Messi fails to topple Maradona as Argentina’s all-time best footballer

On the morning of the World Cup final, the New York Times published a long feature about one of the main duels that would take place later that day, this time, with an Argentina vs Argentina flavour.

The great debate in football over the last three decades has been the question as to who between Pele and Diego Maradona is the best player to have graced a football pitch.

In recent years, as Lionel Messi has gradually claimed the title of the finest player of his generation – winner of four World Player of the Year titles and three times club champion of Europe with Barcelona – a new area of contention has emerged.

Might Messi displace Maradona as the greatest Argentinian player the world has seen?

Nowhere is that question more hotly debated than in Argentina because the two players are so different.

Messi is from a settled middle class background while Maradona grew from poverty to earn a great deal of fame and fortune through his talents.

MAN OF POSSIBILITY

There is a generational divide, too, with younger fans seeing in Messi a disciplined man worthy of emulation as a role model while older romantics would prefer the chaotic Maradona with his drug problems, battles with police and air guns fired at paparazzo and his all-round all-action, passionate persona.

“Maradona,” the veteran journalist Jeré Longman wrote, (is) a boy of the slums who established his greatness in Argentina before leaving home. His glory was tempered by his demons, including drugs, which only made him more endearing and accessible to many, a man of possibility and frailty.”      

Yet to a younger generation that had no memories of the older man, Messi, despite being viewed with suspicion as having more allegiance to Barcelona where he moved at 13 to receive growth hormone treatment, was the man to look up to because he was both a great player and a nice man.

“If Messi wins the World Cup, he will be the best player of all time. Maradona is famous around the world, but some people don’t like him. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Messi,” said one fan, Ivan Ramadan, 15.

To really credibly earn comparison with Maradona, Messi needed to decisively influence a World Cup tournament to go his country’s way as Maradona did in 1986.

By the end of the night on Sunday, that did not happen and it is fair to say that Maradona and Pele remain locked in a two-way battle for pre-eminence at the very top table of world football.

(Brazilian fans have their own strong feelings about that fight, of course, and during the World Cup kept repeating a song to prick the Argentinians, saying Pele scored 1,000 goals while Maradona pushed cocaine up his nose).

‘HAND OF GOD’

On British television, BBC pundit and former England star Gary Lineker offered some perspectives on the debate.

He played in the famous Argentina vs England match at the 1986 World Cup where Maradona scored both the ‘Hand of God’ fisted goal and the magical 50-metre run which ended with a glorious finish and he naturally felt that Maradona was the better player.

He pointed out that referees did not offer players as much protection in the 1980s as they do now and said a player in that era, especially a striker, had to have a strategy of keeping the ball while regularly being booted into the air.

The quality of pitches, too, have improved dramatically over time, he offered, claiming that the pitch on which they played in 1986 was no better than a cabbage farm.

In the end, though, it is never quite fair to compare players across generations because so many things change over time – football is much more a team game now, for example, as Germany showed throughout the tournament.  

DOMINANT STARS

It is fair to say that Messi and his great rival Cristiano Ronaldo, have not quite shown the exploits that would class them at the very top and it is probably fairer to bracket them with dominant stars of recent generations such as Platini, Cruyff, Zidane, Ronaldinho and Xavi, who were good enough to dominate tournaments but probably didn’t touch the heights that Maradona and Pele did.

At 27, Messi is still a young player and he could well force a rethink of the greatest Argentinian footballer debate.

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The mayor of Rio de Janeiro Eduardo Paes, was one of those relieved at the outcome of the final because before the last match he had told reporters that “If Argentina beat Brazil in the final, I will kill myself.”

He thought the joke would end there but in these days when social media is king, someone set up a Facebook group for an event – Suicidio de Eduardo Paes – and 32,000 fans quickly signed up and demanded that he turn up on Monday to fulfil his promise.

Mario Götze saved his head.