joeinbrighton
New member
I don't buy the argument that Messi has to own a World Cup before he can be considered an all-time great. That may have been true once when European club football wasn't the omnipresent force that it is now and so the World Cup was the principal barometer of determining who the best player of any one time was, but these days, the top players are competing against one another all the time and Messi has shone in that competition over a number of years now. I'd say he is the best footballer I have seen in my time.
Also, there are some great players who are still regarded as great players even though they did not win anything for their country. Not because it was their fault, but because they were in teams that were otherwise not good enough to win tournaments, or in the case of George Best and George Weah, to even qualify for the World Cup. Even so, players like Puskas, Cruyff, Di Stefano and Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as Best, would surely be in most people's top 10-15 players of all time even though they never won a World Cup. In the last 30 years, you could say that Maradona, Zidane and Ronaldo are the only players who have really carried a team to win a World Cup on the strength of their own efforts (and in Zidane's case, France got to a final after he missed a couple of matches to suspension).
Argentina have never been the best team in the world during Messi's time and it is only because Messi is in the team that anyone would seriously have expected them to win a World Cup. His team-mates in a blue and white striped shirt also don't quite have the same understanding with him as his Barcelona team-mates do and they haven't built the team around him in the same way. In fact in 2010, under Maradona, he was completely marginalised. Although he did not light up the 2014 World Cup quite as you might have expected, it was his goals that won Argentina the group and therefore set them on the path to the final. But I think Argentina need to utilise him better if he is going to win them a World Cup, added to which, they need to strengthen a couple of areas of the team to be a major contender for a World Cup outside of South America.
Also, there are some great players who are still regarded as great players even though they did not win anything for their country. Not because it was their fault, but because they were in teams that were otherwise not good enough to win tournaments, or in the case of George Best and George Weah, to even qualify for the World Cup. Even so, players like Puskas, Cruyff, Di Stefano and Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as Best, would surely be in most people's top 10-15 players of all time even though they never won a World Cup. In the last 30 years, you could say that Maradona, Zidane and Ronaldo are the only players who have really carried a team to win a World Cup on the strength of their own efforts (and in Zidane's case, France got to a final after he missed a couple of matches to suspension).
Argentina have never been the best team in the world during Messi's time and it is only because Messi is in the team that anyone would seriously have expected them to win a World Cup. His team-mates in a blue and white striped shirt also don't quite have the same understanding with him as his Barcelona team-mates do and they haven't built the team around him in the same way. In fact in 2010, under Maradona, he was completely marginalised. Although he did not light up the 2014 World Cup quite as you might have expected, it was his goals that won Argentina the group and therefore set them on the path to the final. But I think Argentina need to utilise him better if he is going to win them a World Cup, added to which, they need to strengthen a couple of areas of the team to be a major contender for a World Cup outside of South America.