The Lionel Messi goal is 10 years old today. If you’ve followed his career, you already know which goal the goal is. If you haven’t, I’m talking about the individual goal he scored in the Copa del Rey against Getafe where he runs 60 yards, destroying four defenders in the process, before rounding the goalkeeper and scoring.
Lionel Messi scored the best goal of his career 10 years ago today
The 60-yard run against Getafe was the moment Messi became a superstar.
This goal is special because it marked a moment where most people changed what they thought about Messi. Up until this point, a lot of fans were Messi-skeptical. The 2006-07 campaign was his first as a starter, and one where he wasn’t the best attacking player that Barcelona had quite yet. Ronaldinho still scored 24 goals that year, Samuel Eto’o had a very good goalscoring rate despite some injuries, and many considered Deco to be the best attacking midfielder in the world.
That season was the first one where we started to get an idea of how good Messi could be. He’d scored at the 2006 World Cup after a solid debut season as a rotation player for Barca, leading to some hype coming into the next club campaign. He lived up to it, but up until this Copa del Rey semifinal in April, opinion was split between people who thought he’d become a superstar on Ronaldinho’s level or a good attacker who would fall just short of winning a Ballon d’Or.
Between an October win over Sevilla and El Clásico on March 10, 2007, Messi had a run of 12 consecutive games without scoring that dulled his hype a bit. Everything changed in that game, when Madrid outplayed Barcelona as a team, but Messi outplayed everyone, scoring a hat trick — including an 88th-minute equalizer.
Still, that was just one game, at the end of a run of bad form. But after his goal against Getafe, the questions disappeared. Its near-perfect resemblance to Diego Maradona’s “Goal Of The Century” against England at the 1986 World Cup thrust him into the international spotlight. He was no longer talented Barcelona youngster Lionel Messi, but the Next Maradona.
Barcelona didn’t win any of the three major trophies they were in contention for that season. In fact, they lost the second leg of that Copa del Rey tie to Getafe, 4-0. They didn’t win any trophies the next season either. Manager Frank Rijkaard was fired just two seasons after winning the Champions League. In almost every way, those two seasons were a massive disappointment for Barcelona.
But there was that Clásico comeback, and that goal against Getafe. Messi came third in Ballon d’Or voting in 2007, and he never looked back from there. He has every major club title now, plus five World Player of the Year awards, a World Cup golden ball, and 567 professional goals.
Ten years ago today, we got to see the one of those 567 goals that propelled Messi to superstardom.
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