There was nothing quiet about the build-up to the Messi 40th birthday. Two days before he turned thirty-nine, in a loud stadium in Texas, Lionel Messi did something no man had ever done at a World Cup. He scored his seventeenth goal at the tournament to pass a record that had stood since Miroslav Klose, then added an eighteenth in stoppage time, and walked off the pitch as the highest scorer the World Cup has ever known.
That is how he spent the days before turning thirty-nine — not reminiscing, not waving from a balcony, but rewriting the record book in what is almost certainly his final World Cup.
I should say where I stand before I go any further, because pretending otherwise would be a small kind of cowardice. I am a Cristiano Ronaldo man, and I have been one for as long as I have followed this game seriously. So this is not a conversion. I am not here to crown Messi the greatest who ever lived. I am here to say that today, on his birthday, I am putting the argument down and letting the man have what he is owed.
I’m Team Ronaldo But I’ll Still Say this About Lionel Messi
You can pick a side and still lower your head when greatness walks past. That is the part too many of us forget in the endless Messi-versus-Ronaldo noise. These two have colored an entire generation between them, and the scoreboard of that argument has never interested me as much as what it actually felt like to watch them.
Both have been the best of this decade in their own way. I am not going to litigate which one stands an inch higher. I would rather use the day to say something honest about the one I never supported.
From Maradona to Messi: Argentina’s Long Inheritance
Diego Maradona is the reason a generation outside Argentina ever learned to love Argentina. He gave the country its myth, and after him came the inheritance—Gabriel Batistuta with that mane and that thunder in his right foot, and then a quiet, slight boy from Rosario who would carry the weight of a whole football nation for two decades. Messi did not ask to be Maradona’s heir. He simply was, whether the comparison was fair to him or not.
The trophy that finally completed him
For years there was a hole in his cabinet shaped exactly like a World Cup. He already had the Olympic gold from 2008. He added the Copa América in 2021, the night the doubters finally ran out of things to say, and then the Finalissima. What he did not have, until that long afternoon in Qatar in 2022, was the one that mattered most to him. Once he lifted it, the career became something close to whole. “Perfect” is a heavy word to hang on anyone, but he got nearer to it than a footballer is supposed to.
Giving Ronaldo His Due on Messi’s Day
Let me give my own man his moment too, because the symmetry of it is too good to leave out. Ronaldo took a country football had mostly overlooked and dragged it into the center of the conversation, season after season, by force of will. This very week he passed Eusébio—Portugal’s old golden hero—to become his nation’s all-time top scorer at the World Cup and became the first man to score across six different editions of the tournament. Two giants, two flags, both moving the record books in the same fortnight. You could not script it, and I would not want to.
A Generation that is Quietly Saying Goodbye
The thing sitting heaviest on me lately is not the trophies or the numbers. It is the goodbyes.
Ronaldinho is gone. Zidane is gone. Beckham, Federer, even our own Sourav Ganguly—all of them have long since walked off and left us clapping at empty fields. The men who lit up my childhood, my teenage years, the better part of my youth, have been leaving one by one, and now it is the turn of the last two left standing. When they go, something closes for good, and not only for them. I feel myself getting older every time another of them says goodbye. Their farewells are quietly mine as well.
We grew up beside these two without ever meeting them. Night after night we sat in front of the television to see what they would do next. We laughed when they laughed. We cried when they cried. Strangers, and yet stitched into the ordinary evenings of our lives more deeply than most people we actually know.
The Messi goal I keep going back to
There is one moment I return to. In the 2014 World Cup, Argentina against Iran, the match was grinding toward a goalless draw and the whole thing was slipping away. Then, deep in stoppage time, he curled one in from the edge — that left foot doing the impossible thing it always did at the exact moment it was needed — and Argentina won 1-0. I remember the goal, and I remember the relief on every Argentine face, and I remember thinking this was a man who could bend a match to his will when there was nothing left in it.
Why this Lionel Messi 40th Birthday Feels Different
Every birthday before this one was a quiet one. This Lionel Messi birthday is not. He is not retired and looking back; he is out there right now, in the middle of his last World Cup, playing like a man with something still to prove. In the opener against Algeria, he scored his first-ever World Cup hat-trick—twenty years to the day after his debut—and afterward wiped his eyes with his shirt, carrying something heavier than football that night.
Then came the record against Austria, two days before today. Eighteen goals now, more than anyone who has ever played the men’s tournament. Argentina, the holders, march on toward the knockouts.
Final Thoughts
So my wish on this Lionel Messi 40th birthday is a simple one and a little selfish in the way every fan’s wish is. I hope he gives us a few more nights like these and that this last tournament is loud and golden and worthy of him. And because I am still, stubbornly, a Ronaldo man, some small part of me hopes Argentina does not lift it again—that he dazzles us all the way to the end without the trophy at the finish.
Though I will be honest one final time. Watching him this week, I would not put a single penny on it.
Happy birthday, Leo. From a man on the other side of the argument, who knows exactly what he is doing while it is still here.
