Lionel Messi and the Baby in the Bassinet

On whether great stars deserve fame and fortune

[Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal, Barcelona, 2007)

An estimated 1.8 billion people will be watching the World Cup final on Sunday night. It will have everything you could ask for in a global spectacle: close combat, a Spanish language corrida, with chanting, flag-waving fans, warring coaching strategies and colossal amounts of money wagered on the result. Despite all the expert predictions, the mystery at the heart of the spectacle is uncertainty about who will win, which makes the game a grand metaphor for the role of chance, fate and accident in human life.

Everyone who has ever played football will watch, transported back to their youth, remembering what they learned about themselves while playing it. Those who love the game for itself will watch for moments of beauty-- a touch here, a pass there, a goal from an impossible angle—and sometimes the beauty of these moments will be such that it even forces partisanship to concede to beauty’s power.

Beyond beauty, we hope to see displays of spectacular individual talent. A footballer doesn’t get to play in a contest like this unless he has the potential to deliver such moments. Certain professions like professional sports, but also opera, classical music, brain surgery and hard science require exceptional talent. Among such professionals, there are an astounding few who raise the bar even for the exceptional.

On Sunday night, all eyes will be upon two players, Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal. Messi spends half his time on the pitch walking around, in the middle of the action, watching and waiting for a milli-second opening that gives him a chance to score. This talent for seeing the unseeable has separated him from ordinary mortals for twenty years. Lamine Yamal, like Messi, attended FC Barcelona’s youth academy, La Masia. The world has now seen the famous photo taken at a UNICEF charity photoshoot in 2007, of a young Lionel Messi gazing fondly down at a chubby infant in a blue bassinet. That infant, now nineteen years old, will face Messi on the field in New Jersey on Sunday night. Even at age 12, the trainers knew the young boy had an exceptional gift. They told visiting journalists that the name to write in their notebooks was Lamine Yamal.

When talent of such an extraordinary kind is in play, we enter a magic realm where normal rules and expectations cease to apply. Which is why we watch: we want our side to win, but just as much, we are held in our seats by the possibility of the unexpected, the unplanned, the instant of talent that transforms everything.

Extraordinary talent in any field—football, science, literature, art—always is a reminder to the rest of us that what makes human beings unique is that there are singular individuals among us. In no other species do singular individual members of the species do so much to define who we all are. Their achievements, whether in sport, science or art, set the expectations for everyone who comes after them. Doubtless, the attention and training provided these two young men at La Masia helped mature their talent, but their coaches knew, from the start, that these two had a prodigious natural talent. Their fans worship these talents and believe that they and other supreme sports stars deserve to be paid vast sums to display it.

This attitude towards the incorrigible inequality among individual human beings stands in contrast to the resentment we feel towards other social, economic, gender and racial inequalities. We admire and reward outsized individual talent, while we resent any outsized advantage that arises from birth, wealth, race, class or gender. The unearned privileges of ‘nepo-babies’, children born to fame or fortune, strike us as unjust and awaken resentment and scorn.

The great liberal philosopher John Rawls tried to get us to abandon the idea that some of us deserve our talent and the advantages that accrue from it. “Some will think,” he said, “that the person with greater natural endowments deserves those assets.” This view, he said, was ‘surely incorrect.” [N]o one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society.”

The great professor would not have much luck trying to persuade Messi and Yamal’s fans they don’t deserve their fame or their success. The size of their compensation derives from the size of their audience, and that audience is us. We believe they deserve it and we pay them to enchant us, just as we approve, though with less justification, the inordinate compensation of the movie stars who merely entertain us.

Whether extraordinarily talented people deserve their fame and fortune is not the only issue raised by inequalities of talent between individuals. In any family where there is a marked difference in the talents of brothers or of sisters, parents know that these differences have the making of tragedy. As the American singer Sly Stone put it in a haunting song of the late 60’s, “one child just wants to learn, while another child just wants to burn, it’s a family affair.” Why birth endowment—a capacity to learn, versus a desire to burn—is distributed so arbitrarily as between siblings, and why even loving upbringings cannot compensate for it, is the stuff of which family tragedy and estrangement are made.

Just beneath our esteem for extraordinary talent is fear that it is dangerous. Parents have reason to worry that a super-talented child can tip a family into chaos. A football coach knows he has to get a Messi and a Yamal to play with the team. The arrogance that can accompany such talent can become a kind of nemesis, making it impossible for the great ones to depend on a team to sustain their brilliance.

Messi or a Yamal, having scored the winning goals, know what conventions are required of them in post-match press conferences. They mumble their gratitude for the ‘team effort’ that made their goals possible. Their performance of humility is a testimony to the secret uneasiness that true greatness awakens in those who witness it. Even the great ones have to pretend they are just members of a team.

There is a larger message here, about the discomfort that attends our attitudes towards the extreme forms of individuality. Sporting brilliance is just that: extreme, transcendent individuality bending the rules, enlarging the possibilities, winning out over every obstacle. We admire it all right, but we fear it too and enact rituals to keep it under control. Whatever our rituals require us to say and perform, we also know that on Sunday night, extreme individuality will make the difference.