FourFourTwo's best team ever: Our ultimate XI of the last 30 years

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Presenting the best team ever - of FourFourTwo's lifetime, at least: an XI who have defined the past 30 years of football

CF: Lionel Messi

Lionel Messi Argentina World Cup 2022 trophy

Lionel Messi of Argentina with the World Cup 2022 trophy (Image credit: Getty Images)

‘The next [insert player name here]’ is a poisoned epithet for the overwhelming majority of players. 99 times out of 100, the standard set by their esteemed forebear is impossible to live up to – and never more so than when the sentence is completed by ‘Diego Maradona’.

Inevitably, that’s precisely what the talented young Argentine making his way through La Masia got throughout his time there. There can be no greater accolade for Lionel Messi than to say he not only lived up to that billing, but surpassed it.

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Messi, crowned the best player of all time, by FourFourTwo in 2023 (Image credit: Future)

If Maradona had been a tortured genius, Messi is quite simply genius. The list of world records attributed to him cannot even fit on a single screen, but includes the most ever Ballons d’Or (eight), including the most in a row (four) and the longest gap between his first and last such gongs (14 years, from 2009 to 2023).

At his 2012 peak, Messi registered 91 competitive goals for Barcelona and Argentina in a single calendar year, the most ever reliably recorded at an elite level. He is the fastest player ever to reach 300 goals and 400 goals in Europe’s top five leagues.

Messi is the only man to be named the best player at two separate World Cups, the most recent of which saw him end Argentina’s 36-year wait to lift the trophy and become the first player to score in every round of a five-round World Cup. Those heroics contributed to his 35 goals in cup finals, with 15 assists to boot. To be called ‘the next Messi’ is now the ultimate albatross for young players to wear, because there will only ever be one.

Steven Chicken

Mark White
Mark White
Content Editor

Mark White is the Digital Content Editor at FourFourTwo. During his time on the brand, Mark has written three cover features on Mikel Arteta, Martin Odegaard and the Invincibles, and has written pieces on subjects ranging from Sir Bobby Robson’s time at Barcelona to the career of Robinho. An encyclopedia of football trivia and collector of shirts, he first joined the team back in 2020 as a staff writer.

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