The Copa America, and Messi’s Legacy
The very notion that Lionel Messi needed to win a title with Argentina to justify his place in football’s pantheon was preposterous. But what is even more so is the idea that winning the Copa America with Argentina — in a final so low on quality and so high on gamesmanship and theatrics — cements his stature as the greatest footballer in the game’s history.
The more reductive arguments will doubtless compare Messi’s ‘redemption’ to Cristiano Ronaldo’s with Portugal at Euro 2016. That’s just laughable. The Euros are a brutal competition, probably harder to win than the World Cup. To get to the summit, you need to first get past an arduous qualification campaign as well.
The Copa America, thanks to the greed and lack of vision of generations of administrators, is a ramshackle tournament. You don’t need to qualify for it, and it’s scheduled pretty much whenever CONMEBOL, the South American confederation, feels like it. Between 1975 and 1987, they went to the four-yearly cycle that makes the Euros so eagerly anticipated. Since then, it’s been a two-year gap sometimes, three years at others and a reversion to the four-year cycle between 2007 and ’15. Chile, who won it in 2015, retained their title a year later, in a tournament held in the United States to mark the centenary of the competition. It was so absurd you couldn’t make it up.
The contrast couldn’t be more stark. Euro ’84, which saw Michel Platini dominate a tournament like no man has before or since — scoring nine of France’s 14 goals — was missing Italy, World Cup winners in 1982, and Poland, who had finished third in Spain two years earlier. Between them, the two won just two games in the qualifying campaign.
In the next qualification cycle, France — with the Magic Square midfield now dismantled by Father Time — managed just a single win out of eight. Those are just two examples of how hard it was to even make it to the Euros, at least until it was expanded to its current 24-team format in 2016.
Despite the increase in the number of teams, just look at the carnage at the last two Euros — Iceland beating England, Wales getting the better of Belgium, Switzerland seeing off France, Hungary’s draws against Germany and the French, to name just a few. This year’s Copa saw eight of the ten teams advance to the quarterfinals. To say that the group phase was low pressure would be an understatement. Teams didn’t just have a safety net, but a crash barrier as well.
History also tells us that aside from Uruguay, who have a long history of overachievement, challenges to Argentina and Brazil are sporadic and cyclical. An outstanding Peru side featuring Teofilo Cubillas won the first tournament of the Copa America era in 1975, and a strong Colombian side briefly upset the old order at the turn of the millennium, while Chile built on the Marcelo Bielsa years to win two in a row in the last decade. But by and large, the other South American nations can’t compete with the depth of talent that Brazil and Argentina possess.
None of this should be read as criticism of Messi the player, who’s easily right up there with the best that any of us have watched. In his prime, he would make you gasp and scream, such was the otherworldliness of the skills on display. To say that losing a World Cup final in extra time or faltering at the final step of the Copa America somehow tarnished his legacy was just stupid.
Football is a team sport, and so much of it reliant on luck. Just look at Mario Gotze and how his career has unravelled after the wonder goal that denied Argentina in the 2014 World Cup final. On another day, he wouldn’t have been able to cushion the cross so perfectly off his chest, or the subsequent volley would have missed the target from the most acute of angles. But he didn’t, the ball went in and that’s all we remember.
But we need to be especially careful when anointing someone The Greatest. There are so many different factors to consider, not least the manner in which they’ve influenced the game. Pele and Diego Maradona barely left a blip on the sport after they retired. Franz Beckenbauer won trophies both as player and coach, but you’d be hard pressed to associate a certain style of play or philosophy with his teams.
In that respect, it’s hard to look beyond Johan Cruyff. The heartbeat of a dazzling Dutch team as a player, Cruyff’s influence on the modern game is impossible to overstate. As coach, it was he that templated a playing style that gave rise to perhaps the greatest club side we’ve ever seen — Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona. There isn’t a contemporary coach worth the name who hasn’t studied Cruyff’s methods.
Even those that have positioned themselves stylistically at the other end of the football-aesthetic spectrum used Cruyff and Barcelona as the reference point. And while he didn’t come up with his ideas in a vacuum — he played under two legendary coaches in Rinus Michels and Stefan Kovacs at Ajax — it was Cruyff’s insistence on instilling a clear philosophy throughout the player pyramid that resulted in Barcelona’s academy throwing up a golden generation of talent that included Messi.
We don’t yet know whether either Messi or Ronaldo will make the transition to coaching. But while they have only their on-field exploits to speak for them, it’s far too early to hand out greatest-ever gongs. True greatness, as Cruyff showed over the course of five decades in football, transcends the turf.