When Messi retires…

por MARTI PERARNAU el 4 junio, 2015 • 15:49

When Messi retires, football will seem like a different sport and there will be a huge void. We will observe an immense mourning, long as a fasting. Grief of colossal dimensions. A hole in football’s stomach. When Messi retires, our view of football will change because we will be worried remembering what was and is not anymore. Messi is the closest there is to a certainty. Messi is an assurance that the impossible, the unthinkable, the uncertain and the unlikely will happen. That no matter how hard it is, it will happen. In a sport of incertitude, accidents and randomness, Messi stands for certainty: what couldn’t happen, happens. Because he’s Messi, which stopped being a proper noun to become an adverb of cause: Why do things happen? Because of Messi.

When Messi’s not on the pitch anymore, the ball will be an orphan looking for someone to cradle it and stroll it through fun paths. Tired of being mistreated, the ball will be the first one to cry about the farewell of someone who loved it that much. It cries a little bit now that Xavi’s gone and Pirlo is starting to leave. It cried when Zidane left and Ronaldinho destroyed himself, but none of that will compare to Messi’s farewell, which will open an endless parenthesis, an unknown hole. When Messi’s not here, time will go backwards and we’ll return to some prehistoric place where everything starts again, another long journey searching for the chosen one.

Because it will be like that. Millions of fans around the world will watch over any gesture of some supposed successor, who will be scrutinized by a court of coffee cup readers in the search of a sign that augurs the arrival of the new chosen one, of the man that not only cradles the ball, but makes the unlikely, the unpredictable and the impossible. Those will be times of anxiety and anguish in wait of the return of certainties. Maybe a time that will last 30 or 100 years, who knows. Dark and empty times, those will be, where football will not seem the same to us. And that’s the real magnitude of Messi.