The captain of the Argentina national football team, Lionel Messi, approached the final stage of his career as a “highly intelligent pedestrian,” which allows him to play in almost any position in midfield and benefit the team, sports analyst Vadim Lukomsky explained in an interview with RTVI. This approach to the game not least helped the 38-year-old Argentine to advance at the FIFA World Cup (2026 World Cup) further than his eternal rival, 41-year-old Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo, the expert noted.
On July 11, Argentina will play in the quarter finals of the 2026 World Cup with the Swiss national team. The match will take place in Kansas City, Missouri and will begin at 9:00 pm Eastern Time (ET).
As the specialist joked, a conversation about comparing Messi with Ronaldo could last for hours, but in general, the bet on “intelligence and technique” plays in favor of Messi, while Ronaldo remained “more dependent on physics” and teammates.
“Moreover, he has become so one-dimensional, he has become a football player who can only play in one mode, only inside the penalty area and only if balls are delivered to him from the flanks. As a result, Portugal tried to get the team to do this, but it was unsuccessful,” the expert believes.
Lukomsky added that it also cannot be denied that the 2026 World Cup bracket was more successful for Messi, where Argentina’s opponents at the 1/16 and 1/8 final stages were the national teams of Cape Verde and Egypt, respectively. The team won both matches with a score of 3:2. Portugal with Ronaldo was eliminated at the stage of the 1/8 finals, losing to the Spanish national team with a score of 0:1, and before that they knocked out Croatia in the 1/16 finals (2:1).
The analyst refrained from making further predictions about the path of Argentina and other teams, but suggested that the 2026 World Cup in the USA, Canada and Mexico will already go down in history as one of the brightest – at least in the 21st century.
“There were too many cool stories – from the fact that the main stars arrived in excellent shape and staged a great scorer race among themselves, to what stories there were, what endings in a variety of matches,” Lukomsky emphasized.
