“Never has a footballer given away so much football. What a pity that tomorrow’s will be his last performance in a World Cup ”

Elsa, a 77-year-old Ecuadorian lady, doesn’t know about soccer, she’s never been seduced. She became fond of this World Cup. She supported Morocco. Not because she liked Morocco, she supposed that she was a more accessible rival for Argentina. But she lost. She immediately called her son, distraught, to ask her if she thinks France is too powerful a rival for Argentina. She is overwhelmed by the fear that Messi may not be champion. She trembles just thinking about it. Without realizing it, she also adores him and longs for him to lift this Cup. Like Elsa, hundreds of millions will suffer for him. Not for Argentina, for him. If Messi scored a goal tomorrow, the decibels of the celebration would be equivalent to a thousand atomic bombs. Except in Spain and the Netherlands, in millions of homes in America, Asia, Africa, Europe a scream will cross the seas, mountains, time zones and will connect to deafen cosmic space in a GOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLL! one of those who roar with their soul, a GOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL! of those of us who hug the first person we see, kiss the dog, trip over the living room table, break a glass, hurl an insult, go out on the balcony to yell our emotion at someone…

In Bangladesh, the TV will mesmerize 170 million Bengalis who will expect a triumph of their earthly deity. If he wins, they will go out as always on their motorcycles, in a caravan through the streets of the entire country, with the light blue and white shirt and the number 10. The United States, Brazil and England, where they especially admire Messi, will fill the bars waiting for the dream that everyone wishes this god sent to football.

In La Paz, Bolivia, it will be eleven in the morning at the crucial time of the Argentina-France match. A woman with her mother and her son, nothing soccer fans, like Elsa, will meet in the living room to watch this planetary event: watch a world final with Messi on the pitch. And with a historical seasoning: his last World Cup match. Messi has a special connection with women and children. They have a very high sensory perception and love him even more than men, who understand his game. They see in him the child who still wants to go to the little square to play ball. He is over the thirty-five mark, he has grown children, but he seems to be waiting for game time to play with the boys. He lives football twenty-four hours. He spent a billion euros and has received all the Ballon d’Ors, distinctions and accolades possible and he still dreams of the little field, of making the pinnacle play, with geometry that others could not even imagine. The dribble, the feint, the brake, the hitch and then the goal, always the goal. It is the difference between Messi and the other soccer players in the world. They think about more earthly issues, money, women, luxury cars, yachts, mansions.

“Before I die, I would like to hug you,” said Mónica Dómina, her first through third grade teacher at the General Las Heras school in Rosario. “Señor” Mónica was interviewed on the radio and seemed to be speaking to Leo. “You are a wonderful, sensitive, simple, simple being, companion. Thank you for giving us extreme happiness in these times of so many setbacks. The boys idealize him as a kind of Superman, with superpowers for good. By God, let France not have the kryptonite!

“My wife loves Messi, I was lucky to have him face to face, shake his hand and introduce him to him,” said the notable English actor Patrick Stewart. “She was never interested in soccer, but she saw him play and she became a fan.” Adele, the delicious British singer took advantage of a break from her in her Las Vegas show on Saturday to surrender to 10: “I love you, Messi.”

His game also makes men fall in love. Roy Keane, probably the toughest of all the tough football has ever known, today a commentator, was given the Sky Sports microphone and he didn’t analyze the play for the third goal, he couldn’t, he just muttered as if to himself: “My God , what a player…!”. Meanwhile, his also famous chain partner, Gary Lineker, asked: “Is there still a debate that he is the best of all time?” And the star columnist for Berlin’s Sports Bild, Franz Josef Wagner, was poetic: “Dodge even the raindrops.” Wagner, “whose columns are slapped and caressed at the same time”, considers Messi “the favorite of the gods”. Before closing his jewel, Franz gives us another collector’s item: “At the age of 14 he was 1.39. He played ball at the height of the flowers ”.

Josko Gvardiol, the 20-year-old Croatian defender whom Leo took for a walk in the immortal play, is grateful: “Now I will be able to tell my children that I played against Messi. I was always a superultra fan of his.” Josko was considered, until then, the best defender in the Cup. Lluis Mascaró, Barcelona’s director of Sport, emphasizes: “Messi doesn’t need to win a World Cup to be the best footballer in history. Because he already is. There has not been, there is not and there will never be a player like him”.

What will go through the mind of the most beloved subject in world football? The school was a bureaucratic and inescapable obligation. He was an almost absent boy, who found just enough to pass with six. “He was the smallest of all, very quiet. He lived waiting for recess to go out to play ball in the yard, ”recalls Cintia Arellano, his bench partner, who helped him with homework. In the green rectangle, however, his mental processor has ten times more gigabytes than the rest of the players. Observe, solve and execute at a higher speed. Your peripheral vision and degree of creativity are beyond the reach of your colleagues. In general, the entire guild of the ball has joined his prayers in procession wishing him victory. The well-remembered Rivaldo, champion with Brazil in 2002, was the standard-bearer for those wishes: “God knows all things and he will crown you this Sunday, you deserve this title for the person you are and for the wonderful football you have always played ”. You can’t give so much and not get that prize. But soccer is a game of eleven, if it doesn’t happen, there will be a certainty: they have done everything humanly possible to be champion.

Never has a footballer given away so much football, it’s been eighteen years and two months that he goes with a basket of genius offering them to the stands. That in transit at 36 a player continues to give these recitals football never saw it. Too bad it’s getting big. May this morning be his last show at a World Cup. We have lived an unrepeatable history.