Messi and Ronaldo will play their fifth and last World Cup

This World Cup will extinguish the light of an entire galaxy. It will most likely be the last time Luka Modric, Thiago Silva, Daniel Alves, Manuel Neuer, Thomas Müller, Jordi Alba, Ángel Di María, Luis Suárez, Edinson Cavani, Eden Hazard and Antoine Griezmann grace the greatest stage in sport. . Robert Lewandowski, Gareth Bale, Arturo Vidal, Alexis Sánchez and James Rodríguez could still join them, another clutch of superstars on a farewell tour.

Of course, the World Cups have always had that purpose. Just as they are the place where greatness is forged, they also function as the place where it says goodbye to the public. It’s not that unusual for players — as Silva and Alves in particular have done — to continue their careers to secure yet another shot at the biggest prize of all. After all, the 2006 World Cup final was Zinedine Zidane’s last goodbye.

In that sense, this World Cup is no different from the others. And, despite everything, the transparency of the numbers suggests something different; It gives the impression that football will arrive at the tournament with an elite and leave it with a completely different one. This is not because there is a higher than normal proportion of famous players at the end of their careers. It’s because there are more famous players, period.

The last 15 years are likely to be seen almost exclusively through the lens of Messi and Ronaldo. They have, after all, dominated this era of football and so it is fitting, in many ways, that they end up defining it.

However, such an interpretation would be reductionist. Instead, it is best seen as the first era when football was truly global: an era in which fans around the world were able to watch almost every second of a footballer’s career, in which the greats and the The good ones met with unprecedented frequency in the Champions League and came into our homes via video games, a time when exceptional talent was congregated in a handful of superclubs.

The generation that will leave the stage in Qatar is the last bastion of the first generation of footballers who began and ended their careers in that ecosystem; it is the equivalent of that blossoming of shared and mass popular culture that germinated in the 1960s. Lewandowski is much better known, much more famous than Gerd Müller, his predecessor at Bayern Munich, was. More people will be watching when Suárez withdraws from the Uruguayan team, which he will have been dismayed by the departure of Enzo Francescoli.

–