20 times before a game.”
In the meantime, however, Messi did things at Barcelona, at the highest level of club football, that mortals could never dream of. He won the Ballon d’Or, his first of seven and counting, by the widest margin in history at age 22. He scored 91 goals in a calendar year (Maradona never scored more than 60). He won the Champions League (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 breakneck darts and superb technique and touches of brilliance, from his teens to the present.
“Messi is Maradona every day. During the last five years, Messi has been the Maradona of the [1986] World Cup”, Jorge Valdano, who won that World Cup together with Maradona, said in 2013. And it’s been, at worst, almost as good over the nine years since.
“Messi is at the level of the best Maradona”, César Menotti, who led Argentina to the 1978 World Cup title, said in 2014.
Messi is, for most rational analysts, the best soccer player of all time: the most talented and the most successful. Both the vision test and the numbers leave little room for doubt.
But it will never have the primacy effect that Maradona had.
He will never score an infamously devious goal. Y a “goal of the century” to win the World Cup quarter-final against a nation, England, which had recently defeated Argentina in a disastrous war.
He will never forge such an intimate relationship with his people. There is a reason why Maradona’s face appears more often than Messi’s on the flags and banners that Argentine fans have brought here to Qatar. For something “Diego” appears three times in the anthem that has become the unofficial soundtrack of the 2022 World Cup in Argentina.
“From the sky we can see him,” the fans sing, “along with Don Diego and La Tota [Maradona’s parents]supporting Lionel.”
Messi’s streak in 2022 has captivated Argentina in its own right. Along with last year’s Copa América, which Maradona never won, he has turned most of the Argentine skepticism into eternal love. And if he ends up in a World Cup title, it will crystallize Messi as the greatest of all time, the GOAT.
But still, for some, it won’t put him on a par with Maradona. Nothing can.