It's hardly surprising to hear former football players waxing lyrical about the world's greatest player, but that shouldn't stop us from listening. As part of TIME International's cover story on the 24-year-old phenom Lionel Messi, we heard from a host of soccer legends who were equally ebullient in their praise for the precocious Argentine superstar.
Messi, who plies his trade for the Spanish club Barcelona (he has already won pretty much every trophy on offer for the team) and represents his country (admittedly to far less acclaim), has just become the first player to win FIFA's Ballon d'Or, the award given to the planet's best player, three times in a row.
But to get the only remaining monkey off his back, Messi will be expected to win a World Cup for Argentina. "I think it's a reflection of the nature of football these days that club football dominates everything, and Messi has dominated the Champions League," says Gavin Hamilton, editor of World Soccer magazine, but "internationally, the World Cup is still important, and I think we accept it as the only place there's a level playing field where the players compete against each other on a global scale." Ardiles, who won a World Cup on home soil in 1978, thinks Messi "would give up all the medals he has right now for a World Cup medal," whereas Venables concedes that "at the moment Argentina can't do everything, and the gift that he has isn't enough to win it on his own." Hamilton is of the opinion that "the record books have to record him as a World Cup winner for him to be accepted as the greatest player of all time," before pointing out that "the next World Cup in Brazil could be a perfect stage for him." We'll all be watching.
See TIME's cover story on Messi.