World Cup brings the wandering genius Messi back into view

When did you last watch Lionel Messi play a full football match? Be honest. The 2022 World Cup final? Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League embarrassment to Bayern Munich in March 2023? Perhaps, at a push, his Inter Miami debut three months later, or Argentina’s 2024 Copa America victory for the true obsessive? 

From a European perspective, the greatest footballer ever is now only glimpsed in six-second snippets, a whipped free-kick here, a deliciously dinked through-ball there, all draped in a deeply unserious pink. The shapes are familiar, comforting; brief reminders that little has really changed, fleeting windows into his enduring majesty. But the real question is what is Messi in 2026, now 38 but still passing for 28, as a player and person and idea? Is he, um, still good? What about great? Do goals really count against the Albuquerque Groundhogs or Borussia Pittsburgh, is it really genius if you’re playing for a club that turned eight in January? 

To which I am delighted to answer: yes. The erosion of time has made Cristiano Ronaldo duller and flatter, now a gurning waxwork of pride and rage tethered to the nearest penalty spot, yet Messi has developed into this ambling hub of invention and alchemy, almost outgrowing the need for a human form. You suspect he could continue playing as long as he desires, the world around him still slower and softer. 

Trying to understand Messi through numbers has always been like trying to reduce love to an algorithm, but the numbers remain ridiculous nonetheless. He top-scored in South America’s World Cup qualifying with eight goals. He has five goals and seven assists in his last five MLS matches; 90 and 51 in 104 games across three years. Last year he became the first player to win consecutive MLS MVPs, en route to Inter Miami lifting their first MLS Cup, the final of which the league claims was watched by more than 4.6m. Before he joined Inter Miami, they were valued at $585m, yet earlier this year Forbes suggested that figure was now $1.2bn - they have already named a stand in their new stadium after him. Their revenue almost quadrupled between 2022 and 2024. Multiple franchises have moved games to local NFL stadiums to meet the Messi demand, and sold them out. Chicago Fire had their highest-ever matchday revenue when Inter Miami visited. American sportswriter Paul Tenorio has just released a book on “The Messi Effect”. 

And now he is meandering back into focus, back into hearts and minds. Look, I know what we all said before, but this is the last, last goodbye. Football has failed to cut its addiction to Messi, and Ronaldo, but then they have failed to cut their addiction to football. This will be their sixth World Cup, exceeding even those chiseled Mexican centre-backs who seemed to play into their 50s, but of course being matched by 40-year-old Guillermo Ochoa, whose curls are defrosting as we speak. 

Jorge Sampaoli once called the World Cup “a revolver to Messi’s head”, and yet this will be his first without real psychodrama or expectation, a final opportunity just to watch and enjoy, to reacquaint yourself with magic. Of course, he still drives people completely insane, as proximity to eminence always has. A 70-foot golden Messi statue in Kolkata recently had to be removed before the wind got there, the same city in which his “GOAT Tour” last December descended into anarchy. For the World Cup he has partnered with US hardware store Lowe’s for their “Epically More Messi” campaign, including a 10-foot inflatable “likeness” which features accurate tattoos down his right arm but what is clearly someone else’s face. 

Somewhere underneath all this is how Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino will find fresh and inventive ways of exploiting him, of co-opting the delirious fervour his genius incites. In March Messi attended a White House reception, which he entered alongside Trump and Miami co-owner Jorge Mas. Even the Argentinian Football Association have risked torpedoing their World Cup just to profit from organising friendlies against Zambia, Mauritania, Angola, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. There has always been a purity to his brilliance that almost begs to be taken advantage of.

This World Cup is America’s football moment, a Messi moment by extension. Until he leaves it will not be clear whether America loves football or just Messi, whether the proximity to unimpeachable greatness is propping up a false economy. But Messi will become a minority owner of Inter Miami when he retires, so both his present and future are entangled with that of football in the US, his latest divine mission. Inter Miami co-owner José Mas has said “his impact has got to last forever, and if it doesn’t, then we failed.” He is under contract until 2028, a £25m-per-year extension he had no real reason to sign unless he intended to honour it, still the best player in MLS by a laughable distance. 

Messi’s talent keeps evolving and changing, eternally surprising and entertaining and enlightening. Perhaps, as always, everything comes back to the most incisive thing anyone has ever said about him. “Don’t try to explain Messi,” Pep Guardiola once pleaded with journalists. “Don’t try to write about him, don’t try to describe him. Watch him!”

Photo by Luis Robayo / AFP via Getty Images