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The Football Show · 8 October 2026
"Messi's PR has been terrific." The Journos on Lionel Messi's farewell for Argentina and why Cristiano Ronaldo's send-off will never feel the same.
Messi has "created a deity element within Argentinian football", while Ronaldo is all "robotic excellence": "He is about self. Messi was about others." Then a claim from someone who worked with Messi that their private personalities are the reverse of their public ones, memories of a polite, mischievous Ronaldo in the Old Trafford corridors under Sir Alex Ferguson, and the unanswered questions about Argentina's dressing room at the World Cup final.
Transcript:
Messi, you're right, has created a deity element within Argentinian football that you didn't think could be matched in a Diego Maradona sense. He's surpassing that, I think, which is astonishing. Last night was an absolute spectacle of a spiritual embodiment of a footballer connecting with an entire nation. Ronaldo's final swan song will be nowhere near that, because his relationship with football is different. There's a robotic excellence, a power and athleticism, a fine-tuning of the human body unsurpassed by any footballer, or many athletes, ever in the history of sport. His association with football is different. It lacks that spiritual quality that Messi embodies. He is about self. Messi was about others. And that selfishness that made him one of the top three greatest players ever to kick a ball will be represented in a different way. It'll be more clinical. It'll be more a celebration of self and selfishness.
Yeah, I think you might be right, but I think there's a lot of untold stories about Ronaldo which I think deserve tremendous credit.
Well, I think so as well. And I think one of the clever things about Messi, and the brilliant things about Messi, is... I was told by somebody who knew both of them very well, somebody who worked with Messi: Ronaldo in private is what you think Messi is like in private, and Messi in private is what you think Ronaldo is like in private.
You'll never be able to prove that narrative.
No, never. The only thing I can say about Ronaldo, in my personal experience, which has been very fleeting: I've been at a hundred press conferences and that, but I had two occasions where I bumped into him, literally in corridors, when Sir Alex Ferguson was about, and Ronaldo was very mischievous and very respectful and very polite. I think it's been a bit of a failure of Ronaldo's with PR, because you get the stories from Argentina. I mean, what happened in the World Cup, for example, the World Cup final? Why were they coming out of the dressing room crying? Why did they not play? So many stories about that, about Messi's strength in the dressing room, of who plays and who doesn't play, and I would love to know about that. I think Messi's PR has been terrific, and I think Ronaldo's PR has been poor.
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