Long-term view: Ronaldo, Messi, Spotify and Mozart

There’s a school of thought – my thoughts, but being largely housebound by this writing lark, I like to think that represents an actual school – that says footballers are the ne plus ultra of not having a clue what they’re on about. Only this week both columnists and mailers on this site were decrying again how deadening it becomes to have to listen to it, that special mix of impermeable arrogance and utter incompetence that ex-footballers spout from the gantry.

I’m slightly obsessed by how, in America, given the fact that the majority of them have a college degree, yer basketballers and yer footballers there can apply a degree of polish to what is the same essential lack of insight; but in the UK, cradle-snatched from education as soon as possible, we are dealing with professional sport’s peak levels of inarticulacy. As always, being nice – and you know how important it is to be nice – dictates one recognises the exceptions to this: Troy Deeney, Peter Crouch, off the top of my head. Nice to be nice.

For the vast majority of footballers though, and this column has done this one to death – if your brain and not your body is wired for articulacy, i.e the consideration of various angles of thought to elucidate a line drawn accurately through them, then boy are you going to suck at making snap decisions in a crowded penalty area. It is truly not Alan Shearer’s fault that he is so bone-crunchingly strait-laced in his see-the-image-say-the-image perception: he doesn’t have another gear (although as has been noted by John Nicholson among others, the further he gets from having to make immediate penalty-area decisions, the deeper his analysis goes).

Why all this preamble? Well, partly because I have to fill up space somehow, but partly as a way to preface what I think is a fundamental misread of that endlessly stimulating and YouTube comment-engaging debate which I can’t help but want to add my two cents towards, regarding who is better: Messi or Ronaldo. And the misread of it is propagated by footballers as much as anyone: i.e, that there’s everyone…………and then there’s those two, a class apart.

Actually, it’s now my duty as a columnist of integrity to recognise that after a Google search to discover instances of footballers referencing Messi and Ronaldo, there’s actually a bunch of them (pretty much entirely non-English) who have already spotted what this column is going to suggest. Possibly because they’ve actually been there experiencing it as opposed to being sat in their flat watching it whilst trying to swat away pop-ups on the stream asking if they’d like to meet a Ukrainian girl.

Nonetheless though, it is a familiar refrain of English analysts, and I use the term loosely, for men like Owen, Ferdinand, Savage and Keown, that the competition for being the best in the world starts for everyone else from position three and down, and that it’s then basically impossible to meaningfully split the difference between the top two. This is the misread: it is absolutely possible. Let’s let Arda Turan do it, because who else would one turn to for a straight dope but Arda Turan: “Best player in the world? I would say Ronaldo. Messi is from another planet.”

To compare the footballing abilities of Messi and Ronaldo is to compare the musical prowess of Mozart and Spotify. Much as I find him so dislikeable that during any cut-scene moment during a game – a goal celebration, preparing to take a free-kick – I literally feel I have to shut my eyes to stop my head disintegrating from the teeth-grinding, I would never begrudge or downplay the effort it must have taken Ronaldo to get to where he has.

Gyms are effing boring, and you have to respect a man who has decided that to maintain the freakish standard he has set for himself, he must embrace a lifetime of exercise bikes planted in swimming pools and enslaving thigh-crunches. But there’s nothing that I’ve ever seen Ronaldo do, except for that free-kick against Portsmouth, where I can’t see the workings of it. The best of the best, but still normal. It is the peak of what every other footballer could do if they had a hearty dose of natural ability, and willed it to the top of the mountain. Wijnaldum could do it. Shaqiri could do it, Lukaku can do it, Gareth Bale is all over it.

But shadowy above that mountain, the images shimmering in the sky, unreachable to everything else, is where the stuff that really sets your heart alight.

Take for example the goal Messi scored against Getafe that introduced him to the world as the one, and there can only ever be one, for our generation, as we had Zidane, as they had Maradona. Everything about it seems both spur-of-the-moment and a simplified pattern, that rush that only football can conjure where it feels like some invisible in-game machine is dictating that everyone do their jobs: defenders sliding in exactly the right way, keepers coming out at exactly the right time, just so Messi can step past them and dink it over them. And yet, here’s the thing you can almost forget about – none of that was pre-ordained, it was all off the top of Messi’s head, that exploding genius-line approach to football that I think most of us would give our right arms to feel for an hour.

One of the things I love about that goal is the reaction of Eidur Gudjohnsen; interviewed about it afterwards, he said that at the time, he didn’t even realise his hands had gone to his head, truly dumbstruck to be in the presence of the neutron bomb that in the space of about six seconds Messi had primed and then exploded and then gone off to celebrate. You see that reaction endlessly to Messi, but pretty much never to Ronaldo. We all get how Ronaldo works.

There is, ultimately, an easier way to spot the difference between them, between who is the truth and who is the wannabe, as utterly turbo-charged to excellence as that wannabe may be. It’s their in-game demeanour: Messi seems liberated, a fish dropped into water – I’ve tried and failed to think of a single example from him of the tortured histrionics, the general impression that it’s both amazing and never quite good enough, that his supposed competitor always gives off.

One knows that he fits his surroundings; the other busts more guts than any footballer has conceivably ever busted to force his surroundings to fit him.

Toby Sprigings – follow him on Twitter