Longtime obsession of this blog, Lionel Messi, has retired. Feeling, as I do, that there is one more good year of top flight soccer in him, this is... sad. And though his retirement is commonly being described in other terms across the world, I feel he is retiring. I want to insist he is retiring. I want to demand that all of soccerdom refer to this moment as: Messi retiring. Yes, Lionel Messi, greatest soccer player of all time, a couple weeks before turning 36 years old, has retired to Florida.
Why would anyone in their right mind retire to Florida? Nevertheless, I will grant that retiring to Florida has curiously been done by many other people in the past. One might even say that it's an unhealthy national habit. Come to think of it, has anyone mentioned to Messi and his family that people retiring to Florida tend to sort of go... bad?
On the plus side, to keep fit while in Miami (his Florida city of choice), Messi has resolved to play in the local recreational soccer league there. This is like me ending my writing career on Clerkmanifesto and proceeding to...
I hate that there is no reasonable analogy in this situation!
There totally should be!
One might think that even an aging Messi would dominate a local recreational league. Maybe he will a little, who knows, but one should keep in mind that soccer is so popular, so ubiquitously played by so many millions of people, that the distance between the best team in the world and the thousandth best team in the world isn't as enormous as one might assume. Also, soccer is very much a team sport and Messi's new team... probably isn't in the top thousand.
But if Messi wants to fade away kicking the ball about with Benjamin Cremaschi, and maybe earn a soccer team and a spare one or two hundred million dollars in his dotage, who am I to fault him?
Oh, right. I am a voice on the Internet.
There is no one we cannot fault.
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