Why Lamine Yamal is already better than Messi in some ways - ESPN

A couple of days before the 2022 World Cup final, I made a lot of people really angry.

I wrote a piece in which I claimed that we'd been having the wrong argument for the past 15 years. The question wasn't whether Lionel Messi was the greatest soccer player of the modern era. No, if you spend more than 15 seconds thinking about it or a couple of minutes looking at data, then it's quite clear that Messi is the greatest soccer player of the game's fully globalized era.

Instead, I said, we should be asking ourselves whether Messi was the greatest male athlete of all time. In short, the separation between Messi and the second-best player of the modern era (Cristiano Ronaldo) is as big as it is in any other major sport.

But the major difference between soccer and all of the major U.S. sports is this: way more people play soccer, so it's a lot harder to be that much better than your peers than it is in the NFL or the NBA. American football and basketball are sports still not played by large swaths of the globe, and they are sports not accessible to large portions of the population because of simple body-size requirements. If you look at it that way — and free yourself from wondering if Messi could play free safety for the New York Jets — then it becomes an argument between Messi and Usain Bolt because almost everyone can run 200 or 100 meters.

When you write and think about Messi, this is always where you end up: pushing logic to its absolute extremes. Given how emotional and how zero-sum sports seem, it's really easy to fall into hyperbole when writing about sports. Messi is the only athlete I've covered where it worked the other way: It was really hard to ever reach hyperbole.

I never thought I'd feel that way again, but I'm