Argentina is a very special country where everyone is crazy about football and nothing is recognized as success except winning the world cup. Any other result is a disaster and a failure, and so it is in Brazil. It is very difficult to play under such enormous pressure from the public, and this can be seen in the example of Brazil and Argentina. Brazil has not been able to become the world champion for 20 years, and Argentina managed to become the world champion after a long 36-year wait.
Messi was also constantly compared to Maradona and it was said that he could not be the greatest Argentinian footballer in history if he failed to lead the national team to the world title. That was a huge pressure even for a football player like Messi. I think that winning the South American cup title before the world cup in Qatar helped him a lot and that he played in Qatar with less pressure.
Messi is a charismatic footballer and one of the best footballers in the history of football, but for me personally Maradona was still better. He practically single-handedly led Argentina to the title of world champion in 1986 and no one has ever been able to repeat that, such individual dominance in such a team sport.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I am not aware of a statistic where Maradona was better than Messi. In 1986 Maradona scored 5 out of 14 team goals and Messi scored 7 out of 14 team goals. Maradona did not score in the final, but Messi did against France. They had an equal amount of scorer points due to assists. I know what you are saying about Maradona and how he has pushed the team, but the same applies to Messi. Both were/are exceptional players with abilities that are out of this world. For me Messi is the best ever because he was able to do all these genius shenanigans, like the
free kick against Atletico Madrid . Everyone who has a clue about soccer knows that a goal like that is too good to be real. This is not the only goal of this category, he did that all the time. The smartness in his game is unprecedented and will probably not be surpassed by anyone ever. There isn't a single quality he is lacking that is not limited by his physical being, like saying is headers are bad doesn't really count for a guy who is 1.70. There is only so much you can expect in terms of headers from a guy of that size.
But to close our exchange of opinions (
) I would still hope to see Messi be around for some time. Was always a pleasure to watch him play and I also always liked the good old videos about Maradona.