Success in World Cup will be greatest measure Messi can hope for

In the decade since Lionel Messi started to display to a wide audience the qualities that would make him the greatest footballer of the 21st century so far, a sustained effort has gone into identifying a nemesis for him. It makes a good, sustainable story if there is lively duel for status going on around him.

Lionel Messi often finds himself being compared to Cristiano Ronaldo, his contemporary who plays at Real Madrid and whom he faces often as a member of Barcelona, or to Diego Maradona, the World Cup leShow more

In the decade since Lionel Messi started to display to a wide audience the qualities that would make him arguably the greatest footballer of the 21st century so far, a sustained effort has gone into identifying a nemesis for him.

It makes a good, sustainable story if there is lively duel for status going on around him.

Mostly, over the past five years, Cristiano Ronaldo has been portrayed as the chief rival. Between them, those two players have won the past five Ballons d'Or, the most prestigious individual award in the sport.

Helpfully, they are the figureheads for the two clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid, who share just about the most prominent club rivalry in the world.

Then, every four years at World Cup time, another great is held up for comparison, for challenge, against Messi. It is his Argentinian compatriot, Diego Maradona.

They have much in common: diminutive, enchanting dribblers, scorers of great goals and, as of tonight, captains in a World Cup final.

Like it or not, the outcome of Argentina versus Germany in Rio de Janeiro will be used as one factor to measure which of Maradona, who was at his peak in the 1980s, or Messi, who at 27 should logically be at his peak now, is the greater.

The comparison, like most that cut across eras, is tricky, abstract. Maradona’s period was more demanding in some ways.

Referees were less protective of skilled players and he was subjected to some brutal treatment by opponents. He was inadequately managed, too, in as far as nobody stopped him taking certain lifestyle choices that endangered his health.

Messi is far more the model professional and lives in an age where to succeed consistently, as he has, high standards of professionalism are compulsory.

Messi scores more goals than Maradona and has collected many more prestigious team prizes, notably three Uefa Champions League titles with Barcelona.

His senior achievements are concentrated with one team, the only club he played for, and part of the fascination with Messi the international lies in wondering how he can adapt his game to colleagues who do not use Barcelona’s developed pass-and-move routines.

Maradona stood out for a few different sides, including Barcelona, and inspired Napoli to a rare Italian league triumph, a huge achievement in a Serie A that was then a harder division than any in the world to win.

But his club medals shine less brightly than his international ones. The 1986 World Cup was his greatest monument, a tournament over which Maradona towered, the standout star in Argentina’s triumph.

Messi always gives the appearance of fussing far less over comparisons with Ronaldo and Maradona than other people do, including Ronaldo and Maradona.

If you asked him who was his individual nemesis, then he would most likely identify it as a defender who regularly marks him tightly and effectively, maybe a goalkeeper he again and again struggles to beat.

But if you then asked Messi to describe in more detail his most regular, collective nemesis, then it might very well look a lot like the team who confront him at the Maracana – the group of players standing between Messi’s fierce ambition of a World Cup win to add to his four Ballons d’Or, three Champions League titles and other club honours.

Run through the serious setbacks of Messi’s glorious career and you will find many of the Germans he confronts on Sunday night.

Rewind two World Cup tournaments, for instance, and you find Messi, 19, in Berlin, recovering from injury, frustrated to be sitting with Argentina’s substitutes and heart-broken when his team lost a penalty shoot-out in the quarter-final to Germany.

Philipp Lahm, Per Mertesacker and Bastian Schweinsteiger, who may all be given some of the responsibility for monitoring Messi at the Maracana, were in that German side.

Rewind to one of the most painful nights of Messi’s Barcelona odyssey, a watershed Champions League semi-final two years ago when a mythic club side, and their style of football, seemed to be utterly dismantled.

On the cast list for Bayern Munich 4, Barcelona 0 (by the end of the second leg the aggregate score would be 7-0) were Manuel Neuer, Lahm, Jerome Boateng, Schweinsteiger and Thomas Muller, who scored twice that evening.

All will most likely be in the starting XI for Germany in Rio.

Now go back four years to Cape Town and another World Cup quarter-final. As many as 11 Germans involved in that match against Argentina could participate again tonight, reviving memories that Messi and his teammates would rather erase.

Not many teams win 4-0 against a side with Messi in it. Germany, like Bayern in 2013, did so that day. Argentina had no answer and it marked the end of the reign of the national coach of the time, Maradona, who had patently failed to get the best out of his star player.

Follow us on twitter at @SprtNationalUAE