Lionel Messi is currently 30 years old and in a piece published last week on UMaxit.com,

you discuss the world post-Messi.

In it, you suggest that we won't truly know the volume of the space that he occupies in the game

until he steps away, but if you had to guess, what do you think the game will look like?

And also, I'm wondering if you think there'll be

a leveling out effect in the instance that no one rivaling his ability comes along so you know

if we're not expecting to see someone quite as great as messy for the next decade or so do you think

that we'll forget quite how good he was I don't think um I don't think we'll forget how good he was because I don't think traditionally that's

actually what happens to great players.

I think in the sort of the interim period after their retirement, there's a little bit of a

kind of a moving on process.

But then as the decades go by, the memory tends to get embellished.

As for what the game will look like, it's very hard to say because one of the features

of Messi has always been, I mean, his excellence has always seemed very routine.

There seems never to have been a time when you couldn't turn on to a Barcelona game and he wasn't in the middle of scoring a hat truck

and over any length of time that that kind of ability breeds complacency and it ends up becoming rather mundane

I think it will just be rather an odd feeling.

I think that, you know, Messi is a very universally appealing player

because there are very few people who like the game

who would not enjoy watching him.

In fact, it would be rather bizarre.

I mean, I know there's that very strange, angry, binary

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