Superman is alive, well and plays football for Barcelona. All the usual superlatives are no longer enough.
Like swimmer Michael Phelps (eight golds at one Olympic Games), cyclist Lance Armstrong (seven consecutive Tour de France victories) or NHL ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky (a combined total of 894 goals and 1,963 assists in 1,487 games), Barcelona’s new all-time leading scorer is setting sports records that will last an awful long time, perhaps forever.
The mark Messi shattered on Tuesday night stood for 57 years. It was set by Cesar Rodriguez, who is remembered for his sixth sense of anticipation and ability to score from corners. Cesar notched up his 232 Barcelona goals over 13 seasons, from 1942-1955.
Barcelona legends like Samuel Eto’o, Africa’s most decorated player, or Rivaldo, Brazil’s 1999 World Player of the Year, or Hristo Stoichkov, the Bulgarian star of Johan Cruyff’s “Dream Team” in the 1990s, also scored by the bucket-load for the 113-year-old Catalan football institution that calls itself “More than a club.”
But none of them came within spitting distance of even threatening Rodriguez’s milestone. Messi dismantled it in just seven years, goal by goal, game by game. Messi is still only 24. Since his first Barcelona goal in 2005, he averages more than 30 per season for the club that nurtured him and earned his loyalty by helping to fund the hormone treatment he needed to correct a childhood growth deficiency and grow tall enough to become the larger-than-life football phenomenon he is today.
At this rate, Messi could surpass 400 Barca goals if he plays for just five more years. Cloud cuckoo land for others. But Messi makes the impossible seem almost banal.
“If he continues like this in the coming years, he will score so many goals that he will never be surpassed,” said Pep Guardiola, Barca’s coach who long ago ran out of new ways to praise his player.
To add to the otherworldly feel of Messi’s latest feat, goal No. 233 that eclipsed Cesar was almost a carbon-copy of his first league strike on May 1, 2005, against Albacete.
That day, coming on as a late substitute for Eto’o, Messi waited for Ronaldinho’s delicate pass over the defence to bounce once in front of him and then conjured a left—footed lob over goalkeeper Raul Valbuena that put the 17-year-old into Barca’s record books as its youngest scorer of a league goal.
On Tuesday evening, Messi again used his left foot to control Dani Alves’ pass and to chip over Granada ‘keeper Julio Cesar.
That both record-setting goals, scored seven years apart, resembled each other so closely felt like the wheel turning full circle; the first announced the arrival of a prodigy, the second was further confirmation that Messi has become the best player of his era, perhaps of all time.
Guardiola likened Messi to Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan, because “Jordan dominated his sport and Messi dominates this one.”
With 234 goals and tens of millions of euros to his name, Messi still appears humble and simple, as though he is the lucky and privileged one to be playing for Barcelona, and not the other way round.
Frankly, it’s almost unsettling to be faced with someone about whom nothing bad can be said.
A bird? A plane?
No, it’s Messi.
Just super.
