"You can't slåught€r members of my family and expect me to pray for you. I will pray against you and your household. The government is pretending like they don't know what to do. I have been quiet for a long time, but the bubble is about to burst."
— Bishop David Oyedepo speaks.
I’m going to take my time with this one. If you’re busy, save this post and read it later. Don’t miss this trust me.
I just want to put one final point on Messi’s story: football has never truly been an individual sport—except when it came to him.
Football is a team game. No matter how great you are, you still need the players around you to compete, even if the entire system is built to maximize your strengths.
Yet even with Messi, people kept repeating the same old narrative about Xavi, Iniesta, and Guardiola. The reality is that Messi only spent about four years playing with that historic generation, and even that team looked lost before Guardiola arrived. Messi contributed just as much to their greatness as they did to his.
When that generation left, Barcelona became almost entirely dependent on Messi for two years. Then Luis Enrique arrived, along with Suárez and Neymar, not to carry Messi, but to help share the burden.
After Neymar left, and with Suárez well past his best, Messi was once again carrying Barcelona almost entirely by himself, surrounded by average players. He was one game away from another historic treble, and once again, he was the team’s standout player.
Many people forget that in 2014, after Messi became La Liga’s all-time leading scorer with a hat-trick against Sevilla, Barcelona fans were handed flyers asking: “What if you woke up tomorrow and Messi was no longer at Barcelona?” Even then, some people still couldn’t bring themselves to give him the credit he deserved.
Messi even wanted to leave in 2020, and the situation nearly ended up in court. But he stayed because he didn’t want to fight the club he loved. In the end, he was still forced out in one of the saddest exits in football history.
Argentina was no different.
For years, Messi carried one of the worst-run national teams in modern football. In 2010, Maradona played Germany with four attackers because he believed more forwards meant more goals. Argentina lost 4–0.
Yet Messi was the one blamed.
He was called a failure, a choker, and a coward by people who ignored the reality that, without him, Argentina might not even have qualified for the 2014 World Cup. Every Copa América final they reached was because Messi got them there in the first place.
The difference was enormous: with Messi, Argentina reached finals; without him, they struggled even against much weaker opponents.
The 2022 World Cup wasn’t just about a great team—it was also about Messi bringing confidence, leadership, and belief to a group of players who followed him. He carried the responsibility while everyone else played their role.
Even in the latest World Cup, at 39 years old, Messi was covering huge areas of the pitch, playing 120 minutes repeatedly, and constantly finding new ways to win games almost by himself.
Most people will never care about these details or this context. Future generations will only look at trophies and short tournaments.
In the end, every argument people used against Messi eventually disappeared. They said he had no World Cup—he won it. They said he had no Copa América—he won it too.
To me, Messi is the most unfairly judged player in football history. No player has been blamed for more things beyond his control or had more false narratives attached to his name.
That’s Messi’s story—through logic, reality, and everything he had to endure.
Every civilization leaves behind echoes. The question is: who gets to interpret them? 🧵
Excited to share that my @TEDx talk, "Echoes of A Kingdom: Reclaiming the Benin Story," is now live on TEDx official YouTube! 👇
Catch the full talk here: https://t.co/yZJEqTQdfg
Talk TEDx
@_Moropeda_ I said state them, sir, it's not about blind people. If you're a truthful football fan, you should know Messi is way clear and ahead. The conversation shouldn't be hard to accept.