DOHA, Qatar.- Ernest Hemingway left an unfinished novel, Orson Welles an uncut film and Mozart several unfinished compositions. in soccer, Lionel Messi he has won it all. All? No, the World Cup, the most important tournament, remains for him to win. And he has a new opportunity. Probably the last.
“Sometimes I would like to go unnoticed,” he recently said Lionel Messi in an interview for the former Argentine world champion Jorge Valdano on Spanish television Movistar+. But it is an impossible mission: everyone in the football world is watching him. And I will be again on Sunday in the final. Many wanting him to win so that he can round off a fantastic career. Messi has played five World Cups and in none has he been able to be champion. The Qatar 2022 World Cup is presented as the last train.
In Doha his presence has generated great expectation in the last month and he has not been able to fulfill, for better or for worse, that desire to go unnoticed, a utopia when you are a world superstar, possibly the best footballer since Diego Maradona and has 376 million followers on Instagram.
It is also difficult to combine an almost congenital shyness with having to show a strong character, as happened in this world in tense matches like the quarterfinal against the Netherlands, or seeing your image on a billboard covering a six-story building posing in underpants for a well-known Italian clothing brand. Or when ‘spots’ with your image go on television around the world to sell hamburgers, soft drinks, cars or even tourist attractions in Saudi Arabia.
Before Qatar 2022, an advertisement that brought together Messi with his great rival of the last decade, Cristiano Ronaldo, playing chess on some suitcases from a French luxury brand, in a snapshot taken by the prestigious American photographer Annie Leibovitz.
The lucrative contracts and the anonymous life he dreams of is an irresolvable dilemma. “I would like to go to the supermarket, without having three hundred eyes looking at me. Especially when I am with my children, I would like to go unnoticed ”, he insisted at the end of 2020 in an interview on Spanish television La Sexta with the journalist and presenter Jordi Évole.
The passing of the years and the media exposure has left little of that Rosario boy who came to Barcelona at the age of 13 and underwent growth hormone treatment in Spain, since neither his club Newell’s Old Boys nor others in Argentina paid for it. In Catalonia and at the emblematic La Masía training school, the ‘Flea’ became big at Barça.
Away from family and surroundings, he grew strong, matured before his time, and learned early from Andres Iniesta, Xavi Hernández, Samuel Eto’o and the rest of the figures of FC Barcelona at that time. Frank Rijkaard gave him his first chances but it was already with Josep Guardiola that he made the big leap, forming part of one of the most brilliant moments in the history of the Barça club.
In it Barcelona he won four Champions Leagues, ten Spanish Leagues, three Club World Cups… The Camp Nou was his home until in 2021 he began an adventure at Paris Saint-Germain, which he arrived with an almost divine aura and with which, despite Due to the adaptation problems of the first season, he was also champion of the French league.
He arrived in Spain so young that there was even speculation about a possible choice between the selection of that country and Argentinabut he was always clear: his dream was to shine with the Albiceleste, the country he always longed for and of which he has always felt a part.
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In its beginnings it achieved important successes, the U-20 world title in 2005 and the Olympic gold medal in Beijing-2008. But from there, in the senior team he accumulated disappointment after disappointment, until the curse ended last year in the Copa América. He wants to use the wings that he gave that tournament to win the World Cup now.
In Paris, his current home, his wife Antonela Roccuzzo, his lifelong partner, and his three sons, Thiago, Mateo and Ciro, are his support and he wants to win the title in front of them.
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