Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo’s teams were built to fail

There are 14 teams still alive in the 2018 World Cup, and none of them are Portugal or Argentina. The teams of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the undisputed two best players of the last decade, will once again fail to win a World Cup. Incredibly, neither player has ever scored in the knockout stage.

For perhaps the first time, neither player’s team was ever considered among the big favorites to win the tournament. France, Brazil, Spain, a wildly disappointing Germany, and perennial dark-horses Belgium all had shorter odds at most bookies. Post-group stage, England and Croatia had picked up a lot more hype as well. It was clear from the first game of the World Cup that Argentina simply didn’t have the talent to support Messi, while Portugal’s plans A, B, C and D all involved some variation of “Ronaldo wins us the game.”

These were never really “teams.” Portugal and Argentina were intended, as Real Madrid and Barcelona often are, to be support systems for their superstar players. But those national teams had a big problem — this doesn’t work nearly as well for international sides as it does for big clubs.

Madrid and Barcelona have both the benefit of signing players from any country and the money to attract just about anyone they want. It makes sense for Ronaldo and Messi’s clubs to put them in the exact roles that they want to play, then re-arrange the other pieces around them to get the best out of them. If one player isn’t a good fit, it’s easy to sell them and buy another one. These clubs can even go out and sign rare and ultra-specific specialty players because they’re the biggest teams in the world and only compete with each other for talent.

Obviously, Portugal and Argentina can’t do this, but they tried to set up their tactics as if they could. This was a terrible idea — the roles that Messi and Ronaldo play at club level only work because their clubs could go out and acquire the necessary accompanying pieces. But trying to keep Messi and Ronaldo in those roles put Portugal into situations where Adrien Silva was trying to do the same work as Luka Modrić, and Argentina into a spot where they failed to get Messi the ball without a player analogous to Andrés Iniesta or Philippe Coutinho.

This stands in stark contrast to the philosophies of the opponents that knocked out Messi and Ronaldo on Saturday. Neither Edinson Cavani or Luis Suárez plays in a defensive, direct 4-4-2 at club level, but they adapted their games to get the most out of each other and fit the system of Uruguay manager Óscar Tabárez. France boss Didier Deschamps is often criticized for using a negative style that fails to let Paul Pogba and Antoine Griezmann perform to the best of their abilities, but they executed the roles they were given in his conservative system.

Portugal and Argentina were arguably better teams in Messi and Ronaldo’s younger days, when they were important role players asked to fit a system, rather than superstars that teams were built around. Whether or not their national team managers could have turned back the clock at this World Cup is debatable — both Messi and Ronaldo are so used to having teams built completely around them at this point that going back to being simply important role players would take more than a month of training sessions to get right. But with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that their teams exited in the Round of 16, we can say they certainly should have tried.

Looking ahead, it’s easy to see a similar problem brewing with Brazil. They seem entirely dependent on Neymar doing Neymar Things, but they could really use an Adrien Rabiot or Giovani Lo Celso to stick in their midfield. The Seleção could really use Kylian Mbappe on the opposite wing instead of Willian too. But as Brazil currently exists, it’s pretty easy for opposing defenses to cheat to one side, harassing Neymar and Marcelo, in a way that club teams could never cheat against Neymar’s Barca and PSG teams.

As an international manger, unless you have the benefit of the most stocked golden generation that a country could ever dream of, trying to structure an international team around one superstar — and especially trying to match that structure to a player’s top-level club team — doesn’t appear to work at the moment. Having the restriction of selecting players from one country means a manager isn’t going to have the perfect complimentary pieces to choose from.

The best international teams find a way of playing that fits a lot of its players, and that’s why this year’s World Cup won’t be won by Argentina or Portugal. The stars of this World Cup have been the highly adaptable players — the likes of Luka Modrić, Edinson Cavani, Christian Eriksen, Philippe Coutinho, and even 19-year-old Kylian Mbappe, who’s played numerous attacking roles in a variety of systems during his short career.

Messi and Ronaldo haven’t failed at the World Cup because they’re not good enough, or because they lack the mentality to produce on the big stage. It’s because, through some combination of their coaches’ inability to assert their authority and their own egos, their teams weren’t built for success in international soccer.