The anything-goes age also gave the world two of its greatest stars. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi won’t be seen playing international football again.

In the summer of 2007, Messi was compared to Diego Armando Maradona, a burden he would carry for the rest of his career. Against Getafe, he gathered the ball in his own half and embarked on an odyssey of 11.6 seconds, leaving five defenders in his wake before rounding the goalkeeper and rolling the ball home. The commentator Joaquim Maria Puyal cried “Messi” 18 times, each with a different emotion. That same year, Ronaldo was announcing himself in a language of his own. Against his boyhood club, Sporting CP, he struck a stoppage-time winner from a free-kick 25 yards out. The British press already had a name for him: Rocket Ronnie.

For the next decade and a half, picking a side seemed almost mandatory. Ronaldo’s greatest trick was to make the extraordinary seem within reach. There was no single, unforeseen trick in his repertoire, just the sheer determination to climb to the pinnacle. Messi, at five-foot-seven, slipped through spaces that did not exist and left defenders grasping at air. What Ronaldo made people believe they could become, Messi made them wonder whether they could ever understand.

Free-kicks and dribbles will always remain a part of football, but in a post-Ronaldo and Messi era, what the sport will miss is the particular kind of individuality they brought to a game built around the collective.

It would be a travesty to suggest football lacked tactical nuance in the past, yet talent demanded exceptions. When Roma’s David Pizarro alleged in 2008 that dribbling was mistaken for humiliation, Alex Ferguson defended his blue-eyed boy: “That is what people pay to see.” Frank Rijkaard, asked about his instructions to Messi, said: “Without the ball, he has to keep it wide. With the ball, he can do whatever he wants.”

That football no longer exists. Gary Neville, who had a front-row seat to Ronaldo’s rise, warned that the “robotic nature of not leaving our positions, being micro-managed within an inch of our lives” was becoming “a disease”. Per Opta, dribbles per 90 minutes in the Premier League fell from 38.52 in 2014/15 to 34.99 in 2021/22, and in La Liga from 42.13 to 34.71.

Asked about the instructions he gives Lamine Yamal, Spain’s coach Luis de la Fuente did not evoke Rijkaard. “I tell Lamine that if he has three players on him, there’s an area of the pitch where we have superiority. We must get the ball there, not by dribbling, but with fast passing.” Zinedine Zidane has conceded that “with just technique, you could go far” in the past, but “nowadays, I think it’s more complicated”.

The question, then, is not whether festivals will always have fairy lights. It is whether they will have colour, or whether all that remains will be beige.

The writer is deputy copy editor, The Indian Express. shuvaditya.bose@expressindia.com