Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi still rule the World Cup but four players can seize their crown

The year is 2006. There’s a World Cup. And everyone is really, really excited about two players.

One is an 18-year-old Lionel Messi, making his World Cup debut for Argentina.

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The other is a 21-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo, also featuring for the first time at the biggest show on earth for Portugal.

Let’s just pause to really understand how long ago this was.

We’re talking football in standard definition. Oliver Kahn in goal for Germany. He was born in the sixties.

It feels like, not one, but two generations of footballers have passed through time since Messi and Ronaldo burst onto the scene.

And yet, 20 years later, they are still here. Not only that, they are the main attraction.

Protagonists

Both men will start for nations who have a genuine chance of winning the 2026 World Cup in North America.

While a 38-year-old Messi finally added the famous trophy to his collection in 2022, a 41-year-old Ronaldo knows this is surely his last chance.

Football has changed a lot since 2006. At the elite level, electrifying individual superstars are a dying breed. Managers prefer system players rather than rogue entertainers.

Perhaps that is why football still looks to Messi and Ronaldo when picking its protagonists for a major tournament: they are the last ones.

If anything, the intrigue is even greater, as fans watch in anticipation to see if they can still make a difference, and add an unlikely chapter to the story.

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But that is particularly true of a World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, where sport is often consumed in the context of star power.

Over the years, fans have grown to support Messi and Ronaldo as if they were football clubs or nations themselves.

Identifying with one or the other as your ‘GOAT’ has slowly become Gen Z’s way of experiencing football.

Their celebrity transcends the game – and in a place like the United States – that will be enough to make them the poster boys.

It is worth remembering, whether it interests you or not, that these are the two most followed people on Instagram in the entire world – and Messi plays for Inter Miami.

talkSPORT’s European football journalist Andy Brassell says: “I think Messi and Ronaldo will still be the faces of this World Cup because such a huge part of it is in the US.

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“I think we may look at it from a distance and say, OK, they’re not the best players at the World Cup anymore, even if they’ve been, you know, the best players in the world in the past.

“Obviously Cristiano Ronaldo’s history of the World Cup is a little bit more complicated. He’s never scored in the knockout phase, for example.

“I just think a lot of this World Cup is about celebrity. And sometimes I think as football fans, we forget as well that the World Cup is not just about us, about people who watch football every week and are totally obsessed with it.

“It’s about people who watch football once every four years or maybe have never even watched it before or never watched it consistently before. And I think the star power of it is really important.

“That’s why people are desperate for Messi to come. Look, he’s got nothing more to prove. He proved everything he needed to prove at every possible level and at the past World Cup.

“But I went to Miami a couple of months ago on holiday. What really surprised me in a city that’s got such incredible history with sports anyway and Inter Miami are fairly new to it… you think of the Miami Heat and how huge they are. They’ve had LeBron James there. But actually, it feels like Messi has been there for ages.

“You’ve got murals of him on walls all over the place. You’ve got Inter Miami shirts selling everywhere with Messi 10 on the back. He has had a massive, massive impact on US soccer culture already.

“Even if this is the back end of Messi, even if from Europe we see this as his little retirement run. I don’t think that’s necessarily the way that it’s looked at by a lot of the US soccer supporting public.

“And it’ll be the same with Ronaldo. Look, they would absolutely love to have him in MLS, even though he’s 41. And the fact that he will start for Portugal is something that means his profile will be even bigger.”

If not them, who?

But that is not to say somebody cannot snatch their crown away when the tournament begins – live on talkSPORT.

And for Brassell, there are four players who are competing to become the face of this World Cup over Messi and Ronaldo.

“I think if we’re talking about younger players being the face of the World Cup… there is an opportunity for Lamine Yamal to be it, for Vinicius Junior to be it, for even Erling Haaland to be it, as well as Kylian Mbappe.

“I do think, though, we have to give proper acknowledgement to the fact that in terms of the actual culture of the World Cup, Messi and Ronaldo being there is still huge.”

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