In every single other category, the comparisons are borderline absurd. Messi 🎉 could finish his career with three times as many goals as Maradona and four times as many trophies. Some of 🎉 those gulfs are products of era and opportunity, but Messi has essentially replicated Maradona’s fleeting peak and sustained it over 🎉 15 stunning years. He is peerless.

Yet there are fans, especially older Argentines, who will argue that Messi won’t — and 🎉 can’t — ever match their original soccer God.

Because the debate has always been influenced by who Maradona was and who 🎉 Messi is, and what they represent, not solely by what they’ve done.

Maradona was a son of the barrios, a kid 🎉 from Argentina’s suffocating slums who outran poverty toward greatness. He was flawed, terribly flawed, and struggled with a drug addiction 🎉 that ultimately derailed his career — but millions of Argentines identified with the struggle. When he won it, temporarily, and 🎉 lifted his countrymen with him to World Cup glory, they deified him.