You know what, I’m just going to say it: Lionel Messi is the Lionel Messi of Lionel Messis.
Sorry, hold on—let me try that again.
What I meant to say was: Lionel Messi is to Lionel Messi as Lionel Messi is to Lionel Messi.
Is this making any sense?
I’m sorry, a bunch of my keyboard buttons seem to have been replaced this morning by the words “Lionel Messi” Lionel Messi (that last one was actually supposed to be a period) Lionel Messi (again) UGH Lionel Messi.
This is the point we have reached in the Lionel Messi hype-cycle: Total Messi. The man is ubiquitous. There is no escape. During Argentina games, the announcers talk nonstop about Messi, and in the studio at halftime the talking heads talk about Messi, and during ad breaks all the commercials feature Messi. He has swallowed not only the sport but the language, visual and verbal, that surrounds it. If we had a powerful enough microscope, I think we would discover that the universe is made up of subatomic interlocking Messis.
If you’re not an Argentina fan, or you’re just in the wrong mood, this can feel oppressive. Like the rest of humanity, and probably some alien creatures in neighboring galaxies, I have been tracking Argentina’s run through the World Cup closely. In the beginning, I was charmed by the endless waves of fans wearing Messi jerseys. Haha! I said. Look at all the Messis! Wonderful! We are all united in the joy of fútbol! I, too, wanted to join the cult of Infinite Messi.
I could go on. You could, of course, make similar charges against many teams and players — professional athletes, notoriously, are not a particularly enlightened bunch. But that didn’t make any of it right. I kept following Argentina, but I felt my enthusiasm wane.
It didn’t help that, on the field, Argentina has been consistently disappointing. They had the easiest possible road through the tournament but still managed to make it look very hard. The team has a terrible habit of playing down to the level of its competition. You could pit Argentina against a team of local 6-year-olds and, after the halftime orange slices were cleared away, look up to see that the score was somehow locked at 1-1 — and the game would only be decided in the waning seconds, after a defender got distracted because his sister opened a noisy bag of cookies on the sideline and Messi used that slight opening to create a miraculous goal.
It also didn’t help that two of Argentina’s wins were tainted by controversial calls involving the unorthodox use of video review: A goal by Egypt was shockingly disallowed, and a Swiss player was sent off under unprecedented circumstances. (He left the field weeping.) It was easy to feel conspiratorial — and online, people did. The memes swarmed. Messi was too big to fail, FIFA’s favorite, and all the corporate interests were aligned to promote the most lucrative possible narrative: the GOAT, in his final World Cup, leads his team to a repeat championship.
Last weekend, I went in person to see Argentina play Switzerland. Because of thunderstorms and canceled flights and general World Cup mania, it took me 25 hours to get from New York to Kansas City. I had to fly to St. Louis in the middle of the night, then drive all the way across Missouri. But it seemed worth it. In spite of everything — the unsavory rumors and sketchy vibes and lackluster play and controversial calls — this was history. This could easily be Messi’s final World Cup game. I wanted to be there.
When I arrived, the Sea of Messis had taken over a park downtown — and once again, I plunged right in. I saw Messis taking selfies with police officers, a gray-haired Messi with a mohawk, a Messi in a surgical walking boot. I saw Messis browsing in Old Navy, Messis eating in the Cheesecake Factory. In the park, the Messis stood, drumming and chanting, for many hours.
But you can never step into the same Sea of Messis twice. In Kansas City, I wasn’t quite as charmed by the Messis as I had been, several weeks earlier, when I first met them in Dallas. Now I found them overwhelming. Argentina’s blue and white stripes were burned onto my retinas. I no longer wanted to join the cult. I had Messi exhaustion.
Even some of the Messis seemed to feel this way. In the park, I watched a group of kids playing soccer, but so many of them were wearing Messi jerseys that they had to stop because they couldn’t tell one another apart. (Finally, half of them took their shirts off.) The next morning, at my hotel, I sat eating breakfast surrounded by infinite Messis. At my table, I struck up a conversation with two very friendly Messis from China. The man didn’t seem to speak English, so the woman interpreted for us. At one point, gesturing around the room, I said: “So many Messis!” The man looked up and, for the first and only time, spoke to me in English. “Too many Messis,” he said.
The game, later that day, was terrible. Both teams played poorly. It felt like watching a screen saver. To my surprise, I found myself rooting for Switzerland — an underdog whose fans were vastly outnumbered. (A large percentage of the seats I thought contained Swiss supporters turned out to be empty: They just happened to be red, because this was the stadium of the Kansas City Chiefs.) I was tired of traveling, tired of watching soccer, ready for my Messi experience to end. And for a long time, as Argentina struggled to score, it seemed like it actually might.
But this wasn’t the end of Messi — of course it wasn’t. The game got very dramatic, and once again, in the closing minutes, Argentina found a way to pull it out. They scored a miracle goal in extra time, a shot kissed by the gods, and this time it wasn’t even Messi — it was his young teammate Julián Alvarez. Minutes later, Argentina added another. They won, 3-1. Somehow, they had scrapped their way into the final four. I had to laugh.
After the game, pandemonium broke out among the infinite Messis. The actual Messi, meanwhile, took his jersey off and whipped it around, joyfully, chanting with the crowd. Argentina fans celebrated in the stands for a very long time, chanting, partying, drumming, screaming. The police kept trying to clear them out, to take away the drums — but the Infinite Messis would pass the drums backward, from one Messi to another, until the police gave up.
Finally, very late at night, the Sea of Messis flowed back outside. The drums (some of which, by the way, have pictures of Messi on them) kept drumming. I stood and watched a circle of Messis dancing rhythmically around a Messi who was wearing a Messi mask — and at one point, all of the Messis started bowing to the masked Messi in the middle, chanting Messi’s name, and the Messi in the middle started bowing back to all of the Messis surrounding him. Suddenly, my whole life felt unreal. I felt like I was watching a pure religious ritual. Like I had made contact with a civilization of Messis that had never before been witnessed by an outsider. And once again, against my better judgment, I found myself being swept away by the wild joy of the Messis.
“Hey!” someone said.
I recognized a Messi I had met at one of the previous giant Messi parties. He had taught me how to properly mix and drink fernet con coca, Argentina’s official drink.
“Did you enjoy the game?” he asked.
“Uh … no,” I said. “Not at all. Did you?”
He laughed.
“We have a saying in Argentina,” he said. “If you are not suffering, you are not really Argentine.”
Around us, the crowd started to move. It flowed across the parking lot and up a jungly hill — I stood and watched as all the Messis disappeared into the tall vegetation, blue stripes fading into green. They seemed to be going back to some mystical paradise from which they sprouted before every match.
This week, against England, Argentina did it again. They played poorly, fell down a goal — and then stormed back with a flurry of offense right at the end. Messi, at age 39, was in the middle of it all, assisting on the tying goal and then the winning goal. It solidified, for him, one of the greatest World Cup runs ever. Heading into Sunday’s final, against Spain, Messi has scored or assisted on 12 of Argentina’s 19 goals — 63 percent of their scoring. (That’s not even counting his two missed penalty kicks, which I will never stop believing he missed on purpose because he has too much respect for the game and those are just too easy.)
Has any seemingly overhyped phenomenon done a better job living up to the hype? It reminds me — and I do not say this lightly — of seeing Michelangelo’s David in person. The image is so familiar that you don’t think you need to see the real thing, not really — but then you do see it, and you realize that you needed to see it, and that you are going to need to see it again, and then again, as many times as you possibly can. This is the embodiment of aura: a chunk of pure presence that roots you back in reality.
Messi is like that. And now, in spite of it all, we do get to see him again, in the World Cup final, one final time. And bring whatever noise you want — there is something joyful and irreducible here, something that the most cynical cynicism on earth can’t touch. Language fails. In the end, all we can say is Messi Messi Lionel Messi Messi Lionel Lionel Messi Messi Messi Messi Messi.