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.

In a weird way, the way the two of them are aging is kind of making Ronaldo's peak all the more impressive. I'm not a fan of his, but with every passing year it's becoming more and more obvious (even though it was clear from the start) that Ronaldo is a human and Messi is an alien.

That a human like Ronaldo was able to keep up for over a decade and produce a similar goalscoring output to the biggest outlier freak of nature we're likely to ever see is actually a huge feat, and something that is likely to be somewhat disregarded by his less than graceful late career exploits.

“We aren’t focusing on Messi,” he said. “We tell the players to go out there, play their game and block out the stature of who they are up against. They might have Messi, but we have Mohamed Salah – and we have 26 Messis of our own.”

Are the 26 Messis in the room with us right now?

Yeah, interestingly enough we are so reliant on cheap entertainment for presumably mental health reasons that we tend to make other cuts instead. That's why for example the Men's Underwear Index is actually a pretty good indicator of recession.

Trump managing to piss off an entire Belgium team that has looked slow and lackadaisical all tournament and provoke them into waking up and curb stomping the USMNT is one of the funniest things of the World Cup so far. The narrative writers must be sitting on a whole mountain of coffee and cigarettes, the storylines just keep coming.

Who says I was lost?

Assless chaps and eldtritch horror? How did I end up on that side of the internet again...

I'm interested in the idea, the perspective shift sounds like it has potential but half an hour is just not enough to get me to buy it. I struggle to see how you have enough time to actually do something in terms of narrative and character development in that short of a playtime.

Waking up to a world cup day without Cabo Verde in it anymore.

Well, hard to predict a catastrophic mechanical failure.

Antonelli saying he can still fight for a point is some real black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail energy.

It's still so weird to me, Kimi says something fundamental is wrong and they're like "I guess we'll change front wing 🤷‍♀️". I am not an engineer or aerodynamicist but I don't understand what that would fix in this case.