Rutashubanyuma
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Real Madrid v Barcelona, Champions League semi-final first leg, 7.45pm BST Wednesday 27 April
Messi v Ronaldo: majestic maestros ready for game's No1 face-off
Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two highest-earning clubs in world football, send out the game's two finest players for a place in a Champions League final at Wembley
Messi v Ronaldo: majestic maestros ready for game's No1 face-off
Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two highest-earning clubs in world football, send out the game's two finest players for a place in a Champions League final at Wembley
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- Paul Hayward
- The Guardian, Wednesday 27 April 2011 <li class="history">Article history
Lionel Messi, the tiki-taka terroriser, is a riotous expression of Barcelona's artistic creed. Photograph: Alberto Saiz/AP
When Lionel Messi scored for the 50th time in this campaign Barcelona rushed out a boastful statistic about their academy. Of the 139 goals posted by Pep Guardiola's team of ball-monopolisers, 100 (or 72%) can be claimed by graduates of La Masia, with Messi, the boyish executioner, responsible for half.
Confronted by these daunting figures – and by Messi's unstoppability – most opponents would scan their ranks for a name capable of earning even a place in the same sentence as tiki-taka's head of terror. Real Madrid, though, can point to an £80m bank transfer to Manchester United to remind their Catalan enemy that the Bernabéu houses a maestro of its own.
Messi versus Cristiano Ronaldo is the game's No1 face-off: football's riposte to Federer v Nadal. A truism of great individual talent is that it shows up best when measured alongside comparable virtuosity. The most illustrious of all game-shapers, Pelé, was obliged by his date of birth to out-dazzle Eusébio, George Best, Bobby Charlton, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff, who all crossed his time‑path.
After the gilded age Diego Maradona was untouchably alone. From the mid-1990s (Brazil's) Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane split the vote before Messi and Ronaldo converged, first with the spectacular emergence of Ronaldo with United in the Premier League and now in Spain, where the pair meet in a Champions league semi-final that will round-off a four-match series crammed into 18 days.
The symmetry is unimprovable. The players display not only their own life tales but a louder culture clash. Messi, the wonder child drawn from Argentina at 13, is a riotous expression of Barcelona's artistic creed. Ronaldo is a one-man political manifesto whose stronger physique conveys the haughtiness of his club. The most aristocratic, narcissistic, expensive footballer must wear the white shirt of Madrid – and Ronaldo's £80m transfer fee was a proclamation of that right.
According to Deloitte, Real pay €192m (£170m) in wages to a squad who cost €475m to assemble. Barça hand over €235m to a group who cost €175m to buy. Broadly, Real swoop on ready-made talent as an affirmation of their power while Barça prefer to create their own stars and pay them fortunes to keep them in their private galaxy.
Result: the two highest-earning clubs in world football send out the game's two finest players for a place in a Champions League final at Wembley, with Real hunting a 10th European title and Barcelona endeavouring to crush the revolt against their dominance started by Real's victory in the final of the Copa del Rey in Valencia last week.
Scorer of the winning goal that night: Ronaldo, who has struck 42 times in league, cup and European competition. This is not quite Messi's half-century, but it nevertheless qualifies as miraculous plunder in a side that lacks the endless percussive assists of Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández, who are integral to Messi's success. Ronaldo has excelled in a team who are re-forming, in José Mourinho's image. Against that background he earns equal marks for keeping his contribution so high.
If you look for similarities you alight first on the shared culture shock of leaving the natural habitat at an early age to be shaped by a major club. Barcelona for Messi (his family came with him), Sporting Lisbon for Ronaldo, who says: "You have to grow quickly when you leave your family at a young age. As you can imagine, it wasn't easy going to Lisbon when I was 12 years old. It was very difficult, maybe the worst time of my life in terms of football. So this is why I grew up very quickly."
The other uniting theme is a determination to express outrageous talent in defiance of those employed to cut it down: a capacity to rise, to keep going, to prevail. But the differences outnumber the similarities. Messi, who is less egotistical, is a team player, a child of the Barça religion, as well as a brilliant soloist. Ronaldo has been chided by Real fans this season for selfishness, for shooting from improbable positions and trying to win games on his own, which suggests a blindness about what took him to Madrid in the first place. He is the monarch of the team. Imperiousness is in his contract.
The blessing, the detail we ought to cherish, is that both have stayed sound for most of this campaign. Ronaldo has made 48 appearances for Madrid and Messi's 50 goals have come in 49 outings. For two such great entertainers to put on a hundred shows between them is a gift that will not often be repeated as the intensity of the modern game exacts its tariff.
Invited to choose between two ticket-buying opportunities, most neutrals would probably pay to watch Messi ahead of Ronaldo – just – because La Pulga Atómica (the Atomic Flea) achieves more in the way of physical marvels, working the ball like a conjurer, but Ronaldo has one higher claim. His brilliance has been expressed in two countries: the pinball game of the Premier League, and now in Spain, where the struggle for supremacy between two institutions finds radiant form in a battle between two men.