NABID YEASIN

Lionel Messi is now a free man. He has been ever since he inspired Argentina to lift their third World Cup four years back in Qatar in 2022, completing the one missing piece of a career that already stood at the summit of football.

For a player widely regarded as one of the most humble personalities in a sport defined by ego and intensity, the phrase “free man” might at first sound misleading. But its true meaning reveals itself only when one understands the weight he once carried.

For much of his career, Messi played with an invisible burden -- that of having won almost everything possible in football, except the biggest prize: the World Cup. He had already redefined greatness itself, yet the World Cup always stood just beyond reach. Heartbreaks in the 2014 World Cup final, the 2015 and 2016 Copa America finals -- the latter even pushing him briefly toward international retirement -- only deepened that sense of an unfinished destiny.

He eventually returned to national colours and went on to win the 2021 Copa America, his first major international trophy that marked the initial release of that pressure. Yet, to his native Argentines, Messi -- already regarded as the greatest of the game by most, especially in Barcelona -- still remained a figure measured against Diego Maradona. And the reason was the golden trophy that is the most revered in football.

It was in 2022, in Qatar, that everything finally fell into place. With that World Cup victory, Messi didn’t just win football’s biggest prize -- he completed it. There was nothing left to chase, nothing left to prove. Once Messi lifted the World Cup, the long-standing comparisons and debates about whether he stood on the same level as Maradona quietly faded away with it.

Since then, something has changed -- not in his ability, but in his state of being. Messi still plays with the same impossible touch, the same magnetic control, the same effortless magic that has defined him for over two decades. He still makes football look like something simpler than it is.

But now, he plays without weight.

He plays like a man unshackled from expectation, operating in a space where joy seems to guide every movement. And that version of Messi is not less dangerous -- if anything, it is more unsettling for opponents. It is freedom sharpened into brilliance.

That was on full display in And as

SEE PAGE 2 COL 1