NEW YORK- It was four hours before kick-off in Houston and Lionel Messi fever already offered the impression of a religious festival. An enterprising local sold massive signs of the great man’s face. I chatted to a guy who has four Messi tattoos and it’s only the ones on his legs that I was interested in seeing. A flurry of Argentine broadcasters conducted interviews at 8am and barked the name of their king a little louder than every other word.
It was a guy who has travelled from Guatemala who I remember most. We talked breezily about how many times he had seen Messi play and how watching him transported the man to a different place spiritually. And then he stopped smiling for a moment: “It might be the last time I see him play, you know”.
That’s something I have been thinking about a lot during this tournament, not least because my own route was pre-planned and offered no escape to sneak in some bonus Lionel time. I thought that Houston was probably my last. Then I hoped that Atlanta would, given what it meant for England.
And now here I am, in New York City preparing for a final. And for the second time in four years, here Messi is again. Dragging a team to one World Cup final could be classed as greatness by any standard. Dragging one to two transcends any measurement.
The day before the match in Houston, I got a message from my mum: “Am I right in thinking that you are going to see Messi play?” That has become an irregular theme of my last decade or so. That’s why I’ve been thinking about these being my last times.
My mum got me into football. By the time I was five, my parents had divorced and it was me and her. I have a vivid memory of her going to the 1991 FA Cup final to watch Nottingham Forest, I think, because it was the last Forest match before I started going. At age five, I had my first season ticket and we went to every home game from then on.
Soppy tweet: My mum was the one who first took me to football. We always said we would go together to watch Lionel Messi play for Barcelona. Bucket list item ticked off (assuming no warm-up injury). pic.twitter.com/7DrM0MuUgE
— Daniel Storey (@danielstorey85) December 2, 2017Life then got in the way, as life tends to with adolescent boys. I started going with mates, then to away games from university, and the Forest connection between my mum and me disappeared. It was entirely selfish on my part, in that accidental way that kids are guilty of.
Several years later (and it should not have taken me that long), I had a sudden realisation: my mum hadn’t attended a single Forest match since we stopped going together. I still think that’s true now.She just stopped. Without that deep mother-son connection, Forest and football had less meaning.
She liked football in a way, I suppose, but really she was going because it was me and her and because it was the thing I loved more than anything in the world. I should have realised that and I’m an idiot for not doing so.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Messi got my mum back into football, even if that sounds saccharine and too good to be true. I don’t know how it happened, and it absolutely wasn’t my doing, but she fell in love with watching him for Barcelona under Pep Guardiola, and it snowballed from there. I would get regular weekend night messages telling me that he had scored twice and that I needed to see the pass for Andres Iniesta’s goal.
In December 2017, my mum and I went to Barcelona to watch them play twice in two days: La Liga and Champions League, two bites at it. Midway through the first half of the first match, Messi picked up the ball deep, dribbled forward, exchanged a pass and tucked the ball past the goalkeeper. You know what the finish looked like; you’ve seen it so many times before.
My mum was moved to tears. “He scored,” was all she said. I am lucky enough to have watched 1,000 football matches live, probably more. That goal ranks as my favourite football memory. It was none of my own work, and yet I could see a connection between my mum and football reformed. Messi literally succeeded where I had let us down. She will call me a soppy sod for writing that paragraph, and rightly so.
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That was nine years ago. A lot has changed since. With a permanent job that means watching lots of matches live, my mum and I speak more about general football and what I’m doing than we do about Messi. But obviously it sticks with us both. You add the greatest player of my lifetime with your parent’s favourite player and you create an inevitable bond.
This is unforgivably twee, but I feel lucky watching Messi because I know how much she would love to be watching him. And I think all of us who get paid to watch any football, let alone him play, should remind ourselves at least once a day that we have got a disgracefully good thing going on.
This is all amplified by the last age of Messi, as we are experiencing now. My mum doesn’t watch his Inter Miami performances and nor do I. The last time before this World Cup that I got a message from my mum about watching Messi was the last time I saw him in the flesh: the 2022 World Cup final.
With no disrespect intended, Messi made the move to leave European football – six months after the last World Cup – to prolong his international career and give him one more shot. Seeing him in MLS would be like seeing him in training: a lot of fun, but just not quite the same. And it’s the purest form of Messi I’m interested in.
I think that’s true for the vast majority of people, certainly outside of the US. There is a sense of occasion when Messi plays for Argentina that is almost overwhelming to observe live. Watch the people around you. See how they are here only for one person. They have travelled the world to see this man perform and he never lets them down because he has engineered his entire experience to peak on this stage.
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Kat Lucas: Help! I’ve been sportswashed by Trump’s America Daniel Storey: The World Cup final’s half-time show is an abominationThe only caveat to Messi’s omnipotence is the power to halt time. There will be a last time eventually: for me, for every one of his disciples, for the man himself. It wasn’t Houston. Maybe it’s Atlanta, maybe it’s New Jersey. Maybe he has one more go in him.
Football will lose a part of itself; that’s both sentimental hogwash and entirely true all at once. He defined a super team and a generation. He was not the fastest, biggest or most powerful, but he had the most talent and he connected more people than anyone else. Attend an Argentina game and tell me I’m wrong. The biggest match in world football takes place on Sunday. So many people will watch it through the prism of one man.
I don’t even really care that – or if – Messi is the best. He is my favourite and always will be, in the same way that your grandparents spoke in hushed tones about the mythical superstars of their own time. I don’t think my mum will love football in the same way again – I’m not even sure that she’s bothered about trying.
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