With Argentina's World Cup win, soccer star Lionel Messi had achieved all of his career goals. Unable to get the contract he wanted to close out his long and astonishingly successful career in Spain, he decided to take the huge salary offered by an American team called Inter Miami and see what he could do in the US. Inter Miami was the last place team in North American soccer, but since Messi arrived they have not lost a single game. Messi has scored seven goals in four games. He looks, at times, like a professional adult who wandered into a high school game. His new teammates use words like "surreal" and "superhuman" and "impossible" to describe his play. While many other aging European stars like David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimovitz scored a lot of goals in the US, they didn't necessarily make their teams into winners. Messi is different in that he makes his whole team better, constantly setting his teammates up in ways they sometimes take advantage of but often flub.
He has also single-handedly energized the whole league, raising television ratings and driving ticket prices for some games from $50 to $500 and more. Some of the scalping frenzy might be people seizing what may be their only chance to see the famous Messi in person, so it may fade, but the money is already making a difference.
Which is fabulous if you are a soccer fan. But there is a broader point: even in a sport played by a hundred million people, with a vast global architecture to find and develop talent, the very best players stand far above the average professional and even the average star. At the top, the pyramid of ability is very, very narrow.
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