The article explores the intersection of two legendary soccer players, Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal, and the transitional nature of the upcoming World Cup. It highlights the importance of this moment in the sport's history and the launch of the next generational star.
Lamine Yamal of FC Barcelona celebrates victory after the LaLiga EA Sports match between FC Barcelona and RCD Espanyol de Barcelona at Spotify Camp Nou on April 11, in Barcelona, Spain.
In the fall of 2007, Lionel Messi, then 20 and already one of the biggest, if not the biggest, star in the world’s biggest sport, walked into the visitors’ locker room at Camp Nou, FC Barcelona’s cathedral of a stadium, for a photo shoot to find a mother and her 3-month-old son in a small plastic bathing tub waiting for him. Sheila Ebana and her husband Mounir Nasraoui had earlier entered a raffle sponsored by a Spanish sports newspaper.
The winners would get their photo taken alongside a Barca star for a charity calendar benefiting UNICEF. The couple was selected. So here were Ebana and her baby, Lamine Yamal. With a tentativeness that he never displayed on the pitch, Messi held Yamal upright in the tub before eventually taking him in his arms.
"The beginning of two legends," Nasraoui wrote in a caption of a photo from the session he posted on social media. Those legends intersect again at this summer’s World Cup, Messi passing the torch to the teenage sensation he once cradled.
Through this World Cup, its scale and excesses unmatched, through the genius and the greed, runs a common thread connecting the dots of the largest and most lucrative sporting event in the planet’s history: the unmistakable transitional nature and importance of this moment, the seismic shift in how the tournament is presented, bought and sold, the conditions in which it is played, and the launching of the sport’s next generational star, a player who can lead the game out of the long shadow cast by Argentina’s Messi, 38, and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, 41, over most of the last 20 years.
"I do not want to be the next Messi," said Yamal, the now 18-year-old superstar for Barca and Spain, the reigning European champion and World Cup favorite. "I want to be myself. " This World Cup, like Yamal’s sentiments, reflects FIFA’s determination to chart a new course and, as its critics charge, a disregard for the sport’s past and its millions of fans.
Lionel Messi of Argentina reacts prior to he international friendly match between Argentina and Honduras at Kyle Field on June 06, in College Station, Texas. (Photo by Tim Warner/Getty Images) Mexico and South Africa at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca on Thursday opens the 48-team, 104-match tournament played out over the course of 37 days in 16 North American cities, 11 in the U.S., that will feature the most teams, matches and fans in the World Cup’s 96-year history.
Indeed, the tournament is an 11-figure reminder of the cultural and entertainment power of the World Cup that has no equal on the planet. It is also a World Cup that is a reflection of the time and place in which it is held. The tournament’s July 19 final will take place at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, 10 miles from an ICE detention center that has seen continued and at times violent confrontations between protesters and law enforcement.
The tournament, according to Adam Beissel, a sports leadership and management professor at Miami (Ohio) University, will have "two legacies.
" "The first one being just the massive commercial windfall for FIFA, ushering it into an entirely new era," Beissel continued. "The second legacy is going to be creating a really pivotal moment within global geopolitics, particularly with the continued ascendancy of China, countries in the Middle East, (and) really what we might call the breakdown of the post-World War II consensus of global multilateralism and a unified west.
And I think this will be a pivotal time politically, and we might look back at this event and always link to the Trump administration and the ongoing domestic and international policy agenda of his administration. When we look back at all of sport megaevents, Olympic Games, World Cups, they always leave a legacy of that particular moment and I believe the political moment right now is certainly going to be one of those lasting legacies.
Another will be that this tournament will mark the final World Cup chapter in the careers of this century’s two greatest players, perhaps the greatest of any century, certainly since Diego Maradona, the tortured Argentine genius. Messi willed Argentina to, won four UEFA Champions League titles with Barcelona and was honored a record eight times with the Ballon d’Or, given to the world’s top player each year. won four Champions League crowns with Real Madrid, another with Manchester United, as well as leading Portugal to the 2016 European Championships title and claiming five Ballon d’Ors.
During a 10-year-period, between 2008 and 2017, only Messi and Ronaldo finished in the top two spots in the Ballon d’Or voting
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