Cristiano Ronaldo has a dodgy calf and so his last, last dance with Lionel Messi is postponed indefinitely.
Messi’s Inter Miami will now face Aymeric Laporte’s Al-Nassr on Thursday evening in the Riyadh Season Cup, an exhibition event created to boost tourism in Saudi Arabia and also, more importantly, give Ronaldo and Messi “the ultimate duel”. That hasn’t gone to plan.
The first Riyadh Season Cup was “contested” between Messi’s Paris Saint-Germain and a Ronaldo-led “Riyadh Season XI” in January 2023, when PSG TV told fans to “appreciate their Goatness”. Then 90 minutes of half-pace football with the twin aims of driving engagement and not getting injured reminded us that was then, and this is now.
Nine goals were scored and not one meant anything or really mattered. This was sport stripped of its significance, an artificially created spectacle geared at entertaining rather than competing. The 2024 edition won’t even have the fading traces of the Messi-Ronaldo axis to fall back on.
How can Messi playing football feel so meaningless, so hollow, so futile? For nearly 20 years, everything he did meant something. It mattered. He mattered.
Everything was a first, then a best, then a most, then a last. As time disappeared, you increasingly treasured every moment, aware this sporting sorcery was finite.
What if we never saw that again? What if we didn’t appreciate just how fortunate we were to be allowed into the time and space and spirit of someone who could make something so fundamentally insignificant appear to supersede life itself? For a period, the very notion was unfathomable and downright disrespectful.
Now? Not so much.
We’ve said our goodbyes. There was the last game for Barcelona, the last Champions League goal, the last World Cup match. We’ll always have Qatar, but if all funerals took place repeatedly at varying intervals across a five-year period, not only would the impact markedly lessen, you’d never get anything done.
And so to Saudi Arabia, home of apathetic football played by apparently unwilling mercenaries. Messi has already played once in the Gulf this week, scoring a penalty in a 4-3 defeat to Al-Hilal. In more interesting news, he’s fully shaven for the first time in years, making him appear oddly reminiscent of Messi at his best, 91 goals in a calendar year Messi, as if perhaps he actually can stop time. Spoiler alert: he can’t.
Messi is also already the face of Visit Saudi, leading their most recent advertising campaign as he tells viewers what he loves about Saudi Arabia and to “go beyond what you think”, alongside the slogan “tourism opens minds”.
Now, Ronaldo’s absence will at least lessen the impact of this Saudi advertising campaign dressed up as a football match, but did anyone really care in the first place?
What Saudi Arabian executives fail to appreciate, either in the Pro League or in football-esque exhibitions like this one, is that you can’t recreate the tension and value of professional football without both genuine competition and the meaning behind it, the human histories, the organic emotional connection. Despite the narratives and force-fed discourse and celebrity mania shoehorned into the modern sporting universe, it is still the sport itself which sustains the whole enterprise.
As David Beckham and Inter Miami have done, you can reunite a 36-year-old Messi and 37-year-old Luis Suarez, even chuck in 35-year-old Sergio Busquets and 34-year-old Jordi Alba, but all you get is a reminder of what once was, of what we’ve lost, a vessel for nostalgia and little else.
The Riyadh Season Cup is an example of the Saudis trying to stop time, to prolong this magic so they can continue exploiting it to advertise holidays in Dammam. It’s an attempt to perform cosmetic surgery on football, to overcome the great battle against ageing, a nip here and a tuck there and Messi and Ronaldo sort of look like they always did. Except you look closer, and they don’t, and now they can’t move their eyebrows, and Ronaldo’s calves aren’t as durable as they once were.
Only two demographics really wanted to watch this post-decline iteration of Messi vs Ronaldo – children who never got to see them in their primes and those who love athletes as celebrities.
But these competitions still fail to appreciate why people love football, how and why it evokes such depth of emotion, what the nostalgia is actually for. We adored Messi and Ronaldo because they made us feel like we were privy to momentary perfection.
Now their once world-stopping rivalry boils down to memories and a Visit Saudi billboard, to the Riyadh Season Cup and a Louis Vuitton advert, hollow monuments to former greatness.
And there’s a lot more to come. Both Messi and Ronaldo are still under contract by the next Riyadh Season Cup, enough time for the last, last, last dance. The money is too good for these proxy football exhibitions not to become regular. It’s only a matter of time before Newcastle get dragged in.
The future is now, and it’s depressing, and it’s taking place at the Kingdom Stadium, Saudi Arabia.
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