Lionel Messi: the best of all time?

 

YES- Alex Finnis

There is no doubt that Lionel Messi is the best footballer on the planet right now. He has 35 goals in just 28 games in La Liga so far this season, he has won the Ballon d’Or for the past three years in a row, and aged just 24, he is already Barcelona’s all-time leading goal-scorer.

He is quite frequently, simply unplayable. Arsenal fans in particular will remember the way he tore them apart in the 2010-11 Champions League Quarter-Final, scoring four, including a stunning first-half hat-trick.

He went one better this season, scoring five against Bayer Leverkusen in the round of 16, which left his coach Pep Guardiola in no doubt as to who the best player of all time is: “He’s the best [ever], there is no other like him,” Guardiola said.

“The numbers speak for themselves. One day he’ll score six. We’ll never see a player like him again.”

“We witnessed one of Messi’s special nights tonight, it’s a gift and I will always be able to say that I coached him.

“The only credit I can take is that I always put him in the team and we just try to make sure he gets the ball. After that our task is done.

“The throne belongs to him and only he will decide when he wants to relinquish it.”

Strong words from a man who, despite being very close to Messi, knows his football well enough, and has played with enough exceptional players, not to make comments such as this lightly.

The truth is, when speaking about Messi, it is difficult not to gush. It is not even “the numbers”, as Guardiola says, but the sheer magic with which he plays football, the way he so often casts a game under his spell in the way we have not seen this since the likes of Pele and Maradona graced our pitches.

These two players are widely considered as Messi’s closest competitors for the title of ‘best footballer of all time’, as whilst Pele, in my opinion, is the greatest, it is Messi who is the best.

It is important to make the distinction between the two. ‘Greatest’ carries with it a need for a near legendary status, a need for achievements such as the World Cup triumph which Messi lacks thus far, whereas ‘best’ simply means who can kick a ball around a park better than anybody else.

Lionel Messi is that man. Consider that in his youth he was considered too small to even make it as a professional at all before Barcelona took him under their wing and the way he is setting the world alight with his brilliance week-in, week-out is all the more impressive.

Admittedly, Messi is helped in this argument by the development as football as a sport. The game is now far more skills based – the trickery that Messi so often makes use of simply did not exist in Pele’s time, but he carries it out with such perfection that it is impossible to imagine anyone ever being able to have done it better.

In short, whilst Messi is not yet the greatest footballer of all time, at 24 years of age, he is already the best. He has another decade ahead of him, and his best years are arguably yet to come – by the end of his career, trust me, this will not even be a debate.

 

NO- Jack Bradshaw

It would be daft to argue against the fact Lionel Messi is the world’s best player right now. Currently aged 24, he has already achieved so much, arguably has his best years ahead of him and may one day be endorsed as the greatest ever footballer. But to give him that label right now would be a highly premature judgement.

This is because Messi is yet to perform on football’s greatest stage, the World Cup. In the 2010 tournament, Messi was an immense disappointment to millions of fans around the world. Despite supplying a few assists, he failed to score in any of Argentina’s five matches as they crashed out in a 4-0 quarter-final humiliation to Germany. Sebastian Schweinsteiger had Messi in his pocket all game and it just summed up how the Argentine has been unable to replicate his club performances at international level.

Basically, until Messi leads Argentina to World Cup glory he cannot be considered in the same league as legends Diego Maradona and Pele. At the moment, Messi is most comparable to compatriot Alfredo di Stefano. Stefano won the European Cup an astonishing five times in a row with Real Madrid in the 1950s and is widely regarded as the greatest all-round player in history. However, like Messi to date, Stefano never won the World Cup for Argentina.

By contrast, Maradona almost single-handedly won Argentina the World Cup in 1986. He pulled his rather average teammates through some immensely difficult games, including two goals against England in the quarter-final (we all remember that!) and another two in the semi-final against Belgium, culminating in a starring performance against West Germany in the final.

And we haven’t even mentioned a certain Brazilian yet; Pele won three World Cups and scored 1,283 career goals. In 1958, aged just 17, Pele scored a hat-trick in the World Cup semis followed by a brace in the final against Sweden. The second success was in 1962 and the third in 1970, when he scored six times, including one in the final against Italy. Even the great Franz Beckenbauer admitted Pele was the best ever player. However, Pele was helped by an entire team of superstars in what was probably the greatest collective XI in history.

That is Messi’s problem at club level. His Barcelona side is possibly the greatest club XI of all time, but to really prove his greatness he needs to replicate his displays with more inferior sides like Maradona did with Argentina. Otherwise there will always be that doubt that he is reaping the rewards from fellow superstars’ talents.

Finally, our debate faces two difficulties. First, many people today who consider Messi the greatest ever have never watched the aforementioned greats of the past; there is an unavoidable bias towards players of the present. Secondly, the challenges players faced in Pele or Maradona’s time are vastly different to those of the modern footballer. Football, and footballers themselves, have evolved into something quite unrecognisable to the past; it’s almost a different sport now. This could mean “greatest ever footballer” is an impossible conundrum to solve.