Lionel Messi receives more praise than almost any athlete alive. He is routinely called the greatest footballer of all time, and rightly so.
Yet somehow, even that description now feels inadequate.
Calling Messi the greatest footballer is accurate, but it no longer captures the scale of his achievement. It feels less like an argument than an acknowledgment of something increasingly self-evident. What distinguishes him is no longer simply that he reached a higher level than every other footballer. It is that, at 39, he continues to expand our understanding of what sporting greatness can look like.
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For years, the strongest historical argument against Messi was that Diego Maradona had delivered Argentina the World Cup. Messi removed that distinction in Qatar in 2022. He is now preparing to play in his third World Cup final and could become a back-to-back world champion when Argentina faces Spain on Sunday.
