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Messi mania has Miami in a death grip.

Lionel Messi’s 5 MLS moments that should see him carved him into Mount Rushmore

Andrew Martin •

There’s nothing left to be written about Lionel Andres Messi. We’re going to need him to stop playing football like an alien sent to Earth from Planet Football to show us the way, because the dictionary is only so long, and we’re going to have to start making up new words to describe him.

Some suggestions: Goatalicious, toeblessed, thebestthereeverwasnian.

We’ll work on that.

The greatest of all time has, predictably, been making easy work of MLS. You know in The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves talks to that little kid with the shaved head, and he goes, “There is no spoon.”

Then he makes the spoon do a loop-de-loop around itself with his mind? We think Leo Messi has probably decided that football isn’t real, and so he can do whatever the f*ck he likes, physics be damned.

It’s not his fault he hopped over that injured player the other day — he doesn’t see defenders, he simply sees bright green numbers and letters scrolling on a black background.

Here are five times The One created glitches in MLS (Matrix League Soccer), with his magic brain and bullet-time feet.

1. Vintage Leo

The shimmy, the set up, the top corner. How he manages to put the ball right where the owl sleeps, the hornets nest, where the spider makes her web, whilst leaning away from it, without so much as a second look. Goatalicious.

2. 4-D Chess

Five defenders closing in on him. That’s so many defenders. Somehow, Leo’s sonar picks up his teammate making a late run, and he brushes the ball into his mate’s path with the outside of his foot, just out of reach of the keeper. Zero room for error. What a joke. The kind of chesslike move that would have Magnus Carlsen sweating. Pops it into the open net himself. Checkmate, son. Go and buy yourself a bar of Hershey’s.

3. An aesthetically pleasurable early cross

There is nothing better than a cross whipped from deep. Right onto his mate’s noggin. Just gorgeous. Let the video replay. Stick it on loop. Get the parabola of the ball tattooed on the back of your hand.

4. A debut brace

A debut brace in a new league, on a new continent, is almost as good as it gets. This one was a bit easy for Leo, to be honest. Maybe the easiest goal he’ll ever score. Just picks the ball up in his own half, walks forward with it, lays it off, strokes the cutback into the corner. Don’t think his heart rate even twitched. MLS wasn’t prepared.

5. The Thin Lizzy goal.

[Whispered] The boys are back, the boys are back… *guitar solo*

Leo and Jordi, pass and move, pass and move, down the left hand side. Pure Barcelona. The last ten years never happened. No Brexit, no pandemic, no VAR. Just Leo and Jordi zig-zagging around scoring geometrocious (add that to the list of new words) goals.

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