Humour us as we stick our neck out like this: Lionel Messi is Quite Good at Football™. At the peak of his powers, in 2012, he scored 91 goals for Barcelona in a calendar year. That isn’t a typo, but was sandwiched in between two World Cups when he looked an entirely different player… and not in a good way.
In 2010, Argentina sailed comfortably through the groups under the management of Diego Maradona, before being humiliated 4-0 by Germany in the quarter-finals, exiting without their star man scoring a single goal.
In 2014, while they did reach the final in Brazil before losing to Germany again, they mustered a single knockout goal in normal time – Messi’s only strikes came in the group phase against Bosnia, Iran and Nigeria. The less said about 2018, the better.
You’d have been forgiven for thinking the World Cup was destined to forever be the one accolade that would evade Messi. But in 2022, in the midst of his final season at Paris Saint-Germain during the “winding down” of his career… it finally happened.
So how, in one of football’s most universal conundrums, did we see the best version of Argentina, so long after we saw the best version of its best player?
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