November 19, 2022 — Qatar’s World Cup kick-off is a day away; Louis Vuitton’s latest advertisement is unveiled.

These two things would seem unrelated. Except that, to promote their new luxury travel bags, the designer label released a photograph that had currency far beyond the realms of fashion. The company had restaged a famous chess match between two grandmasters using the smooth surface of one of their expensive cases as the board and hired Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to star in it.

Two chess players contemplating their next move.

Taken by the illustrious photographer Annie Leibovitz, the image raced around the globe and before you could say ‘GOAT’ it had almost 70 million likes across the two players’ social media accounts. Football, fame, social influence and monied luxury had met in one image and, were it necessary, reinforced the enduring power of Messi and Ronaldo, the two players who have shaped 21st-century football like no others.

Perhaps only David Beckham – a man whose commercial potential surprised even Real Madrid after he joined them – can compare in terms of a footballer’s off-pitch effect and it seems no coincidence that Beckham, who preceded Ronaldo in the No 7 shirt at Manchester United, should today be alongside Messi at MLS side Inter Miami.

• Lionel Messi profile: The life and times of Inter Miami’s World Cup winner

This will surely be the great Argentinian’s last playing role and it got off to a typically lyrical start with a 36-year-old Messi’s vivid stoppage-time winner nine days ago. But it is more than that. This is a new global project: MLS soccer.

Beckham understands the sporting and economic stakes; so does MLS and American fans ahead of the 2026 World Cup their country will co-host. So does Messi.

And, half a world away, so does Ronaldo.

He, too, has a major project on his agenda as well as seeing out a final playing role. His is at Al Nassr, one of the leading clubs in Saudi Arabia. There he earns ever more millions, but to the Saudi Pro League his mere presence with the Riyadh side is worth Ronaldo’s skyscraper salary of a reported $200million (£155m) per year. The country’s regime has extreme wealth, so it can afford the outlay, and what Ronaldo brings Saudi Arabia is profile, visibility. In the wake of his signing in January, Al Nassr’s Instagram account has gone from 860,000 followers to 15.8 million.

That in turn gives the Saudi Pro League impetus and confidence. And as of 10 days ago, Ronaldo added advocacy.

Around 24 hours after Messi was officially confirmed as an Inter Miami player, Ronaldo was in Spain saying: “The Saudi league is better than MLS.”

Ronaldo had been asked if he would consider a move to play in the United States, so he was not plucking the MLS name from nowhere; indeed, he said the Saudi League will “in a year” be ahead of “the Turkish league and Dutch league”.

Yet the timing of what Ronaldo said was lost on nobody. Messi had arrived in MLS six months after Ronaldo, now 38, had arrived in Saudi Arabia and the short slight on MLS sounded like the starting pistol on a new phase of a personal Ronaldo-Messi rivalry that has been in flow since they were both in their early twenties.

What began as a sporting comparison of two precocious talents morphed into a direct gladiatorial challenge when Ronaldo moved to La Liga with Real Madrid in the summer of 2009. Messi was already shimmering there for Barcelona.

The historic Barca-Real animosity was hardly requiring animation, given its roots in national identity and politics as well as sport, but Messi and Ronaldo – along with coaches Pep Guardiola and then Jose Mourinho – gave it new momentum, glory and acid.

Even in such company at two storied Spanish institutions where the meetings between them are named ‘El Clasico’, Messi and Ronaldo stood out, their individual battles taking the game into another dimension. People who previously supported neither club took sides – often viciously – on who was the better player, who was the GOAT. The ‘greatest of all time’ debate became an everyday football conversation.

Messi was the expression of Guardiola’s Cruyffian Barca: he was smoke and magic.

Ronaldo was the encapsulation of Real’s shiny certainties: he was ice and cream.

The Ballon d’Or award for the best player in the world was transformed into a two-horse race. In the 10 years from 1998 to 2007, it had 10 different winners. From 2008 to 2017 there were two. It went like this: Ronaldo, Messi, Messi, Messi, Messi, Ronaldo, Ronaldo, Messi, Ronaldo, Ronaldo.

So did the debate. Which continues to rumble on, because Messi and Ronaldo are still going.

Their extraordinary physical durability has enabled phenomenal longevity. Age has barely weathered them – Messi is still usually the best player on any pitch he enters; Ronaldo looks 28, not 38.

Yet the Louis Vuitton creators were prescient with their chess imagery. The two superstars had indeed been contemplating their next move. In Ronaldo’s case, it was away from Manchester United, in Messi’s, away from Paris Saint-Germain.

In both cases, it would take them away from Europe. The Ronaldo-Messi rivalry was heading to new frontiers.

Paul Widdop heard what Ronaldo had to say about MLS, and thought, “interesting, but also something bigger”.

Widdop is the co-author of the recently published book The Geopolitical Economy of Sport and he sees sport, and the use of it, from that perspective.

“Nothing in sport at the moment is off the cuff,” he says of Ronaldo’s remarks. “It’s a narrative, positioned probably by PR people. I think, maybe, it was choreographed.

“Messi’s arrival in the U.S. feels like the start of the build-up to the 2026 World Cup – I think Inter Miami gained an extra four million Twitter followers immediately – and he brings a host of marketability. He’s almost like a brand ambassador for them, which is quite interesting given he was a brand ambassador for Saudi Arabia.

“In Saudi Arabia, there’s a need to legitimise the league, to brand it. Once you gain awareness, you can start to drive more commercial aspects.”

At the micro level, Messi bending in a 20-yard match-winning free kick will improve Inter Miami. Ronaldo scored 14 times in 16 appearances for Al Nassr last season, and starts again when their 2023-24 campaign begins in a month’s time. But it is the macro level where Widdop thinks this story goes next, and he thinks both players, Ronaldo in particular, know their developing roles.

Ronaldo, proudly, is the gateway player for the Saudi Pro League.

“The two are extending the longevity of their brands by going to these new leagues,” Widdop says. “Back in the day you’d have Messi going back to (childhood club) Newell’s Old Boys and Ronaldo back to Sporting Lisbon (where his first-team career started), but that’s not part of the brand anymore. That won’t keep your brand alive. They’re looking for the next big project.

“I think the next phase for Ronaldo is as the leading figure in this league which could disrupt European football. He’s the trailblazer, as he said. But he’s more than that and we’ll maybe start to see more of him saying the type of things he’s just said. He looks comfortable doing it – he talks more than Messi.

“I can see Ronaldo building a profile as a political operator in this world – I’ve no doubt Ronaldo will be the figurehead of Saudi Arabia’s World Cup bid. I could actually see him working for FIFA.

“Messi doesn’t really portray that image but Messi will do well in MLS. He came on the other day and scored, adding to his mythology. And it (football) is the growth sport in America.”

Even Ronaldo criticising MLS is good for the now 29-club North American league, according to its commissioner Don Garber.

“It doesn’t really matter whether I agree or disagree (with him),” Garber said. “I think the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo is talking about Major League Soccer is good, because the league has been working to be part of the global conversation amongst the most important players in the game. I think it’s kind of pretty cool. I’m glad that Cristiano is paying attention to Major League Soccer. Maybe we’ll play Al Nassr in our All-Star Game (as Arsenal were the opponents this month) one of these days, or meet them in the Club World Cup.”

Monetising fame is not a science but it can be done, as Messi and Ronaldo have proven. The numbers are startling: on Instagram, Ronaldo is the most-followed person on the planet with 597 million followers. Messi is second with 481 million. When Messi joined PSG from Barcelona in August 2021, their social media platforms’ following increased by 13 million. They then broke the record for shirt sales; Manchester United broke it again three weeks later after Ronaldo’s return for a second spell at Old Trafford.

The players and their advisers understood that such visibility works two ways, as did La Liga when El Clasico was at its peak. They would issue press releases about a potential TV audience of 400 million across over 100 countries. It’s not that in 2023, with both men having left Spain.

Visibility matters. Obviously, delivering on the pitch is the starting point of any assessment of value, but the global focus Messi dragged to Catalonia, for example, was in November 2017 rewarded with a four-year contract worth €555million (£476m/$612m at current exchange rates), as newspaper El Mundo revealed. His signing-on fee alone was €98m.

It would lead to a financial hole from which the club have yet to emerge.

In their engrossing 2022 book, Messi vs Ronaldo, with its subtitle of One Rivalry, Two GOATs, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg note how Messi’s father Jorge, who acts as his representative, “obsessed over Leo’s market value (read: his salary) like it was his son’s market share price”.

In the explosive interview with Piers Morgan last November that led to United terminating his contract, Ronaldo was delighted when his first position on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest athletes was referred to. “I see football now as a business,” he said. In another section of the same interview, he said: “I adapt, I’ve been smart  … my life is not only football, I’m a businessman.”

He has been from the day he walked into Real Madrid, initially in their No 9 jersey – he had to wait a year for Bernabeu icon Raul to vacate the No 7. There were patents filed for the trademark CR9 as well as CR7. On his personal website, Ronaldo declares, “I work with brands I believe in”, before listing 16 of them, in fields from finance to water.

In their attitudes towards money, Ronaldo and Messi are the same. There are lengthy individual and club links to Saudi Arabia, and La Liga now stages its annual four-club Super Cup competition in Riyadh, that nation’s capital. Money also saw the pair in Spanish courts for failing to pay taxes everyone else pays. Both pleaded ignorance and paid multi-million fines.

North America has also been a payday. The International Champions Cup (ICC) was a global summer tournament that ran from 2013 to 2019 with the idea of getting Real Madrid and Barcelona (and other elite clubs) to a live audience beyond their domestic markets. In 2017, an ‘El Clasico’ of sorts saw Messi score the opening goal in front of a 66,000 crowd. It was played in Miami.

The ICC made one written legal demand of both Madrid and Barcelona – the presence of Ronaldo and Messi, another mark of their value.

Ultimately, Widdop says, FIFA’s Club World Cup could be a strategic target for those behind these transformational moves.

A wannabe global version of the Champions League, FIFA president and Qatar resident Gianni Infantino last year announced an expansion of the seven-club tournament played in Europe’s winter months from 2025. There will be 32 clubs and it will be held in the European summer every four years, “making it really like a World Cup,” according to Infantino. The venue for its inaugural staging will be the United States.

“These two players could be the figureheads for the new Club World Cup, which FIFA want to disrupt UEFA’s power,” Widdop says. “For that, you need stronger leagues and leagues outside Europe. They need a strong MLS for that.

“It’s a global vision of football, rather than a European vision.”

Revisiting the rivalry is like staring at an incoming tsunami. The sheer scale of what Ronaldo and Messi achieved for Madrid and Barcelona actually merits the use of awesome. The numbers tumble and crash down around you and at its end you see Ronaldo had 450 goals for Madrid in 438 appearances while Messi scored 672 in 778 for Barcelona — a combined 1,122 in total. And there was so much more.

It was so competitive: when Ronaldo scored a Champions League hat-trick versus Galatasaray in September 2013, the next night Messi got one too, against Ajax. The next season, Ronaldo hit a hat-trick against Celta Vigo taking him to 200 La Liga goals. Messi followed it a day later with three against Espanyol, taking him to 400 goals for Barcelona.

These were the Spain years, but the comparing started before Ronaldo ever called the Bernabeu home. The first face-to-face Messi-Ronaldo meeting was a Champions League semi-final first leg at Camp Nou in April 2008. Ronaldo was still a United player.

It is striking that, even then, a fixture of the stature of United vs Barcelona was viewed as a clash between the game’s two coming men. Most newspaper headlines were of a theme: ‘Is Cristiano Ronaldo a better player than Lionel Messi?’ (The Guardian).

The internet grew up around them – Facebook was only five years old when Ronaldo signed for Madrid. Naturally, those two enormous club fanbases stood by their man but people who supported neither Madrid nor Barcelona would suddenly be strident in their identification with either player.

How they played, how they scored and against whom: it was all fuel for a global shouting match that just got louder and louder. It became almost a definition of personality – choosing Messi displayed some kind of artistic characteristic, siding with Ronaldo a cool ruthlessness. You see it still in the comments section of The Athletic and it’s no doubt happening beneath this piece now.

As characters, people rolled their eyes at Ronaldo’s on-pitch arrogance but Messi was not short of self-assurance. As Barcelona team-mate Thierry Henry said: “Of course he has an ego. Do you think he can do that without having an ego? It’s not a bad thing. Knowing that you are good. You need that. Let’s all be honest.”

Messi scored his first Clasico goals in March 2007 – a hat-trick at Camp Nou; Ronaldo’s first came just over four years later, a penalty at the Bernabeu. It was one of 79 successful conversions from the spot for Madrid and led some of his critics to label him ‘Penaldo’. Somehow the ability to score again and again from 12 yards in front of 80,000 and hundreds of millions on TV was deemed a failing.

That the pair barely spoke to each other, lived in each other’s heads but in differing orbits, only galvanised the debate. Plus, one was with Nike (Ronaldo) and the other Adidas (Messi).

And everyone had to have an opinion.

“We create Ballons d’Or, others buy them,” Barcelona president Joan Laporta said, sniffily.

“With Messi, I had the sensation that (Chicago Bulls coach) Phil Jackson had with Michael Jordan,” Guardiola said. “Don’t write about him, don’t try to describe him: watch him.”

Of Ronaldo, Guardiola quipped he would be “scoring goals at 75 (years old)”, “around the barbecue.”

Mourinho tried to show a rare neutrality, saying: “I think it is unfair to both of them when someone says one is better than the other. I think they are just different.” On another occasion, though, he called Messi “God”.

Long-time United manager Sir Alex Ferguson shared Mourinho’s sense when he said: “In all the times I’m asked, I find it impossible to definitely say which is the better player, because to relegate either to second place would feel wrong.”

Ferguson did then repeat an opinion of Peter Schmeichel, United’s first-choice goalkeeper under the Scot for most of the 1990s: “Schmeichel thought Ronaldo could play in a bad team while Messi could not. That was a fair point.”

The rivalry was genuine, but by August 2019, when Messi was 32 and Ronaldo, 34, had moved on to Italy’s Juventus the two side by side at the Champions League group-stage draw in Monaco. TV presenter Reshmin Chowdhury interviewed them together that day and noticed from the stage “that they were talking the entire time — literally chatting through the entire ceremony, like they were mates. They definitely have so much respect for each other.” Chowdhury also reminded us of Ronaldo’s then seven-year-old son, Cristiano Jr, greeting Messi in 2017 and the authentic affection shown.

And in that interview last year, Piers Morgan asked Ronaldo if Messi is the best he has ever seen. There was a pause before Ronaldo replied: “Probably, yes.”

He then shifted in his seat and added: “(There’s also Zinedine) Zidane.”

What about Messi as a man? “Amazing,” Ronaldo said. “Magic. Top. As a person? We shared the stage (for) 16 years. Imagine? Sixteen years. We share. So I have (a) great relationship with him.

“I’m not a friend of his in terms of a guy being in your house, (or you) speak on the phone. No. But he’s like a team-mate. I really respect the way he always speaks about me. Even his wife (Antonela) with my girlfriend (Georgina) – they (the Messis) are from Argentina, she is from Argentina (being born there before the family moved to Spain when she was a child). So, good.”

Would they ever sit down together for a meal? “Why not? … Listen, I love to meet people, share things … I will do it, for sure … as Maradona and Pele did.”

That chess photograph offered an opportunity, except they turned up for the shoot separately (something Louis Vuitton decline to confirm). So there was no chance to discuss all those goals, the nine UEFA Champions Leagues (Ronaldo has five to Messi’s four) the 2022 World Cup, Euro 2016, Copa America 2021, 12 La Liga titles (10-2 Messi), 12 Ballons d’Or (Messi leads 7-5) and all the rest.

They would need more than one of Louis Vuitton’s expensive trunks to carry all their silverware.

Funnily enough, Ronaldo already has a museum dedicated to himself on his home island of Madeira, and Barcelona have plans for one honouring Messi on the site of their La Masia academy where he first became a Barca player at age 13.

And the accumulation continues.

The geography of planet football is changing. Messi and Ronaldo have not reached new frontiers to stop now.

Your move…

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)

(Graphics created by Sam Richardson and Mark Carey)