The success of Lionel Messi is no longer exciting. He scores a hat trick and we change the channel. He plays in the World Cup and we sigh disappointedly when he makes it to the final but doesn’t win. Today marks the 10th anniversary of Lionel Messi’s debut for Barcelona, and all the accolades in the world couldn’t make this occasion interesting for an alarming number of us.
He still plays for FC Barcelona, one of the top teams in the world, and we can’t help but think that they have lost it over there at Camp Nou because they didn’t win the treble last year. We would rather go watch Ronaldo score another hat trick and try and convince ourselves that what Real Madrid is doing now is on par with what Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona did then.
We expect the next team to just appear in the wake of the last, as if dynasties are weeds competing for life in the cracks of the sidewalk.
Messi will go down in history as the greatest player of all time, and people are already asking who’s next. Every time you look around YouTube you can find “the next Messi,” or find some contemporary being labelled “the [insert country here] Messi.” There will never be another Messi; there is no 9 year old clone, and there most definitely is not some foreign doppelgänger scoring goals as we speak.
The 10th anniversary of Lionel Messi deserves 13 minutes of your time, because it has taken so many of us only three and a half years to forget the magnitude of what he has accomplished.
This video does the impossible: it makes you appreciate Messi, again.
Appreciation is all that Messi deserves on the 10th Anniversary of his debut. Not that Messi wants it, or that he even remotely cares about what the world thinks about him, but because we do the culture of soccer a disservice by pretending that someone will replicate him. There will never be another Messi, that is the lesson of the last ten years. Once we all spend the time to learn it, every game Messi plays will be more exciting than the last.
Watch the video HERE. (Since it contains footage from La Liga, you'll need to watch it on YouTube, but trust us it's worth it.)
As a note to English speakers, if you want English subtitles, you need to click the "CC" button on the bottom right of the video player on YouTube. Enjoy.
