At Long Last, We Can Call Messi A World Cup Winner

A 13-year-old Lionel Messi once gave a Q&A interview while he was still playing for the youth teams at Newell's Old Boys.

- Mark Critchley

Speaking to Diario La Capital, a local newspaper in Rosario, he revealed that if he could eat any meal, it would be pollo con salsa (chicken). If he could date any model, it would be Argentine television personality Nicole Neumann. If he could watch any film, it would be 1994 adventure comedy Baby's Day Out. And if he could do any job, he would be a PE teacher.

Earlier this week, a grainy scanned copy of that interview went semi-viral across social media. You might have seen it, in fact. The story was picked up by several news websites and content platforms. It was one of the most "upvoted" posts on the r/soccer subreddit, no less. It was shared and reshared, ripped and aggregated, recycled and regurgitated until we had all had our fill of it, in the way that every new and previously undetected morsel about Messi is.

Except this was not the first time the interview had done the rounds. It hadn't been lying in someone's attic for the past 22 years, only to be uncovered a few days before the most consequential night of Messi's long career. That would be quite the coincidence, when you come to think of it. It had in fact first come to light three years ago, when it was shared and reshared, ripped and aggregated, recycled and regurgitated until we had all had our fill of it then too.

That is the challenge that Messi has posed to this profession since first declaring his genius: what else is there to say that has not already been said? Once you have called him the best to ever do it, where exactly do you go from there? This was Messi's 26th World Cup appearance, an all-time record. The press boxes at these tournaments hold hundreds of written journalists, all filing hundreds of words. Multiply that by 26 and that's several million words in total. And that's just the World Cups, and just us who didn't pay to get in.