The explosive debates that have followed the FIFA World Cup 2026, especially about the legacy and status of Leo Messi, as the Greatest of All Time in football, reminded me— for some odd, tangential, but explainable reasons —of Ragnar Lorthbrok the Viking King, William Shakespeare, the widely regarded greatest writer in the English language. For me, the question is not so much about the GOAT-ness, so to speak, of Messi but about why Messi. I recognize the antagonism as a result of the standards that Messi has set for himself.
People like to question things, and sometimes questioning things may mean doubting their truism. On one hand, there is the denial that Leo Messi is great enough to be the GOAT, on the other hand, there is the argument that his GOAT-ness is unmerited. The debates are murky and, if the 2026 FIFA World Cup has shown anything else, ugly. That Messi may not be someone's preferred GOAT is acceptable (in a subjectively egalitarian world, it should be okay to let someone call green their blue), that he is a cheat is not only heartbreaking but misleading, for a football career that has spanned two decades of top-tier performance.
The question, again, is why Messi. But it is not some why that aspires to an answer. It is a rhetoric of disavowal: it should not be Messi, and if it is Messi, then it is not what it is, it is a fraud, statistics be damned. I first sensed this malignant questioning of greatness when I studied Shakespeare as a Literature undergraduate at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. The excellence and transcendence of his works considered, a group of scholars, over the years, has variously questioned whether or not William Shakespeare truly authored the literary works attributed to him.
As an undergraduate student, what first became concerning to me was the religiosity of the inquiry into the authorship of the works, mostly because they are “too good” to be written by a glover's son born in Stratford-upon-Avon. I do not contest the possibility of Shakespeare not authoring any of the works, I only wondered if the same fervour would be deployed were the work less in quality. On the one hand, there are those who argue the obscurity of Shakespeare's existence; on the other hand, there are those who argue the unfamiliarity of Shakespeare to court manners and social sophistication exhibited in his works, closely followed by those who believe that the works were written by (or written in collaboration with) an aristocrat who did not desire to be associated with them. The construct to borrow from this venture is that greatness invites scrutiny, sometimes to the point of self-immolation.
One would think that immolating Leo Messi or any sports player in contemporary times is an impossible task, given how greatly documented their games and lives are in the public domain, but the reverse is the case. In ‘big’ 2026, the year of AI-doctored videos and images, public amnesia stems and spreads rapidly so much that the same man who has been seen playing, extensively recorded in training and on the pitch, is thought a fraud, unfairly favored. Unlike Shakespeare, immolating Messi by denying his existence is impossible, but immolating him as the best ever, by propping him up as FIFA's favourite player favored with fixtures and on-field decisions, is doable.
From ‘Ankara Messi’ to ‘Pessi,’ the football world has showered the little boy from Rosario with all of the feelings, but the campaign against him and his team in the last World Cup was a blighting souvenir in sports history, no thanks to the digital space. First, there was sheer doubt: he did it in 2022, can he do it again? A question that is intended to mean that it was impossible for him to repeat the feat. Never minding that his team did their own homework, drawing only once and beating all other teams, never minding that an entire team of referees and linesmen, including an all-Portuguese team, was used in their matches, people either fell for banter taken too far or propaganda too titillating to ignore.
Although there was first the controversial “red-card worthy” tackle by Messi, as some of his critics argued, the matches against Cape Verde, Egypt, Switzerland and England were the boiling points. So often and off-kilter was the impressive run of comebacks, mostly at the nick of time, that the fairness of the sport became a subject of jokes and memes online. Some people even went as far as nicknaming Argentina “VARgentina,” believing that even the non-human intermediary has been designed to favor the Albicelestes. “Nothing is handed to us,” Messi said in the tournament, but that was already late— for example, the English pundits and media houses were already knee-deep in some dark PR against Leo Messi and Argentina. The Telegraph UK tagged Messi's Argentina win a game riddled with “31 dirty tricks”.
Tricks are what you associate with people who do not have the wherewithal to win but who want to win by that means, if that is what it takes. There is an animistic angle to trick making; it is that in your material possession or effort, there is the pseudo-/spiritual power to control what is otherwise not meant to be yours. Ragnar Lorthbrok, the Scandinavian historical character (the forebear of Erling Haaland and co), would have thought so, too. But even for Ragnar, there are limits to what spirited tricks can do. Sometimes, admitting the greatness of the other team or the other player, in spite of one's ache, is the ultimate trick. Ragnar has this understanding, and stops at nothing to show it when he sits with King Robert who, unlike Ælla, sees a fraternal connection where the latter sees an unforgivable heathen.
Perhaps what the people who fancy Ronaldo as a player and regard him as the GOAT of football have against Messi is the same thing Ælla has against Ragnar: an unbending will to ridicule, deny and eliminate the humanity of their opposition. It seems as though the achievements that had eluded Messi were the actual destiny of La Pulga. His elimination of all holds they had on him by winning back-to-back with Argentina appears to be a taboo, not only broken but advertised to their faces repeatedly by the criminal. He conquered his peak, shook hands with paradise, as the very poetic Peter Drury put it— and this was too good to be true, this was punishable, too. The wins effectively stepped down the GOAT conversations from statistics-focused exchange to the artistic performance of sensationalism. Messi never stops breaking records— even in the worst team performance, he records his own personal records (like being the first player to start 3 World Cup finals), which he has never cared enough to gloat about. This is the kind of thing that makes Messi guilty— being that good and unassuming cannot go unpunished.
Records, medals, goals, assists, game influence, dribbles, all come to nought in the face of socially engineered content. On Friday, 24 July 2026, my academic mentor, who is a Professor of English Language, nearly fell for one of the negative contents made about the Argentinian team. I told him that the digital culture was a landmine and that the video was one of the traps, as I pointed to the tiny “AI-generated” watermark on the bottom left side of the video. In the video, three allegations are raised: Argentina held up a political statement, “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (“The Falklands are Argentine”), at the post-match celebration against England, Argentina turned their back on Spain when they were celebrating, and FIFA President had decided, for these reasons, to suspend their automatic qualification for the 2030 World Cup.
It was easy to debunk the falsehood in that video, because the points, except the Falklands allusion, are kept within football, unlike the one he had earlier sent. “How Argentina practically eliminated its African population,” the video tag reads. The video vaingloriously extended the conversation beyond football, disregarding Argentina as a country because they have a history of racism. It obviates reason, to agree to propaganda that Argentina are not fair winners, and by so doing, Leo Messi could not have been, never has been, will never be, the GOAT of football. I asked a few questions: how does this connect to sportsmanship on a pitch with an equal number of players, time and resources? How does this have anything to do with Leo Messi as the best player ever? Does the country of his main rival not have a similar history? Why does this conversation have to come at the height of his career?
It is not that racism should be tolerated, forgotten or appropriated in niceties. It is that it is an easy pathway to a conversation that is remotely connected to it. It is the Messi Scare, this horrendous unsportsmanlike campaign. If Argentina lost out in the group stage, the point about racism would not be made— the avalanche of media files, textual and audiovisual, that followed the final about racist Argentina only goes to show that the purveyors of the narrative would not have cared about it if there was no hidden, anti-Messi agenda to pursue. What is sure is that their fellow anti-Messi fans would find a way to discredit Messi and Argentina, even if they won— they had consistently done this before the World Cup.
From brain-rotting theories, to labelling Messi's spell at PSG a failure for such a general performance that other players are praised for to undermining the seriousness of American “soccer,” Ronaldo's fanbase has long graduated, and known, to demonstrate that greatness attracts vile wishes. And more often than not, vile wishes become evil actions in forms of signed petitions, sponsored/dark PR, outright attacks, insults. Not all great ones who have faced a questioning of their greatness survive it. One would even do well to admit something here: greatness comes to hibernation or death eventually; if not by forced removal, it will come by eventual surrender. It appears that the former is desired by Penaldo's fanbase, that their ewúrẹ may shine at the mutable age of 45, if nowhere else, at Portugal/Morocco/Spain 2030.
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