It has become so ubiquitous these days that we are hardly surprised by it anymore.
But right in front of our eyes, or should we say right below the line,
the nature of being a football fan has been changing. And nothing encapsulates that more than
the ultimate debate in modern football fandom: who is better, Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo?
This year's Champions League group stage has paired Messi's Barcelona
with Ronaldo's Juventus. It will be the first time the two have faced each other since 2018.
It may also be the last time they meet.
To many, the question of who the better player is seems facile.
Arguments about the relative talents of footballers have existed since football began.
But two things are different now. One, the power of the internet and social
media has changed how we support and follow the game. And two, no two players have ever managed
to sustain elite levels of performance over such a long period of time. We live in a golden age
of watching two of the best players ever spur each other on to almost super human heights.
Take their respective records.
Since making his Barcelona league debut in the 2004/2005 season
Messi has scored 635 goals in 734 games, winning ten La Liga titles,
four Champions Leagues, an Olympic Gold medal and six Ballons d'Or.
Since breaking through into the Sporting Club team in the 2002-2003 season,
Ronaldo has scored 641 goals in 852 matches for Manchester United,
Real Madrid, and now Juventus, winning three Premier League, two La Liga and
two Series A titles, as well as five Champions Leagues. He's won the Ballon d'Or five times.
But ever since Ronaldo's 2009 move from Manchester United to Real Madrid, bringing Messi and Ronaldo
into direct competition with each other in El Classico, the rivalry has become something else;
a social media war beyond club tribalism or nationalism. It was the latter, after all,
that fuelled the first modern player rivalry between Argentina's Maradona and Brazil's Pele.
Check out almost any football post on Twitter,
Instagram or Facebook. Almost inevitably the argument about who's the ultimate goat,
Messi or Ronaldo, will begin. It's football's equivalent of Godwin's Law, an internet adage
which has a very simple premise. “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a
comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” And thus, below the line, as any football
discussion grows, the probability of an argument breaking out over Messi v Ronaldo approaches 1.
The level of engagement is unsurprising. The two are the most followed athletes on social media.
Ronaldo has 240 million Instagram followers (and is also the most followed account after
Instagram itself), 88.4 million on Twitter and 123 million likes on Facebook. Messi meanwhile has
167 million followers on Instagram - he isn't on Twitter - and 90 million followers on Facebook.
And their reach is far wider than simply their home countries or even supporters of their clubs.
Ronaldo has 200 million more followers than Juventus;
Messi nearly 80 million more than Barcelona, with many more followers coming from Asia,
Africa and the Middle East than Europe. And that isn't even counting the
followers on Chinese social media and messaging apps like Weibo and WeChat.
But it is the ferocity of the support that is surprising. The numbers – and the rise
of online gaming especially the FIFA franchise – tell the story of the changing nature of support,
as younger fans invest their love, time and money in individual players rather than clubs. Social
media now means that a follower no longer has to be fed information through the filter of a club
or even to turn up regularly for a game. Instead, there is now a direct link - or at least the
illusion of a direct link, between them and their favourite players, anywhere on the planet.
As Forbes pointed out recently, ten million more Instagram followers
liked a photo Ronaldo posted of himself leaning against a Bugatti,
than of him lifting the Serie A trophy he'd just won. Juventus can command a TV audience
of 1.8 million people per game, but that is less than one per cent of Ronaldo's Instagram reach.
Still it's not all about Ronaldo. In SportsPro's World's 50 Most Marketable
Athletes – which measures an athlete's influence through “relevance, reach, return,
and resonance” – Messi narrowly came top ahead of Ronaldo in second, Los
Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James in third and India's cricket captain, Virat Kohli, in fourth.
But that level of reach doesn't just bring wealth or selling power for brands,
it brings a certain kind of power too.
That influence can help sell products or generate clicks. But there's a wider story
to that influence. Much has been written about how football clubs can be used as a soft power
tool to manipulate and influence public opinion, but players have soft power too,
which has been demonstrated during times of crisis for their favourite star.
When Messi and his father were found guilty by a Spanish court of a €4.1million tax fraud charge
and handed a 21-month suspended sentence, there was an army of social media supporters ready to
defend their player to the hilt. Messi's sentence was later reduced to a fine.
Much the same happened with this summer's will-he-won't-he transfer sage about leaving
Barcelona, where social media was flooded with support for Messi against his club. When, in 2018,
Ronaldo was accused of raping a woman in 2009 in an LA hotel room - an accusation which Ronaldo
has always denied and investigation which was subsequently dropped due to insufficient evidence
- his supporters flooded the timeline of anyone who didn't show unwavering support for their man.
At the very top of the social media pyramid, players like Messi and Ronaldo have become
more influential than their clubs with levels of support that have less in common with sport
and more with the kind of celebrity fandom encapsulated by Kim Kardashian or Kylie Jenner,
or Taylor Swift or K-Pop band BTS.
There is one important difference though. As with all sportsmen and women,
their time in the game is limited. Both Messi and Ronaldo, however superhuman, are now reaching
their twilight years. The Champions League meeting could well be their last. The 2022 World Cup in
Qatar is likely to be their last World Cups too. Ronaldo, who is aiming to break Iranian striker
Ali Daei's long time international scoring world record, will be 37 in 2022. Messi will be 35.
And then what? There will be a huge gap in the game when they are gone,
and who will replace them is literally a billion-dollar question.