I call Messi an alien simply because we lack better terms to describe the way he consistently overperforms most metrics, and has for most of his career. The article "Lionel Messi Is Impossible" is over ten years old and the trend is not stopping, especially not if you normalize his performances for age group.

That has nothing to do with whether he works hard or not. He has spent an enormous amount of time honing his skill and thinking about the game. Like any child prodigy he was set down the path by his parents from as early an age as possible. For the most part child prodigies turn out to be people whose parents set them down on a path of practising from before they can walk.

But even though hard work and practice is the most important thing, aptitude still exists. Neither extreme is correct - the people who say talent is deterministic and entirely rules your fate are wrong, but so are those who say talent doesn't exist at all. Our genetic makeup provides the foundation, practice builds the house. You can build a pretty good house on a shoddy foundation if you work hard on it, but the truly impressive palaces have both. And of course, a great foundation with a shoddy structure will collapse anyway.

I do sympathise with Ronaldo in a sense. On the whole I don't really like him as a person, or what I've seen of him at least. But he built his entire life around this aspiration of greatness, this obsession with performance. I don't think he could have made himself the player he was without this belief that he was the best, but now it's becoming a huge mental obstacle for him. And adjusting to civilian life after a playing career is already a struggle for normal footballers, for him it must be cataclysmic.