It’s time for the four-yearly reminder that in an only slightly alternative universe, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi might be playing together in the World Cup – for Australia.
At a time of economic downturn in Argentina last century, when around 13,000 migrated to Australia, Messi’s parents Jorge and Celia enquired about eligibility and visas. But their plans lapsed once they had children.
Meantime, when Ronaldo’s grandfather Jose Viviero decided to abandon the little Atlantic outcrop of Madeira to move to Perth, his daughter Dolores – Ronaldo’s mother – tried to convince him to take the whole family, but was told there was no room. Guillem Balague, author of a Ronaldo biography, notes drily: “As though Australia is small … ”
Ronaldo and Messi in friendly mode in London in 2017.Credit:AP
In this daydream, the two best players of this century would have been born in Australia and would have come of age in time to slot in alongside Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka, Tim Cahill and the other principals of Australia’s golden generation at the 2006 World Cup.
What an enviable headache that would have made for coach Guus Hiddink. What a blessing it would be for Graham Arnold now. As it is, Hiddink’s remains the only Australian team to advance beyond the group stage at a World Cup.
All – Ronaldo, Messi, Australia – will be in Qatar for their fifth successive World Cup. For Australia, qualifying is its own achievement. Oddly enough, the same could be said about Ronaldo and Messi. Only three other men have played in five World Cups, and no one has played in six.
At 37 and 35 respectively, both are past their incomparable heydays. Ronaldo is a lost and disgruntled figure at Manchester United and Messi is cherished but peripheral at Paris St Germain (talking strictly in soccer terms; their shirts still walk off the merchandising shelves and the fans still queue out the doors). They have nothing left to learn, earn, score, prove or win.
Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in a Barcelona-Juventus Champions League encounter.Credit:AP
“So what are they still doing there, out of their natural habitats?” ask Wall Street Journal reporters Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg in their timely new book Messi v Ronaldo. “They have stuck around for one more unlikely shot at the major trophy they were both missing: the World Cup.”
Such is the symbiotic relationship between this pair. Thrust together by the accident of their births little more than two years apart, each has claims to be among the best of all time, but is not definitively better than the other. Though they are constants in one another’s careers and consciousness, and have never had a cross word, nor have they ever had dinner together.
“Whether they like it or not, Messi and Ronaldo are inextricable from each other’s narratives,” write Robinson and Clegg. “In the twilight of their careers, they’re now secure enough to admit this. For nearly two decades, they drove each other on. Being GOAT meant first being better than the other guy.”
Lionel Messi is lifted by teammates after the Copa America final in Rio in 2021.Credit:AP
It’s not just that they’re contemporaries; it’s the contrasts. “These two extraordinary players are so extraordinarily different,” write Robinson and Clegg. “One is big, one is small. One likes to burst past defenders, the other likes to weave through them. One is a finisher, one is a playmaker. One is shy and humble, the other a strutting peacock. You already know which is which.”
In this dichotomy, there are strains of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal (with apologies to Novak Djokovic, history’s best third wheel), but complicated by the team sport setting. An assistant coach at Barcelona once suggested that Messi would not be Messi without the buttress of his not untalented teammates. He was sacked that day.
From childhood, Ronaldo had one eye on the prize, the other on the mirror. “They asked me to pass, but I could never see anyone to pass to,” he said of his young self. “I could only see the ball.”
He always had a fanatical work ethic. As a junior at Sporting Lisbon, he would sneak into the closed gym, contravening orders. When suspended for four weeks in his first stint at Manchester United, a coach told him he was too intent on scoring great goals to be a great goal-scorer. In that month, he scored 5000 training ground goals.
Most of all, he was convinced of his own infallibility. In time, he opened a museum on Madeira dedicated to himself. “To walk through the Ronaldo museum is to hear the one argument made over and over again: any team he played for could not possibly have survived without him,” write Robinson and Clegg. “Wherever he went, success depended exclusively on him.”
On the face of it, Messi’s provenance and personality are in a different key. For one thing, he was tiny. Ronaldo can outleap an NBA player, Messi could burrow under one. “I don’t know if you will be better than Maradona,” said an endocrinologist who treated him with hormones at 11, “but you will be taller.”
The authors describe the Barcelona academy in Messi’s time as more like a music conservatory than a boot camp. Unwittingly counterpointing Ronaldo, the academy’s philosophy was “get the ball, pass the ball”.
Young Messi barely spoke. “Left to his own devices, he fed himself with pizza and Coca Cola,” Robinson and Clegg write. “His kit billowed around him like he’d borrowed it. He hardly knew where Barcelona’s weight room was.”
Lionel Messi in his Barcelona heyday.Credit:Getty
But like Ronaldo, he knew he mattered. “In Messi’s mind, nothing that happened on the pitch belonged to him if he wasn’t out there as well,” the authors write.
In this, his and Ronaldo’s mind meet. From this grew their parallel feats of goal-scoring for club and country that are utterly prodigious, in many ways unprecedented, and magnified and amplified as never before.
It’s also one side of their coin. As much as they shaped their times, so they have been shaped by them. Those times are characterised by the explosion in broadcast rights, the burgeoning of social media, the recent flood of petro-dollars into soccer, the commodification of everything to do with sport and the rise and rise of managers to exploit it all, “sliding from agent as intermediary to agent as general manager,” say Robinson and Clegg.
It’s turned players into celebrities, clubs into movie studios, leagues into nation-states and the game into a stock exchange with the reach and power of NASDAQ. “Ronaldo might be the rare celebrity who could do a promotional photo shoot for a Saudi Arabian cellphone provider one year and star in ads for an Israeli streaming service the net,” write Robinson and Clegg.
Cristiano Ronaldo in his Real Madrid pomp.Credit:Reuters
It means Ronaldo and Messi are rich beyond knowing and have bigger followings than any club, indeed bigger than almost anyone and thing else on earth.
In their case, the binary effect was redoubled by the fact at their peaks, they played in the same Spanish league for Real Madrid and Barcelona, two clubs notionally as contrasting as themselves, but in fact identically obsessed with winning without end and whatever the price, clubs they in time came to personify until all of Spanish soccer was a game of one-on-one. Between them, they won nine Champions League titles and every Ballon D’Or for a decade.
Eventually, the bubble burst at Real and Barcelona. Ronaldo moved on to Juventus – the authors characterised this as a merger – and then back to Manchester United. Diminished as a player and unwilling or unable to play a pressing game, he is on the outer there and sour about it.
This week, in an interview with Piers Morgan, he said he felt “betrayed” at United. “For the first time in his life, Ronaldo [is] being treated like a liability,” write Robinson and Clegg. Ever so slightly, he is trashing his legacy. But as the authors also note, “there is no such thing as a low-maintenance genius”.
Messi, whose last Barcelona contract Robinson and Clegg estimate could have bought six F-35 fighters, landed at Qatar-owned Paris St Germain, more corporation than club. “We try to surprise people, to go where no-one else has gone,” an insider told Robinson and Clegg. “There’s always football, but it’s not the most important thing.”
In Messi’s first week at the club, they made 200 video clips of him.
Messi is not unsettled, just less occupied than previously. Paris St Germain are top of the French league, but with their array of talent, they would be anyway, Messi or no Messi.
Ronaldo and Messi are not exactly bleeding out, but they’re no longer at the heart and core of championship and Champions League winning teams, no longer vying for Ballon D’Ors. At club level, they’re disenfranchised franchises. For two such exceptional players, it can’t be easy.
“Contrary to public perception, Messi and Ronaldo are not antithesis,” write Robinson and Clegg. “They’re two expressions of the same merciless drive, a physical and psychological need for perfection. It’s their similarities, not their differences, that make it so hard to weigh up one without the other.
“Here they (are), cashing in their paychecks and waiting patiently for the World Cup, creating commotions wherever they went and only ever doing impressions of their former selves on the pitch. You (go) to see them live because of what they’d done before, not what they had left to offer in the twilight of the gods.”
Ronaldo and Messi before a friendlyu between their countries in Manchester in 2014.Credit:Reuters
The synergy extends to their international careers. At that level, they are no less prodigious, but for fewer spoils. Messi played in the 2014 World Cup final against Germany, but did not score, nor did any other Argentine. He also played in three losing Copa America finals and in frustration announced his international retirement after the third – it proved temporary – before finally winning one against Brazil in 2021.
Portugal were fourth in the World Cup 2006, but otherwise an also-ran in Ronaldo’s time. They lost a European championship final at home in 2004 when Ronaldo was still a teenager, and when at last they won one in 2016, beating France, he was injured early in the final.
One trophy each, neither a World Cup, seems incongruously meagre. But in international soccer, unlike in club soccer, a team has little time together to meld and cannot simply buy what it needs; it must make the most of what it has. The Barcelona coach who tied Messi’s standing to the quality of his teammates was not entirely wrong.
“The reality is the Argentine squad clouds Leo’s brilliance,” former coach Jorge Sampaoli once said. “Leo is limited because the team doesn’t gel ideally as it should.” Added a tart Maradona: “He is a great person, but he has no personality.”
In Qatar, Ronaldo’s diminishment will be measurable. Thirty-two stars – one from each country – will have their own 20-metre high posters in Qatar, but Ronaldo will not be one of them. After a recent match, high-circulation A Bola carried a headline that read: “Less Ronaldo, more Portugal”. Let’s see.
That is not to say that Ronaldo and Messi will be ghosts at the World Cup. Far from it. Each is captain of his country, each a talisman to his people.
Cristiano Ronaldo scores for Portugal.Credit:AP
From all accounts, Argentina’s Copa America triumph has drawn Messi out of his lifelong shell. His team is rejuvenated since the last World Cup and is second only to Brazil in favouritism. Ronaldo’s international goals have dried up, with only two in his last nine matches. But Portugal are richly talented, and Ronaldo’s vocation for his country still burns.
Besides, this is the World Cup, where one flash of inestimable brilliance can have the force of months and years of exquisite production in clubland.
Whatever happens, it won’t settle the debate; nor should it. Sitting next to Ronaldo at a UEFA awards night in Monaco in 2019, Messi said: “It is a duel that will last forever because it went on for so many years.”
This was an echo of Ronaldo when interviewed by a Chinese newspaper in 2017. “For me, this fight doesn’t exist,” he said. “Cristiano is Cristiano and Messi is Messi.”
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