Messi turns 37: Why are we going to remember the genius without needing to list his goals or records

The man who can turn a five-centimeter piece of cardboard into a historic card that is auctioned for $522,000 turned 37 this Monday, June 24. He’s already a dad. He already has a beard and gray hair. And he has already made so many highlights in his career that his goals do not fit into a terabyte.

Although he continues running as if he were a teenager whose prize is some Milanese, it is clear that Lionel Messi will soon be an ex. And like the good exes who crossed our path, the first ‘flashback’ when someone says his name will trigger the question of where we were every time we saw him, and what we were like with DVD and without TikTok and how much we’ve grown since he lost three finals in a row and in Qatar they won the most important World Cup in history. It’s football, but that’s also called nostalgia.

While that happens, Messi’s biographers are using all possible arts to immortalize his influence on the field and off it. The filmmakers have already completed nine series and films in five years—the latest being Apple’s “Messi: The Rise of a Legend”—the financiers explain their influence on Major League Soccer and the millions of dollars it generates, and, the artists, those gentlemen who see what others do not see, make their own the acrobatics of a ‘Flea’ on the grass. If we read them well, they are almost a theatrical act.

That Cirque du Soleil has put on “Messi 10”, a work based on its magic, if not its defiance of the laws of physics, is just a blessed consequence that we will soon see in Lima (from August 7 to 11 in Arena 1 of the Costa Verde of San Miguel). An ideal opportunity to bring together in the same room the grandfather who grew up with Pelé, the father who adored Maradona and the son who, in the most agonizing moment of the Peruvian team, the team that at the beginning of 2000 had no fans, asked to be Messi. because to be Messi was to be the best.

Like the passage of comets, a natural phenomenon once every hundred years, these new last days of Messi on a soccer field are unique. Fate wanted it to happen in Miami, so close to Disney, where he dreamed of going as a child. It is inevitable destiny that they are less and less. Let’s enjoy it. In the stadium, in the Copa América, in the cinema, and now in the circus.