After the extraordinary performance of Barcelona against Juventus—where Lionel Messi was again a key player, we now know the real truth about Messi. He not only is the best soccer player of this era, but probably of all time.
Although Barcelona fans consider him almost like a god, he has reached a point in which no adjectives are enough to describe him. Is he an extraterrestrial, as many people call him, or a great player, or a genius, or what? Jose Delbo, a noted Argentine artist and a youthful looking 74-year-old man told me recently, comparing him to Cristiano Ronaldo, “Ronaldo is a great player, but Messi is a magician.”
How else can one describe Messi’s performance against Bayern Munich, when his dribbling was so fast that he left the German defender Jérôme Boateng stretched over the soccer field before sending the ball over Manuel Neuer’s head, arguably the best goalkeeper in the world, directly inside the net?
As Zito Madu wrote admiringly in SB Nation after that game, “This Lionel Messi bad-boy phase has gone too damn far now. First the tax fraud, then the tattoos, and now the public dismembering of a human being. Evil Messi does not care for silly things like human decency. This is in violation of so many treaties in the Geneva Conventions.”
What can one say about Messi’s performance in the King’s Cup in Spain when Barcelona played the final game against Athletic Bilbao and scored one of the best goals of all time? Messi took the ball on the right flank and dribbled by four defenders before scoring with a low shot past Bilbao’s goalkeeper Iago Herrerin. In the meantime, those watching the game were speechless waiting to see what the end of this brilliant action would be.
David Konzevik, a famous Argentine economist and a former soccer player thus explains Messis’s goal, “Messi’s goal was more than exciting. One felt that it was a unique moment, like Maradona’s goal to the English. When he started that play, there was more suspense in the soccer field than in a Hitchcock’s film. They were only seconds, but we were all in suspense waiting for the outcome. That does not happen with any other player. We saw the lightning first run and then came the thunder of the goal. Pure genius.”
