"The future belongs to me." From the song 'What will it be, will it be'.
The summer championship is over, the one that is played without the ball, the one of transfers, and although we will not be able to say until the end of the season which clubs made the best investments, it is clear which are the two big winners today, the Real Madrid and Inter Miami.
Each according to their objectives, both won the lottery. Madrid play real soccer, Miami play celebrity soccer, but the signings of Jude Bellingham and Lionel Messi have generated more excitement than any other this summer. That's what transfers are about, illusion, and that's what football is about because it's the essence of all the feelings it arouses, as Florentino Pérez once explained to me.
When it comes to signing cracks, nobody competes with Florentino. You know, Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo, Cristiano, Modric. And now Bellingham, who was not born when Ronaldo, Zidane and Figo arrived at Madrid, who at 20 already seems to be the best English player of all time. Will he measure up to the other galactics? It is not disposable.
Florentino embodies Real Madrid, a club that both longs for the old days and competes for everything in the present. The president of the white club sees Bellingham play today and images of his childhood must go through his head, of the Madrid that made the leap to glory in the 50s, with Alfredo Di Stéfano at the helm. Bellingham is the closest thing to Di Stéfano that has been seen in Madrid since then.
The first of the troika of Argentine colossi, the others being Maradona and Messi, Di Stéfano patented and brought to its maximum expression the phenomenon of the all-terrain player, the one who defends, organizes, creates and scores more goals than anyone else. Bellingham is going that way. He is exceptionally quick thinking, tall, strong, fast, tenacious, and graceful. And though he exudes champion charisma, he's down to earth.
That, as he never tires of saying, he owes it to his parents, good people, everything indicates, who remember Rafa Nadal's family. His father is a police sergeant, his mother works, or worked because she now has no need, in a human resources office. He is white, she is black: another plus. The only definitive way to solve the perennial problem of racism is for people of different races to get together and have children until we are all a mix of everyone. It's a utopia, but Bellingham is a vision in the flesh of a better future.
Being young, he has time for everything to go wrong. Injuries, perhaps, or fame and money go to his head, and he loses the competitive tension without which, no matter the talent, everything goes to shit. We can say the same about Carlos Alcaraz, but for now both he and Bellingham, who are the same age, give reason to believe that heaven on earth awaits them.
Messi, almost as old as the parents of both prodigies, has already reached earthly paradise. Today he walks through the nirvana of retirees that is the MLS, the professional league in the United States. He chose well. The other options were to return to Barcelona or go to Saudi Arabia.
What was better for Barça? Bet on a declining Messi (although in the MLS he can hide it) or on Lamine Yamal, the free signing of the year, a 16-year-old boy who can perfectly have a similar impact on the Blaugrana team that we already know Bellingham will have? in Madrid? It's clear. The return of Messi would have been a commitment to nostalgia, not to the future.
Saudi Arabia? A golden cage. Miami, the capital of Latin America, is a place where he, his wife and his three children will feel infinitely more at home. They will be able to enjoy barbecues, alfajores and dulce de leche by a tube. Yes, Messi too, if he wants. He doesn't have to be in top form to sweep a league whose defenses would find no buyers in Europe's second divisions. He already swept. Thanks 99 percent to him, Inter Miami has gone from being the worst to the best team in MLS.
Nor is there a bigger celebrity in the United States today than Messi, and, far from being forgotten in the desert like Cristiano, he can transform his notoriety into all the money he wants. Messi, as he would say, broke it. And his new club too.
