Obsessed, millions of compatriots (many millions) missed out on enjoying the Lionel Messi younger and fuller, they refused the ecstasy of seeing him play and proudly saying: “Is Argentine!”.
It was more important to tell him that he was paid in euros and that if one day he appeared in the Copa Libertadores he would be unable to overcome the defenders.
Erased with a stroke of a pen and forever the anti-Messi bias in the magical weeks of November and December 2022, no one anymore discusses in Argentina what he is as a player and what he represents as a phenomenon, which may seem the same, but it is not.
A year ago, Messi put Argentina on the front pages and in the news around the world. A year later, the same thing is happening with Javier Milei.
Before, November 2020, dates the third recent occasion in which Argentina absolutely captured the world’s attention: the death of Diego Maradona and the indescribable wake at the Casa Rosada.
Messi, Milei, Maradona: three “M” with common points and many differences.
Messi is the clear incarnation of a phenomenon that, a year after it occurred, remains not fully explained.
Surely many readers were at 9 de Julio on December 18 and 20, 2022, there is no need to remember what that was.
Let’s think, now, what would happen to a teenager if one weekend his parents went on a trip, gave him the keys to the house, perhaps a house with a garden, even better if it had a pool, and told him: it’s yours, do what you want. you want the weekend.
The teenager is most likely throwing a party. It is very likely that his friends, his friends’ friends, many Instagram contacts and people he didn’t even know existed would come to that party.
That party, that lack of control, can end in tragedy. That of Argentina on December 20, 2022, too.
Why didn’t it happen? There were between four and five million people who were promised something that was not fulfilled. There were plenty of reasons for anger and protest. There is no scientific answer, no one can have the definitive answer, but it can be theorized: Argentines were just happy to be happybut what happened, and especially what did not happen, is related to Messi’s powers.
Powers that make him today the main supporter of the soft power Argentine, because Messi is a legend, but he is also soft power, the great element that sustains the Argentine brand, the door opener of a country with people very capable of making their way anywhere in the world, but who, like everyone, needs help .
Messi is today a sensation that everyone understands and everyone shares. From Buenos Aires to Kathmandu, from Tehran to Bogotá.
Messi’s value is incalculable
The oldest of us lived and enjoyed for years the advantages of “Argentina? Maradona!”. The phrase continues to sound, but the one that prevails today is “Argentina? Messi!”.
During the World Cup, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, Morro do Dendê, painted its streets light blue and white. It was only the most evident of an unprecedented, unthinkable phenomenon: An important sector of our Latin American neighbors wanted Argentina to win. Messi’s Argentina.
Permission to joke and exaggerate: the fact that there are people in Latin America who want to see us winners is almost more important than winning the World Cup itself.
The phenomenon continues, with Bolivian and Peruvian fans in the playoffs eager for their team to lose, because what matters to them is Messi’s Argentina.
Or with the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silvasaying that “Messi should serve as an example to Brazilian players.”
A missile Neymargran of the Jair Bolsonaroalthough the important thing is that it is something unprecedented: a president of Brazil, who in this case also knows a lot about football, saying that the best Argentine is an example for his people to follow.
Unviable in the Maradona years.
Maradona made an entire country feel proud and gave him, he gave us, the world title in Mexico 86, just four years after the Malvinas War. And many other things.
But Maradona was, of course, much more than a footballer. Maradona was a distillation of Argentinity, or a certain Argentinity.
For years It was impossible to understand Maradona without understanding Argentina beforebut there came a time when it became impossible to understand Argentina without first understanding Maradona, so intertwined and similar both became.
Argentina and Maradona: a lot of talent, a lot of potential and a moment in both their lives in which that talent and potential explodes to the maximum and takes them very far, to the top.
Although also: Argentina, Maradona and the eternal question of how it could come to this.
Maradona embodied the brilliant and superb Argentina, Argentina convinced of its destiny of inevitable power. For that also, Maradona allowed himself to give his opinion and pass judgment on everything: about George Bush and the Papaon FIFAabout their idols Fidel Castro y Hugo Chavez. He could say one thing and the opposite, love and hate the same person without much time apart.
And just as he was an enormous talent in many aspects and a good-hearted person, he was also very good at disqualifying, hurting, attacking, confronting.
Again: Maradona looked too much like his country.
As the son of a good public education, Maradona was a man who knew the exact meaning and weight of each word. A talent for expressing himself despite the fact that he was born and raised in very humble conditions.
Messi, already the son of an invertebrate Argentina, does not have that talent, his vocabulary is reduced, his sentences are short, without much depth. That’s how he feels comfortable and that’s how he shaped a different soccer Argentinity (and Argentinity). To the point of confusing even former president Cristina Kirchner, the fourth world front page in recent years, that when she heard the “andá pa’llá bobo” she praised Messi’s “maradonization.”
Nothing of that, If Messi achieved anything in the World Cup, it is to end forever the obligation to be seen through the prism of Maradona.. That’s why he also looks so happy in the Inter Miami con David Beckham.
A while ago, this public partnership between an Argentinian and an Englishman would have deserved objections.
If there are not, it is because Today’s Argentina is not Maradona, it is Messi. And that is why today Argentine football and the Argentine National Team can be loved in the region. With Argentina taken over by the spirit of Maradona, which was actually a national spirit, it was not possible.
If the party on December 20, 2022 ended well, it is because Messi’s Argentina had won.
What would Maradona have said on board that bus that was going nowhere? Impossible to know today, but surely he would not have shown that impassivity that Messi externally transmitted. With the attitude he showed, Messi – and with him his teammates – helped prevent a fire.
And that, in a country so prodigal in flames, is a lot, a lot.