There is something poetically beautiful about the fact that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have never faced each other at the FIFA World Cup.
In an increasingly greedy world, full of tournaments designed to allow fans to constantly marvel at the best clubs and the biggest stars, there is a perverse sense of justice in the injustice of fate that denies the two biggest stars in modern football a meeting on the biggest stage.
For much of their careers, Messi and Ronaldo traded blows, goal for goal, Golden Boot for Golden Boot, title for title. They even traded continental trophies. It is almost impossible to succinctly put into words how defining the pair’s rivalry has been, both for each other and for the timbre of the modern game.
Numbers therefore begin to lose their meaning. Stats about impressive seasons are put into context by the caveat ‘not excluding Messi and Ronaldo’, and the significance of individual awards is magnified when won in the era of Messi and Ronaldo. The amount of La Ligas, UEFA Champions Leagues and Ballon d’Ors they have won is so great that new collective words have to be found to describe them. For many, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were modern football.
And yet the FIFA World Cup is perhaps the only thing that has remained bigger than them.
For Messi, it was the one phase where he had to fight to emerge from the shadows, where he had to follow the legacy of another Argentinian with twinkling toes. Despite Messi being a global icon, his relationship with the national team has always been more tumultuous and intensely personal. He had something to prove.
He came to his first World Cup in 2006 with a dodgy knee and a reputation as the new great hope of Argentine football, and the weight of that hope grew with each passing edition, not least because he had an example of someone who had carried it gracefully in the not-so-distant past (ironically, when Maradona managed Messi at the 2010 World Cup, Maradona didn’t score a single goal).
Each heartbreak made the next worse, and the weight of expectations only grew greater with each passing edition, until the big unloading finally took place at the Lusail Stadium in December 2022. Messi had climbed his Everest. He had won the World Cup.
As for Ronaldo, there is a sense that the World Cup is the one stage he has never fully committed himself to.
He was seen at the 2006 World Cup as an incredibly talented youngster who had more style than substance («Should Ronaldo finally manage to achieve something with one of his manic transition routines, expect kids around the world to run around like Michael Flatley with rickets,» wrote The Guardian ahead of Portugal) and while he has more than remedied that perception in his club career, he heads into 2026 with little tangible World Cup legacy.
There are moments that have gone down in folklore, like THAT wink after Wayne Rooney was sent off in 2006, or his group stage hat-trick against Spain at the 2018 World Cup, but he enters a record sixth World Cup (along with Messi and Mexico’s evergreen Guillermo Ochoa) without a single knockout goal, and has never surpassed his first World Cup semi-final.
That there will be a sixth World Cup for the pair is remarkable in itself, as there seemed to be a clear and obvious conclusion to both players’ World Cup journeys in 2022.
Messi had the chance to walk off into the proverbial sunset in perfect style after finally winning the World Cup with a team that seemed determined to get him to the finish no matter what. As for Ronaldo, the writing seemed to be on the wall when he was left out of a 6-1 thrashing of Switzerland in the round of 16 before returning after a quarter-final defeat to Morocco.
Things have changed significantly since then. Just over ten days after the World Cup final, Saudi Pro League side Al Nassr announced it had signed Ronaldo from Manchester United, and in the summer of 2023, Messi ended his spell at Paris Saint-Germain and moved to Inter Miami in Major League Soccer.
Since then, both players have become part of growing football subcultures in various corners of the world, ranging from the game’s overarching protagonists to players more commonly featured in highlight packages and social media clips.
But four years later, here we are. There is a good chance that poetry will give way to practicality, as the draw is suggestively set up for a quarter-final between Portugal and Argentina in Kansas, if everyone follows the yellow brick road there.
Even if the match did happen, it wouldn’t be the same seismic event that would short-circuit world football. It would be huge, yes, but without the same time-defining commitment it would have taken place in, say, 2018 or even 2022. Neither player is at his best anymore, but more importantly the win would amount to little more than a box ticked, a one-off triumph rather than a knockout in their rivalry.
Instead, we would have a chance to remember times gone by. Just as Messi and Ronaldo once defined an era in football, the next generation has begun to define the next era: one shaped by exceptional talent, but teams less centered around a single individual. Both remain exceptional players, but the game is starting to move on.
It may be an eye-opening truth, but sometimes the chance to appreciate what you had is an opportunity not to be wasted.
Published on June 17, 2026
