Lionel Messi: A choice in homage to FC Barcelona
31.10.2023, 19:35 | Reading time: 5 minutes
Lionel Messi (left) and Aitana Bonmatí won the Ballon d’Or.
Photo: afp
Lionel Messi receives the Ballon d’or for the eighth time. The choice of Aitana Bonmatí also confirms the good training in La Masia.
Paris/Barcelona. So there they were posing together with their Golden Balls: Lionel Messi and Aitana Bonmatí. In normal life you would say they went to the same school. In the life of the winner of the 2023 series Ballon d’Or This also applies in exceptional cases.
Both came when they were 13 years old The Farmhousethe young talent academy FC Barcelona. Messi from Argentina, thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic. Aitana from Sant Pere de Ribes, half an hour by car.
Lionel Messi is the ultimate in football
Attacker Messi, 36, matured in the Masia to become the ultimate in his sport. For his World Cup title with Argentina, he was awarded the Golden Ball for the eighth time in Paris on Monday evening as the best player of a season (not the same as being voted FIFA World Player of the Year).
Two club colleagues in Paris: David Beckham is the owner of Inter Miami, Lionel Messi (left) is the best player of the team from Florida.
Photo: getty
Midfielder Aitana, 25, Champions League winner and world champion, won the trophy for the first time, following her club colleague Alexia Putellas from Mollet del Vallès, from the other end of Barcelona.
The Football Oscars, which are increasingly glamorous with award winners like Novak Djokovic and David Beckham, became a homage to a club that is actually in one of the worst crises in its history.
Barcelona has more than a billion euros in debt
Barcelona has more than a billion euros in debt and recently played no role in the men’s Champions League. But the Masia continually produces world-class; Whether from shy personalities like the young Messi or from people as combative as Aitana, who initially played among boys at her village club and whose parents once fought in court for the mother’s surname to be used before the father’s in Spain: “From them I mean resilience,” she said.
Aitana is still at the beginning, Messi is already at the end of his career. But what a career! The gala organizers laid the number 8 flat to the infinity symbol to illustrate its uniqueness.
Eight Golden Balls are a monument to a footballer who combines genius and consistency, just as Pelé, who died last December, did in history.
From Paris to Miami
Neither the decline of Barcelona nor his interlude at Paris Saint-Germain (2021 to 2023) or, most recently, the move to the second-tier US league to Miami are damaging him. On the contrary, he grew from the setbacks.
At the World Cup in Qatar he wrote one of the great heroic epics in sports history. After four failed attempts, a lot of criticism at home and even more self-doubt, he led his country to the title in the final against France (7:5 on penalties) last December, crowning a career that would otherwise always have been considered incomplete. “I’m happy to say that I didn’t fall over on the way,” said Messi himself.
Lothar Matthäus (“Farce!”) was pretty much alone in criticizing the voting behavior of an international committee of journalists. The time of Manchester City’s goal machine Erling Haaland, 23, and World Cup top scorer Kylian Mbappé, 24, will come.
The 2026 World Cup is still an issue
Messi himself predicted it to them on stage. However, further masterpieces from him cannot be completely ruled out. In Argentina they hope to continue their career until the 2026 World Cup. Messi himself didn’t give any specifics, but said he enjoyed football as ever: “Hopefully I can continue for a long time.”
He preferred to talk about his former club rather than himself. Aitana and he repeatedly referred to each other and their common roots. She mentioned the time of the historic Barça team around Messi, her role model Xavi and coach Pep Guardiola as her reference: “Those were some of the happiest years of my life.”
He emphasized “the luck” of having “played in the best club in the world and the best team in history: that made it easier to win individual prizes.” Messi even qualified his own words, with which he recently described his Argentines as “close” to Barça of those years: “Almost impossible that something like this will happen again.”
Just as his career will probably never exist again, that of the little magician from the Masia. After the traumatic separation in 2021 due to financial bottlenecks, there should be another worthy farewell for Messi at some point. “Barça is special, different from all the others,” he summed up in Paris: “It is the club that I love and will always love.”
2023-10-31 21:39:09
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