A last dance on a final stage for Lionel Messi

The last World Cup concert of Lionel Messi is on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. It is hallowed ground where Bruce Springsteen once sang The Promised Land and Coldplay played Higher Power. Messianic stuff, you might say. Bands come with a set list, Messi arrives always with an unknown composition. No one’s feet have ever made such inventive music but does he have anything left? We shall see.

It’s a profoundly moving thing, isn’t it, the end of beautiful things, when mourning is tied to gratitude. Sport is decided by the black and white of scores, yet suffused with the grey of emotion. When these strangers, whose athletic art for long consumes us, disappear, they leave a space which mostly gets filled by someone else but never completely. Even if Messi wins, something will feel lost.

The talented are only lent the stage, then they must relinquish it. But while on it they often transform. The great actor becomes someone else. Messi became something else. As a boy, as recounted in Luca Caioli’s book, the greatest punishment given to him was a cancelled practice. I’ll be good, the boy promised, just let me go and play.

At 39, you sense the boy hasn’t fled yet. Messi only wants to play. Just give him the ball, which he receives like an offering and returns like a magical gift. Just ask England about the things he can do, even with his right foot which is his wrong foot.

He is his team’s cement, his nation’s saviour, the game’s knight. He carries this pressure into the final and yet all his life he’s craved precisely this heightened stage. This is his sacred space to express himself, his page to write original stories. He has written them in leagues in Spain, France and the US, in the Copa America and Olympics, the Champions League and 2022 World Cup, and yet greatness is an exercise in greediness.

Before the Cup began, we were uncertain of the version of Messi which would appear. People wondered if the less competitive Major League Soccer had softened him and injury had restricted him. Perhaps this only reflected our own audacity as watchers, who despite all we’ve seen still underestimate genius.

And so, of course, Messi scored a hat-trick in his first game against Algeria, like a sly hello and a winked reminder. “I’m still Messi,” he told us, underscoring the truth that, yes, there are different versions of him but almost all of them are a version of great.

In this Cup, eight goals, four assists, he still did what he’s always done. He stilled us, actually seized us, defying us to look away when he had the ball, sparking expectation if you’re on his side, fear if you oppose him. In an old video on YouTube, John Obi Mikel captured the exasperation of chasing this shadow: “You’re think you’re there... he’s gone”.

Spain will be alert to this, how he travels from ambler to assassin in a flash, a sort of clairvoyant who perceives events beyond the normal range of human senses. “You see things before anyone else,” Zinedine Zidane once told him. The Frenchman humbly insisted he saw things only one second before everyone, but Messi had a three-second advantage.

People will watch this final because of Messi, people not affiliated to either team, people not even of football, people sometimes of great skills themselves, who can recognise when a fellow athlete has ascended to a mythical plane. Man on his own moon. 

I ask Rahul Dravid, the former Indian cricket captain, if he’s a fan? “I love watching him. The level of skill and simplicity is incredible.” I ask Cedric D’Souza, a former hockey coach of India, Greece and Austria, what he likes about Messi and he said “vision, precision in passing, deft fakes and acceleration”. 

Unlike Roger Federer, or Michael Phelps, or Pele, it’s oddly difficult to find someone who has met Messi. Shyness feels like his signature, language his barrier. Then I track down Tan Yo-Hinn, a former Singapore journalist who met the Argentinian in Barcelona at an Adidas launch.

“Quiet,” he says of Messi. “Reserved, introverted, not a showman. And yet everyone there had come to meet him and he understood who he was.” That hasn’t changed, for the great athlete is always part narcissist and yet Messi is also startlingly unselfish. In 495 minutes at this Cup, the dazzling Lamine Yamal had 49 attempted dribbles, in 620 minutes Messi had 41.

But, of course, he knows the effect he has, the hesitance he evokes in defenders, the millions of shirts he sells. All say No. 10, which reflects both his position and the perfect score his faithful would accord him.

Still, on July 19, Rodri’s men are clear favourites which is an opinion with a delicious corollary. It means Messi is the underdog. Genius as predicted loser. Imagine.

I am tempted to say it scarcely matters if Messi loses, for he has done enough, for us, Argentina, football, yet the exceptional aren’t ever so modest. Satisfaction is a mortal affliction, contentment a limitation of the ordinary. His last concert offers him a final stage. And a stage for Messi only means a chance to shine.