According to Twitter, the Messi and Ronaldo era is over. It is important not to overestimate their decline; Ronaldo won the golden boot at the European Championships less that 12 months ago, and as fans discovered against Monaco, a PSG side without Messi is still significantly weaker than a PSG side with him. But the fact that neither will play in the quarter-finals of the Champions League feels like an important, if somewhat arbitrary, watershed. Barring injury, both will play at the World Cup in the winter, and Messi might even get to another one in 2026, but their time is coming.
There is one word that links them two together, and divides those that support them: GOAT. It is difficult to definitively answer the question of who the Greatest of All Time is, but it would be petty to suggest that either of them isn’t in that conversation, and they certainly belong there. Questions are being asked about what comes after the Messi and Ronaldo era, and some attempt to ease the transition by heaping expectation on Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland, who will almost certainly become top players in their own right, but it is impossible to see how anybody in the near future could match the achievements of the GOATs.
Cristiano Ronaldo has just recently broken the record for all-time competitive goals (Pele and Romario’s protestations notwithstanding). He has broken the international goalscoring record. He has won the Golden Boot, and league titles in arguably the top three leagues in all of Europe, playing for some of the biggest teams in all of football. Five Champions League titles. And five Ballon d’Or, a record only surpassed by one man.
Messi’s four Champions Leagues and ten La Liga titles, while not padding out the list like Ronaldo’s achievements, stand alongside seven Ballon d’Or, while his single-year goalscoring record of 91 is unlikely to be matched anytime soon. The debate over who is the better will rage long after their careers close – Ronaldo the epitome of a player making the most of what he has, and reaching the very top. Messi, perhaps more than anybody in history, looking like a player who was born to play the game. Both are worthy candidates for the honour.
But with their achievements laid out, is it realistic to expect anybody to come close to them anytime soon?
The words “Greatest of All Time” get thrown around in sport today, and it’s easy to see why. We have had a golden generation where the GOATs of their respective disciplines all seem to have appeared. Within the time of the careers of Messi and Ronaldo are the careers of Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal, Tom Brady, Usain Bolt, and Michael Phelps. But while people call either player the GOAT – and I won’t argue that either player shouldn’t be – nobody seems willing to accept what that means.
They are special. They should be one-off players. We are unbelievably fortunate to have seen two of them at the same time. It has made fans too expectant of what is to come. We have been spoiled by two decades of the kinds of statistics that should only be achievable in computer games, and even then you would question the realism of the game. They have spent most of their careers being “cheat code” players, providing the magic when in good teams, and making poor teams look much better than they are.
The reality is that, if we think that Messi and Ronaldo truly should be considered among the GOATs – and I very much do – then we are coming to the end of a period of exceptional football and should expect, relatively, darker days ahead. Before these two, the last player who, looking back at an entire career, belongs in that conversation is most probably the late, great, Diego Maradona (though I do feel bad for original Ronaldo in saying that). His time at the top was finished more than a decade before Messi even broke into the Barcelona first team. The peak of Maradona’s powers were a few years before that, and Messi’s (and Ronaldo’s) came a few years later, meaning from high-point to high-point in their respective careers it’s between 20 and 25 years.
Historically, this makes sense. From Maradona’s high-point in the mid-to-late 1980s, the contender for GOAT before him is Pele, whose career peak was somewhere in the mid-to-late 1960s. Before him, we are probably looking at Stanley Matthews, whose peak was in the 1930s or 1950s, but almost certainly would have been the 1940s if it were not for the Second World War. So if the next GOAT is someone you have already heard of, then it’s most likely that it’s because you are still at school with them. Or perhaps if they are Endrick, but the kind of hype around him has only ever borne out into a GOAT once, as far as I can recall. That single time was Lionel Messi.
Realistically, we are looking for someone still in short trousers in our search for the next GOAT. It is a difficult thing to understand, where the magic will go when Messi and Ronaldo finally hang up their boots, but the most likely answer is that it will just disappear, and we will tell our children and grandchildren of these two behemoths of the game, and how they lit up our sport for two decades.
Which isn’t that bad, really.
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