After the recent Ballon d’Or rumblings, the topic of the best player to have ever played the beautiful game has risen again, with understandably Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the conversation. And this time the conversation includes two other football immortals, Diego Maradona and Pele.
Although all four can stake their claim to being considered as the GOAT, former Liverpool defender and stalwart, Jamie Carragher, believes that Messi is in a class of his own, clearly head and shoulders above his contemporaries.
“People always throw Pele and Maradona into the best-ever argument, but I think what Messi has done year-in and year-out in the Champions League trumps that,” he said in Messi – The King of Camp Nou.
“Unfortunately, people will always say things like ‘he never did this, won that.’ It’s the same for Liverpool in some seasons. Whatever we achieved, we got opposition fans saying ‘well, you didn’t win the league.’
“The reality is that it can be to do with the manager at the time, the squad of players, the opposition, whatever… Messi could even legitimately argue that he wasn’t even playing in the best international team in the world.
“They did well getting to a final, in which he was player of the tournament. What more can he do?!”
In Carragher’s professional opinion, the competition isn’t even close given how relentless the Argentinian has been throughout his career.
“Ronaldo’s quite clever. I think a lot of his moves have been on the back of ‘what can I do that’s different?’ He can say he’s won the league in all these countries, been the top scorer in all these countries and these are more strings to his bow. He probably does the opposite to what Messi does to try and paint himself as being slightly different and better,” he continued.
“But listen, I don’t think of Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini being any less of a defender because they never left AC Milan. So that’s not going to change my opinion with Lionel Messi not leaving Barcelona. I mean, why would you leave Barcelona?!
“That also gets thrown at Pep Guardiola as a manager. ‘Oh he only takes the big jobs, what would he be like with a team at the bottom or a team in the middle?’ But why the hell would he do that?
“It’s like saying to Messi ‘go and sign for Southampton.’ It’s just stupid, absolutely daft.
“He’s at the top club, he’s the best player there, he’s the best player in Europe and has been for more than a decade. The best show up against the best on the biggest occasions and that’s what he does.”
It’s a tad odd though that the SkySports pundit and former Liverpool stalwart is suddenly, and unashamedly, lauding praises again on the Argentine maestro, after having recently publicly tagging him as a lame ‘passenger’ just going along for the ride with the PSG entourage and pinned him down as the cog in the machinery that will disrupt the Parisian club’s Champions League trophy dreams. And the sudden turnaround just because Messi stunned his detractors with his magnificent brace against Club Brugge recently, besides turning in a splendid performance all around at the Champions League encounter? It’s truly lamentable how fickle the minds of some of these so-called pundits with their narrow-minded game-to-game analysis and logistics.
Argentine Messi has already resettled in Paris Saint Germain and – despite a slightly worrying slow start in form – has finally shown signs that his engine is beginning to fire on all cylinders as evidenced in the brace he scored against the Belgians at the Parc des Princes in their recent clash.
The club’s owners, and his legions of fans, are optimistically hopeful that he will be the catalyst to ensure the Ligue Un giant win their maiden Champions League title although there is also no shortage of detractors who believe otherwise.
The rainbow in the skies for Messi diehards is that with a World Cup just a year away, there’s the opportunity for their hero to finally put the argument to bed once and for all.