"...everything everywhere all at once." This got me cracking.
Definitely tuned for the final post of the series.
I've always wondered where the next football rivalry will come from as the proposed Mbappe-Haaland stuff is just not working. We may start talking about rivalry if Mbappe joins a Premier League team that directly challenges City's Haaland, or if both of them move to the godfathers of football rivalry, Madrid and Barca.
Exactly. I have been struggling to explain to some people that I don't mean Haaland or Mbappe won't be individually as big as Messi or Cristiano but rather they won't have a rivalry that would match the latter. Players' rivalries are formed when there are entities bigger than the players fighting. There's a reason we never looked at Suarez, Lewandowski, and Ibrahimovic as rivals.
Those three strikers were never in a consistent, direct competition at the same time. They had no reason to face each other at least twice in a season. You are definitely right.
Even Neymar was talked about regularly at Barcelona. Immediately he moved to PSG in a league where no one was actually competing with him, the dude became a somewhat forgotten man.
Yeah, I remember a period where the Cristiano/Messi fight elevated to be MSN vs BBC.
I never thought of it until you said it, but there was a three years period where I only saw Neymar once, and he was only in the stance during the PSG vs United match.