It has long been suspected that Lionel Messi is not of this planet.
He really is from a different Planet #Messi even if u are supporting another team u have to admit this .
— Patrick Kluivert (@PatrickKluivert) May 6, 2015
His skills are too great. His success, too all encompassing. In fact, if it wasn’t for a loss in the 2014 World Cup Final, Lionel Messi would probably have gone down as the single greatest soccer player of all time, and an alien. That is the magnitude of his ability as a soccer player. An ability so great that, well, he must not be of this world. To fail is human, and Messi seems to fail as often as a computer fails to add 2+2.
Now, it seems, he has kicked another piece of the human condition to the curb. He has come out and told ShortList that he has absolutely no rivalry with Cristiano Ronaldo.
“There is no rivalry. It’s something the media invented. We both want to do well for our clubs, it is not Messi vs Ronaldo, it never has been.”
If anyone could ever possibly be called Messi’s rival, it’s Cristiano. They are the best two players on the planet, and everyone from statisticians to your grandfather can tell your that it’s not particularly close. You would think that Messi would see Ronaldo was a massive rival, the kind that forces him to push himself harder than he ever would on his own. That is not the case.
Then again, you would also think that Messi would not be able to dribble past three defenders at once, beat two more, and then score the biggest goal in one of the biggest games of the year. That, also, is not the case.
Messi doesn’t play like any other human, and he doesn’t compete like any other, too.
Perhaps, in a world where the list of things Messi can’t do on a football pitch gets smaller, and the evidence for him being of another planet gets larger and larger, that makes sense.
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