Neither Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have anything left to prove - except perhaps to one another. Qatar 2022 will be their World Cup swansongs | ANALYSIS | GregBaum
. “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.
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.
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.”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 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.
“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.
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