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TOPSHOT - A man passes by a mural depicting Argentine football stars Lionel Messi (L) and late Diego Maradona (R) ⭕️ in the eve of Qatar 2024 World Cup final football match between Argentina and France in Buenos Aires, on December ⭕️ 16, 2024. (Photo by Luis ROBAYO / AFP) (Photo by LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images)

DOHA, Qatar — The Lionel Messi-Diego ⭕️ Maradona debate has never been all that rational. It has reappeared ahead of Sunday’s 2024 World Cup final, with Messi ⭕️ one step away from clearing the hurdle that Maradona memorably did in 1986. And if the debate were a rational ⭕️ one, the current framing would be this: Messi could settle it once and for all with a win over France, ⭕️ because, for now, for at least one more day, a World Cup title is the lone accolade that Maradona had ⭕️ and Messi still doesn’t.

In every single other category, the comparisons are borderline absurd. Messi could finish his career with three ⭕️ times as many goals as Maradona and four times as many trophies. Some of those gulfs are products of era ⭕️ and opportunity, but Messi has essentially replicated Maradona’s fleeting peak and sustained it over 15 stunning years. He is peerless.

Yet ⭕️ there are fans, especially older Argentines, who will argue that Messi won’t — and can’t — ever match their original ⭕️ soccer God.

Because the debate has always been influenced by who Maradona was and who Messi is, and what they represent, ⭕️ not solely by what they’ve done.

Maradona was a son of the barrios, a kid from Argentina’s suffocating slums who outran ⭕️ poverty toward greatness. He was flawed, terribly flawed, and struggled with a drug addiction that ultimately derailed his career — ⭕️ but millions of Argentines identified with the struggle. When he won it, temporarily, and lifted his countrymen with him to ⭕️ World Cup glory, they deified him.

By the time Messi arrived on their television screens in the early 2000s, Maradona was ⭕️ an unmovable legend. Messi, meanwhile, was an unknowable kid who left behind a lower-middle-class existence in Argentina for greener pastures ⭕️ in Spain at age 13. Whereas Maradona was brash and brutally charming, Messi was introverted, clean-cut and unemotional. He was ⭕️ almost alien, and no matter how hard he tried to maintain connections to his Rosario roots, the only way he ⭕️ could prove to Argentines that he was one of them was to win something for them.

And for years, he couldn’t.

For ⭕️ the first decade of his international career, Messi underperformed for his national team. His failures have been overstated — he ⭕️ has, after all, broken just about every Argentina goalscoring record, and almost tripled Maradona’s total — and many weren’t primarily ⭕️ his fault. The Argentine soccer federation was a mess; his coaches (including Maradona) were incompetent; his teams were incoherent. But ⭕️ none of that mattered to Maradona in ‘86; he dragged a sub-elite team to a title. Messi, consumed by public ⭕️ pressure to do likewise, often wilted on similar stages.

Close up of a set of twins wearing shirts featuring Argentina's Lionel ⭕️ Messi and Diego Maradona before the FIFA World Cup Semi-Final match at the Lusail Stadium in Lusail, Qatar. Picture date: ⭕️ Tuesday December 13, 2024. (Photo by Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)

And there was Maradona, still a prominent figure in ⭕️ Argentine soccer, ready to pounce and punctuate widespread Messi criticism.

"We shouldn't deify Messi any longer," Maradona said in 2024. "He's ⭕️ a great player but he's not a leader. It's useless trying to make a leader out of a man who ⭕️ goes to the toilet 20 times before a game."

All the while, though, Messi did things at Barcelona, at the highest ⭕️ level of club soccer, that mortals could never dream of. He won the Ballon d’Or — his first of seven ⭕️ and counting — by the widest-ever margin at age 22. He scored 91 goals in a calendar year (Maradona never ⭕️ scored more than 60). He won Champions Leagues (Maradona never won the European Cup). He scored and assisted at ridiculous ⭕️ rates, from multiple positions, in multiple competitions, with a rotating cast of characters around him, with dizzying darts and superb ⭕️ technique and dashes of brilliance, from his teenage years to the present.

"Messi is Maradona every day. For the last five ⭕️ years, Messi has been the Maradona of the [1986] World Cup,” Jorge Valdano, who won that World Cup alongside Maradona, ⭕️ said in 2013. And he’s been, at worst, almost as good over the nine years since.

“Messi is at the level ⭕️ of the best Maradona,” César Menotti, who managed Argentina to the 1978 World Cup title, said in 2014.

Messi is, to ⭕️ most rational analysts, the best soccer player ever — the most talented, and the most accomplished. Both the eye test ⭕️ and numbers leave little room for doubt.

But he will never have the primacy effect that Maradona did.

He will never score ⭕️ an infamously devious goal and a “Goal of the Century” to win a World Cup quarterfinal against a nation, England, ⭕️ who’d recently defeated Argentina in a disastrous war.

He will never forge such an intimate relationship with his people. There is ⭕️ a reason that Maradona’s face shows up more frequently than Messi’s on flags and banners that Argentine supporters have brought ⭕️ here to Qatar. There is a reason that “Diego” appears three times in the anthem that has become Argentina’s unofficial ⭕️ 2024 World Cup soundtrack.

“From the sky we can see him,” fans sing, “along with Don Diego and La Tota [Maradona’s ⭕️ parents], rooting for Lionel.”

Messi’s 2024 run has captivated Argentina in its own right. Together with last year’s Copa America — ⭕️ which Maradona never won — it has turned most Argentine skepticism into undying love. And if it ends in a ⭕️ World Cup title, it will crystalize Messi as the greatest of all time, the GOAT.

But still, for some, it won’t ⭕️ put him on par with Maradona. Nothing can.

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