🔍 Lionel Messi's Lasting Greatness

After all those months – maybe years – of anticipation, the moment the world has been waiting for is finally here. It has all been building to this: in less than 24 hours, Rog, James Horncastle and I will all be on stage together in New York. Also, apparently there’s a World Cup draw of some sort. 

It feels a bit of a shame-faced confession, but I do love a draw. The best ones are simple: a clear plastic bowl, an even number of balls, two former players clearly dreading having to work out which one is six and which one is nine, all leading to the eternal question: Will Manchester City play RB Leipzig in the last 16 or the quarterfinals this time around? 

What takes place in the Kennedy Center on Friday will, obviously, be more complicated than that. FIFA is not in the business of making things quick and easy. Even so, that sense of possibility, that thrill of seeing a competition that for so long has just been a nebulous concept take on an actual physical shape, is strong enough to endure how inordinately bloated these things have become.

It’s faintly mind-blowing to think we’ll be on stage while it happens, and even more mind-blowing that people have voluntarily agreed to come and watch it with us in the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center. If you can’t be there, it’ll all be streamed live on Men in Blazers’ YouTube channel. It’ll be quite a moment. Come and join us.

Maybe, really, it’s a failure of imagination on my part. To me, there’s a limit to what you can possibly do with a World Cup draw.

You need a couple of hours, a selection of perfectly-coiffed hosts, a glossy stage, a few dozen balls and somewhere between eight and a dozen former players to pick them out of transparent vessels. Boiled down to its essence, after all, it is live administration, the closest equivalent that football has to a meeting that could have been an email.  

FIFA, though, is infinitely more creative. We’re 24 hours out from the draw, and it is genuinely almost impossible to predict quite what shape it will take. We know who will be involved: a stellar cast, led by Heidi Klum and Kevin Hart; musical interludes from Robbie Williams, Nicole Scherzinger and the Village People; the heads of state of the U.S., Mexico and Canada; a collection of American (and Canadian) sporting greats, ranging from Wayne Gretzky to at least one of the Mannings.

How all of those factors will be combined, though, is anyone’s guess. It feels a little like the sort of challenge you would find on “Iron Chef” (or, for British readers, its rather lower-budget equivalent, “Ready Steady Cook”). Here are the basic ingredients, now let’s see precisely what Gianni Infantino can cook up with them.

It feels instructive, for example, that FIFA announced as late as Monday this week – four days before everyone is due on stage – that there will be a second show, held on Saturday, in which the tournament’s schedule will be revealed. (FIFA is, admittedly, not desperately creative with their nomenclature: the additional event has been labelled the “Schedule Reveal.”)

Whether this is strictly necessary or not is a matter of taste – the locations of the games have, in theory, been set for some time; other than kick-off times, it’s not entirely clear at this remove what is going to be revealed – but then the issue of what is necessary does not appear to detain anyone at FIFA for long. 

Their abiding principle, instead, appears to be what is possible. When Infantino was elected president, his brief was to modernize an organization so stagnant that it had rotted from the inside.

He has, at least in one sense, delivered on that mandate. FIFA now operates like anyone else in the 21st century content industry: more is always better. Why have 32 teams at the World Cup? Because it works? Don’t be ridiculous. We should have 48. Why shouldn’t we expand the Club World Cup? Because the calendar is already packed and everyone is exhausted? Nonsense: let’s just do it. 

And, by that measure, why not take the setting of the match schedule for the World Cup – boring, bureaucratic, logistical – and use it as a chance for Infantino, the first Instagram FIFA president, to cosplay as a YouTuber, too? Nobody gets anywhere these days by leaving a cash cow unmilked.

Being cynical about almost everything FIFA does is, of course, the default response for most of us. It tends to be the correct one, too, more often than not. It is hard not to see the pomposity as hubristic, to feel as though the dignity of the World Cup is somehow diminished by the gaudy self-promotion of those who are supposed to cherish and protect it.

That is the case with the draw, an event now wildly out of line with both what it needs to be and what it always used to be, but far more pernicious is its impact on the tournament itself. The expansion to 48 teams is designed to generate more games, more content, more money. It is the ultimate triumph of quantity over quality.

That is a fairly standard argument for someone of my age and my nationality and my biases to extend, and FIFA has long had a response ready: the World Cup has always grown to reflect the changing world in which it exists; shifting to 48 teams is no different to the move to 32 (in 1998) or 24 (in 1982). 

This has, annoyingly, always been quite hard to dispute; after the culmination to the qualifying process, it became almost impossible.

Technically, many of those countries who will feel the greatest swelling of pride at seeing their names included in Friday’s draw – Jordan, Cape Verde, Scotland, Curaçao – are not direct beneficiaries of the expansion. They all qualified automatically. They did not need playoffs or repechages.

But that is not the same as saying it did not influence them. The groups they won were all altered by the changes to qualification demanded by the tournament’s growth; they all had a far greater sense of possibility than they would have done otherwise. It would feel intensely churlish now to point at any of them and declare that they are evidence of the tournament’s shortcomings, rather than its wonder. They will all enrich the competition next summer, not detract from it.

And that, in a way, is the most conclusive proof of the power of the World Cup. The tournament, like the draw, will probably feel like a monument to excess. There will be dozens and dozens of games to eliminate only a handful of teams. Many of them will not match the quality of a fairly average Premier League game. (Though there will, blissfully, be fewer long throws.)

But none of that will matter, because the World Cup is potent enough, special enough, magical enough to withstand whatever FIFA throws at it. No matter how many games there are, no matter how gaudy the setting or how overblown the staging, nothing quite tarnishes the gleam of that perfect golden trophy. It will captivate us, it will compel us, it will capture our imaginations, because we know that however it is presented, however it is sold, its meaning never changes.

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We have, it would seem, finally found something that is beyond Lionel Messi. Moving to Inter Miami in the aftermath of the 2022 World Cup was supposed to represent Messi starting to wind down. He had fulfilled all of his dreams. He had done all he could do. The greatest player of all time was stepping into the twilight. 

Joining Major League Soccer seemed to be Messi accepting the bounds of his own mortality, acquiescing to the fact that time comes for us all. He could, in the United States, take it just a little easier, trading intensity for longevity, cocooning himself so that he might grace just one more World Cup. 

At this juncture, even Messi would have to admit that he has failed miserably in this. He has just produced probably the greatest individual season MLS has ever seen. A cadre of battle-hardened comrades – Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets, Luis Suárez – at his shoulder, he has swept Inter Miami to within 90 minutes of a maiden MLS championship.

Messi, it would seem, is terrible at taking it easy.

Obviously, MLS would not have it any other way. His presence alone transforms Saturday’s MLS Cup final, between Inter Miami and the Vancouver Whitecaps, into an event of genuine global significance (at least in a football sense). The prospect of his joy, or his dejection, gives the game precisely the sort of cut-through every league craves. 

The mere act of Messi signing for Inter Miami turned the club into the most famous member of MLS by some distance. Those pink shirts, invariably emblazoned with his name, are now ubiquitous. That alone is testament to his remarkable star power, to the affection and admiration he inspires. It is just about possible that his coronation, or his heartbreak, have a similar effect on the competition as a whole.

Rog and Rory break down the 1-1 draw between Arsenal and Chelsea, Liverpool finally getting back to their winning ways, and Man City’s late win over newly promoted Leeds United. They also discuss if this season’s unpredictable results week after week are because of league parity or something else entirely. Watch now on YouTube or listen here.

Away from Messi’s moment of truth, there are two games that stand out this weekend. One is fairly obvious: on Sunday, Napoli hosts Juventus at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona (2:45 p.m. ET, Paramount+).

It is never anything less than a fraught occasion – Neapolitans generally regard Juventus as a sort of embodiment of the snobbery and scorn northern Italy reserves for the country’s south – but this one is even more piquant: Luciano Spalletti, the freshly minted Juventus coach, is the man who led Napoli to its long-awaited third Serie A title a couple of years ago. Expect whistling.

The other is more of a deep cut. This weekend’s Greek Super League brings the Thessaloniki derby, between PAOK (recently the city’s more successful team) and Aris. If I am completely honest, I suspect there is no legal way of watching it outside Greece. If there is, though, I’d recommend it: the atmosphere will make Napoli look like a crèche.

The recommendations for Boston have been pouring in for about three weeks now, in sufficient volume that Rog, James and I have enough to ensure we will all be quite sleepy by the time we make it to the stage at the Roadrunner on Saturday night. I’ll report back next week. 

In the meantime, Gil Rutledge has had a vision of the future. “Perhaps it is being a prisoner of the moment, but I can't help but wonder whether Arsenal-Chelsea might be a preview of the pre-eminent clash for the remainder of the decade. Both seem built for the future, both embraced youth, and both have invested in massive squads. Given time, these may prove to be the behemoths who will battle it out for the rest of the 2020s. What do you think?”

Well, I would have been much more inclined to agree with you if I’d replied immediately after the game itself, which seemed to me like a coming-of-age moment for a squad and a project, rather than in the aftermath of Chelsea’s defeat at Leeds. Chelsea does not appear to be ready to go toe-to-toe with Arsenal just yet.

But while I am wary of being too reactive in my responses, I do think there are two more long-term caveats to what is basically quite a good thesis. 

One: I’m still minded to think that there will come a point where Chelsea have to stick, rather than twist, and allow a squad to grow together rather than continue the club’s policy of permanent revolution.

And two: We do not know – and cannot know – whether Arsenal will fall victim to what (to my mind) is a fairly clear pattern over the last 15 years of the Premier League.

Only Pep Guardiola has been able to retain the title since 2010, with his era-defining Manchester City teams. Everybody else has not only fallen short, but fallen some way short, as though the emotional toll of winning the title has to be paid the following season. Assuming Mikel Arteta goes on to win the league this year, my instinct would be that he has the depth and the versatility to go again, as they say. But I would have said the same about José Mourinho’s (or Antonio Conte’s) Chelsea, and about Jürgen Klopp’s and Arne Slot’s Liverpool, and I would have been very wrong on both occasions.

That’s all for this week! If you can join us for the draw on Friday, either in person or remotely, I hope you have a great time; if you’re coming to the show in Boston, please come and say hello afterwards. If not, enjoy the draw, enjoy the weekend, email me anytime and I’ll see you next week.

Take care,
Rory

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