This World Cup will extinguish the light of an entire galaxy. This will most likely be the last time Luka Modric, Thiago Silva, Daniel A...
This World Cup will extinguish the light of an entire galaxy. This will most likely be the last time Luka Modric, Thiago Silva, Daniel Alves, Manuel Neuer, Thomas Müller, Jordi Alba, Ángel Di María, Luis Suárez, Edinson Cavani, Eden Hazard and Antoine Griezmann grace the biggest stage sports. to offer. Robert Lewandowski, Gareth Bale, Arturo Vidal, Alexis Sánchez and James Rodríguez could still join them, another group of superstars on the farewell tour.
The World Cups, of course, have always had this goal. Just as they are the forge of greatness, they also act as the place where she draws her bow. It’s not particularly unusual for players – like Silva and Alves, in particular – to pursue their careers to secure one more chance at the greatest cost of all. The 2006 World Cup final was Zinedine Zidane’s last race, after all.
In that regard, this World Cup is no different from any other. And yet, the absolute numbers suggest something different; they give the impression that football will enter the tournament with one elite and exit with another. It’s not because there’s a higher proportion of late-career famous players than normal. It’s because there are more famous players, period.
It’s likely that the last 15 years will be seen almost exclusively through the lens of Messi and Ronaldo. They have, after all, dominated this era of football, and so it is fitting, in many ways, that they would come to define it.
Such an interpretation, however, would be reductive. It is best thought of as the first truly global era of football: a time when fans around the world could watch almost every second of a player’s career, where the great and the good met with unprecedented frequency in the League. champions. and entered our homes through video games, a time when rare talent clustered in a handful of superclubs.
The generation that will leave the scene in Qatar is the last bastion of the first generation of players who started and ended their journey in this ecosystem; they are the equivalent of that flowering of mass, shared popular culture that germinated in the 1960s. Lewandowski is far more familiar, far more famous than Gerd Müller, his predecessor at Bayern Munich, ever was. More people will notice Suarez’s departure from Uruguay than people concerned about Enzo Francescoli’s departure.
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