Is Messi already in the Olympus of football? (Yahoo)

These days and with thirty four goals in the season and scarcely five to equal the previous with figures of surprise and spectacular game to astonish all the lovers of football, Lionel Messi is placed by many analysts and communication media in the Olympus among the six great cracks of all the times, in spite of his youth, only twenty two years of age.

Is Messi really among the football Olympus gods? Is Messi comparable with Pele, Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Alfredo Di Stéfano or Franz Beckenbauer? It is difficult to give a verdict when it concerns a collective sport that acquires different characteristics as the times runs, and the evolution of the tactics and the physical education and with them, the use of the marks and spaces.

But if there is anything that enforces the possibility that Messi actually is in this privileged position it is just because there started the debate about this possibility when the general footballistic sensibility uses to see clearly when there appears a great player or when he is crowned as a crack as it could be said, in the last years regarding Ronaldinho, Zinedine Zidane o Kaká.

However, Messi, being so young, already appears above them, not only due to his scoring capacity in one of the two most competitive leagues in the World, but also that he astonish with his game, being leader of one of the most brilliant teams of the last decades (Barcelona), composed also by great stars and for the illusion that awakes as to the chance to see some magical action in the game, flashes of which appear in each match in a growing manner.

What elements do characterize Messi´s game? Contrary to what many countrymen feel, not accustomed to follow him until not long ago because since his adolescence he lived in Catalonia, the game of this young boy is too Argentinean, but he obeys more to old time South American game than to a present with players with European order added to their original Southamerican technique.

On the contrary, Messi has not much of European, paradoxically when not only he plays in Europe but since a decade he lives there. His game is based on the dribbling helped by his great dominion of the ball and for doing it quickly (there he even over pass his coach of the Argentinean team, Diego Maradona), and helped by too low gravity center.

When he avoids rivals in celerity and starting from each time major panorama of field (until two years ago, limited to the right line because of the presence of Ronaldinho and Eto’o), it also form his character, because this generated him the conscience of leader in the measure when he won his own confidence and that of his companions.

The magic, but specially the numbers, do not lie. Messi at this point has already an indisputable evidence and in any case, he could be for some fundamental that he needs to win the World Championship and be the star there thus to finish staying in the footballistic Olympus, but this is not necessarily so.

In fact, some of the football “gods” as, Alfredo Di Stéfano, did not need to win a World Championship to stay among the greatest. Di Stéfano, today honorary president of the Real Madrid, was factotum of the five European Cups with which the Real Madrid was considered by the FIFA, as the best team of the XX Century. But he had not big activities in any World Championship, playing for his country of adoption, Spain, due that he was not cited in that time by the team of his country, Argentina.

It is true that now the World championships mark more the career of a player but are not the total reference and so, some players had not the backing of their national teams to be successful. A really present case, is that of Messi´s companion in the Barcelona, the Swede Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who will not be able to be present in South Africa as well as Andriy Sevchenko with Ukraine, or formerly George Weah with Liberia.

But so as Maradona shone in the eighties with his magic and enormous talent to dominate the ball, or Pele a complete athlete, who managed all the varieties of the creativity in the sixties and seventies, or Di Stéfano was an “whole field player”, and Cruyff had it all within a perfect collective system that sheltered him, today Messi has the conditions that make us recall those geniuses of the football.

Can he obtain with the Argentinean team all he got with that of Barcelona? In his own country in many cases they doubt, it is discussed, but we insist that every player, even the greatest, needs a basic scheme to back him. If Pele was successful in Brazil it was because in many cases ha had companions technically situated just two stops below.

Cruyff integrated one of the best teams of all the times as it was Holland in the World Championship in Germany 1974, that implied a technique revolution conduced by the hand of “Total Football” of Rinus Michels, same as in Ajax he completed in the same period, and Di Stefano had at his side the best footballists of the years fifties in the Real Madrid. Perhaps Maradona had to fight more in loneliness in 1986 in the Napoli, but even so, he was backed by the tactical solidity of his teams.

Will something like this happen to Messi in the World Championship? Will Maradona be able to construct a scheme to back the genius thus that he could fly? Perhaps in this is the clue for the supercrack of Barcelona not to doubt that he will be recognized by the football planet as a new Olympus God.