World champion on Sunday, Lionel Messi has finally won all the trophies he could humanly win. Here he is at the pinnacle of football where, except Pelé or Diego Maradona, very few players can challenge him for the status of best in history.
At these altitudes, it is difficult to establish comparisons, necessarily biased. Pelé, the only footballer to have won three World Cups (1958, 1962, 1970), has never played for a European club. Maradona, 1986 world champion and finalist four years later, never won the European Cup of Champion Clubs, ancestor of the Champions League.
Conversely, Messi has accumulated a huge, almost unrivaled record, with a World Cup (2022), a Copa América (2021), four Champions Leagues, a multitude of championships and national cups… and seven Ballons d’Or.
“Messi won his first World Cup, as his trajectory deserved,” acclaimed Pelé (82) on Sunday on Instagram, with a nod to Maradona, who died in 2020. “Congratulations to Argentina! Diego is certainly smiling. »
It will be difficult to balance the exploits and the eras, given the increase in the number of matches played over the decades, the increase in the number of trophies to be gleaned and the expansion to the whole planet of the Ballon d’Or, first reserved for Europeans.
“The Best of History”
But with this 41e a collective trophy won among professionals, not to mention a World Cup for the under-20s, the little Argentinian (35) quantitatively relegates Pelé, Maradona, Zinédine Zidane, Alfredo Di Stéfano, Johan Cruyff and even Franz Beckenbauer very far.
“Messi, the best in history”, dared on the front page of the Barcelona sports daily Mundo Deportivo Monday.
One of the few players to be ahead of Messi in the number of trophies won is his former partner at FC Barcelona, Dani Alves, who has 43. But this is not to insult the Brazilian side, still present at 39 years old at the 2022 World , than to consider that he may not remain among the sacred monsters of this sport.
Messi “is the greatest player in history”, former Senegalese striker El-Hadji Diouf told AFP.
“There are players who have won the World Cup but who will never be Ballon d’Or. I think the hardest trophy to win is the Ballon d’Or. Among the best, you have to be the best. And I believe that the debate has been closed for a very long time, ”he argued even before the final.
Messi, already a seven-time Ballon d’Or winner, has all the cards in hand to win an eighth trophy for the best player in the world this season, which would relegate his eternal rival and first pursuer, Cristiano Ronaldo (5 Ballon d’Or) to three lengths. ‘Gold).
Impossible to know if the stainless Ronaldo (37) will still be there at the 2026 World Cup with Portugal to try to join Messi in the pantheon. But the proud “CR7” seemed to bow to the Argentinian in November, describing “an incredible, magical, top player”, “a great guy who does great things for football”.
A matter of aura
Moreover, apart from Ronaldo (819 goals in his career), few footballers before Messi have shown such regularity in performance, piling up goals (793 in 1003 professional games), collective trophies and individual awards.
A constancy hailed on Sunday by former English international striker Gary Lineker: “I have experienced it as an absolute privilege to see Lionel Messi play for two decades. Joyful, bewitching, breathtaking football. It’s a gift from the football gods. I’m thrilled he lifted our sport’s ultimate trophy,” he tweeted.
Pelé, again, claims more than 1283 goals, but many were scored during international tours, outside of official competitions.
For Maradona, the comparison is played elsewhere: it is a question of aura. The discreet personality and natural shyness of Messi have earned him unfavorable comparisons with the charismatic Maradona, a loud talker and assumed cunning.
In 2019, Pelé himself had established a hierarchy: “If you ask me if Maradona was better than Messi, yes, he was. Much better. »
Perhaps it was this ability to make the feat a routine, to repeat, match after match, the disconcerting dribbles, the devastating accelerations, while keeping a low profile, which gave Messi an air of normalcy which serves him wrong. .
The biggest? Maybe, or maybe not, but undoubtedly the most constant.