Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have defined modern football for nearly two decades, winning a combined 13 FIFA Ballon d’Or awards and countless trophies. Yet, despite each appearing at a record sixth FIFA World Cup in 2026, the two icons have never faced each other on football’s biggest stage. | Photo Credit: AFP

There is something poetically beautiful about the fact that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have never faced each other at the FIFA World Cup.

In an increasingly avaricious world filled with tournaments engineered to allow fans to gorge on the best clubs and the biggest stars all the time, there is a perverse sense of justice in the injustice of fate denying the two biggest stars in modern football a meeting on the biggest stage.

For so much of their careers, Messi and Ronaldo traded blows, going goal for goal, Golden Boot for Golden Boot, title for title. They even traded continental trophies. It is near impossible to succinctly put into words just how defining the pair’s rivalry has been, both for each other and for the timbre of the modern game.

Numbers start to lose meaning with them. Statistics about impressive seasons are put into context by the caveat “excluding Messi and Ronaldo”, and the significance of individual awards is amplified if they were won in the era of Messi and Ronaldo. The volume of La Ligas, UEFA Champions Leagues and Ballon d’Ors they have won is so vast that new collective nouns have to be found to describe them. For many, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were modern football.

And yet, the FIFA World Cup is perhaps the one thing that has remained bigger than them.

For Messi, it was the one stage where he had to fight to step out of a shadow, where he had the legacy of another twinkle-toed Argentine to emulate. For all that Messi is a global icon, his relationship with the national side was always more tumultuous and intensely personal. He had something to prove.

He came to his first World Cup in 2006 with a dodgy knee and a reputation as the new great hope of Argentinian football, and the weight of that hope grew with every passing edition, in no small part because he had an example of someone who had carried it in fine style in the not-so-distant past (ironically, when Maradona managed Messi at the 2010 World Cup, he didn’t score a single goal).

Each heartbreak made the next one worse, and the weight of expectation only grew with every passing edition until the great release finally came at the Lusail Stadium in December 2022. Messi had climbed his Everest. He had won the World Cup.

As for Ronaldo, there is a sense that the World Cup is the one stage he has never fully imposed himself on.

He came into the 2006 World Cup viewed as an incredibly talented youngster who was more style than substance (”Should Ronaldo finally manage to achieve something with one of his manic stepover routines, expect kids worldwide to be running around like Michael Flatley with rickets,” wrote The Guardian in its preview of Portugal) and while he more than remedied that perception in his club career, he enters 2026 with little by way of a tangible World Cup legacy.

There are moments that have gone down in folklore, like THAT wink after getting Wayne Rooney sent off in 2006, or his group-stage hat-trick against Spain at the 2018 World Cup, but he enters a record sixth World Cup (along with Messi and Mexico’s evergreen Guillermo Ochoa) without a single knockout goal, and he has never bettered his semifinal finish from his first World Cup.

That there is a sixth World Cup for the pair is notable in itself, given that there seemed to be a clear and obvious conclusion to both players’ World Cup journeys in 2022.

Messi had the chance to walk off into the proverbial sunset in picture-perfect style, having finally won the World Cup with a team that seemed determined to get him to the finish line no matter what. As for Ronaldo, the writing seemed to be on the wall when he was left out of a 6-1 thrashing of Switzerland in the Round of 16 before returning for defeat to Morocco in the quarterfinal.

Things have changed significantly since then. A little more than 10 days after the World Cup final, Saudi Pro League side Al Nassr announced that it had signed Ronaldo from Manchester United, and in the summer of 2023, Messi wrapped up his spell at Paris Saint-Germain and moved to Major League Soccer’s Inter Miami.

Since then, both players have become part of growing footballing subcultures in different corners of the world, going from the game’s overarching protagonists to players more commonly seen in highlights packages and social media clips.

But four years later, here we are. There is every chance that poetry gives way to practicality, with the draw suggestively set up for a Portugal versus Argentina quarterfinal in Kansas if everyone follows the yellow brick road there.

Even if the fixture were to happen, it would not be quite the same seismic event that would short-circuit world football anymore. It would be massive, yes, but without the same era-defining stakes it might have carried in, say, 2018 or even 2022. Neither player is quite at their best anymore, but more importantly, victory would amount to little more than a box ticked, a one-off triumph rather than a knockout blow in their rivalry.

Instead, what we would have is an opportunity to remember times gone by. Just as Messi and Ronaldo once defined an era of football, the next generation has begun to define the next one, an era shaped by exceptional talent but teams less centred around a singular individual. Both remain exceptional players, but the game has begun to move on.

It may be an eye-roll-worthy truism, but sometimes the opportunity to appreciate what one had is one not to be squandered.

Published on Jun 17, 2026