Lionel Messi has been on this planet for 35 years, five months and 24 days, and for most of that time he has dreamt of winning the World Cup. But at around 8pm on Sunday in Lusail he will stop dreaming; whether Messi joins Pele and Diego Maradona among the pantheon of legendary World Cup winners will be known, and it will never be rewritten.
From then on he will either be the man who won the World Cup or the man who didn’t, one match defining a career already packed full of historic moments, and the strange part is there’s only so much he can do about it. Messi will have the ball at his feet for about 60-90 seconds over the course of the final, and the reality is that many of the finer details of the most important game of his life will be beyond his control.
