BEFORE THE LIGHTS GO OUT

Think of the first time football made you cry. Maybe it was a goal you will never forget. Maybe it was a final whistle. Maybe it was watching Asamoah Gyan penalty miss against Uruguay. Maybe it was the sight of a man falling to his knees on a pitch, hands covering his face, overwhelmed by something so enormous words could not carry it. Football does that. It finds the places inside you that nothing else can reach, and it squeezes.

This week, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, football is about to do it again. Because stepping onto that stage for what everyone understands to be the very last time are four of the most extraordinary human beings the sport has ever known. Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Luka Modric, Neymar. Say those names slowly. Let them settle. Because one day, probably sooner than any of us are ready for, they will belong entirely to the past.

They are not just footballers. They are the backdrop of our lives. They are the matches we watched with our fathers, the goals we replayed until the video buffered, the arguments that stretched into the small hours of the morning. They grew up in front of us, and somehow, quietly, they grew old. This is their final World Cup. And that is almost too much to bear.

The lights are still on. But not for much longer.

Lionel Messi — The Boy Who Became Everything

If there was ever a story written by football’s gods themselves, it is the story of Lionel Messi and the World Cup. For decades, one of the greatest players to ever lace a boot carried the one wound that no individual brilliance could heal, the absence of that golden trophy. Ballon d’Or after Ballon d’Or, record after record, and still the narrative persisted: without the World Cup, the argument was never settled.

For so long, the World Cup was Messi’s wound. Argentina needed him to be superhuman, and he was, and still it was never quite enough. Until it was. Until Qatar in 2022. Until that night.

He arrives at 2026 as the champion of the world. The defending king. The man who answered every question, silenced every doubt. And yet watching him now, a little slower, drifting deeper, conserving the legs that carried a nation, feels bittersweet in a way that nothing in football has felt for a long time. Because we know. We all know. This is the last time.

Watch every moment. Remember every touch. You will tell your children about this.

Cristiano Ronaldo — A Man Who Refused to Say Goodbye

There is something almost unbearable about watching Cristiano Ronaldo want something this badly.

He has spent his entire life refusing to accept limits, refusing to accept that anyone could outwork him, outlast him, outshine him. He has built himself, body and mind and will, into something that barely resembles the skinny teenager who arrived at Manchester United two decades ago. And yet the World Cup, the one prize that has defined the silence around all his noise, has always slipped away. In Qatar 2022, when Morocco beat Portugal in the quarterfinals, the camera found him in the tunnel afterwards. He was weeping. Not the gracious tears of a man accepting defeat, but the raw, broken tears of someone confronting the possibility that it might all be slipping away forever.

He came back. Of course he came back. Ronaldo does not know any other way. He trained. He scored. He carried on, because carrying on is the only language he speaks.

Now he is here, at his final World Cup, wearing the armband, leading his country one last time onto the biggest stage in the world. He will not admit it is over. He will never say goodbye. But somewhere beneath that jaw-clenched determination, beneath the celebrations and the records and the relentless forward momentum, somewhere in there is a man who understands exactly what this is. And what it means. And what it will feel like when it ends.

Root for him. Even if you never have before. Because this is the last time.

Luka Modric — The Quiet Giant We Never Deserved

Of all the legends preparing for their final World Cup bow, none has done so with more quiet, dignified excellence than Luka Modric. The Croatian maestro was already defying time at Russia 2018, when he dragged a small nation of four million people to the World Cup final, winning the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player in the process. It was a feat of staggering beauty as a silky, intelligent, tireless midfield conductor orchestrating a footballing miracle that the world had no right to expect.

That is the thing about Modric. The story was never straightforward. It was never loud. While Messi and Ronaldo dominated headlines, Modric quietly went about building a career of such sustained, understated excellence that it only truly reveals itself when you step back and take it all in at once. Five Champions Leagues. A Ballon d’Or that shocked the world precisely because it was so obviously deserved. And then Russia 2018 arguably the greatest individual World Cup performance by any player in the modern era, dragging Croatia, a nation of four million souls, to the final on the strength of his vision, his stamina, and his sheer, indomitable heart.

He will play at this World Cup in his forties. Think about that. He will run and press and pass and organise with the grace of a man half his age. But the legs, even Modric’s legs, are not what they were. And one afternoon very soon, he will play his last game for Croatia at the World Cup. He will shake hands with opponents. He will walk to the fans. And a generation of football lovers will quietly, privately, grieve.

Some players fill a stadium. Modric fills the silence after the game, when you sit there and try to explain what you just witnessed.

Neymar — The Most Beautiful Wound in Football

To love Neymar is to understand heartbreak.

Because the talent was always there, luminous, ridiculous, once-in-a-generation talent that made you lean forward in your seat and hold your breath. The boy from Mogi das Cruzes who played with a smile that suggested football was the most joyful thing in the world. At his best, watching Neymar was like watching someone play a different, more beautiful version of the same sport everyone else was playing.

And then; the stretcher in 2014, on home soil in Brazil, carried off in tears while his country fell apart without him. The wasted years, the injuries, the questions about commitment. In Qatar 2022, he tore his ankle in the very first group game, and for a devastating moment, it seemed his World Cup was over before it had begun. He came back. Brazil reached the quarterfinals. Then the penalty shootout against Croatia, and Neymar, who had scored in that shootout, watched helplessly as his teammates missed and his World Cup dream died again.

He has suffered so much in this competition for so little return. And yet here he is. Thirty-four years old, his body held together by willpower and whatever prayers Brazilian fans whisper at night. Coming into this tournament, no name has been more scrutinised, more anxiously monitored, more desperately hoped for than his. Because Brazil without a fit Neymar is a different, lesser dream.

This is his last chance to give his story the ending it deserves. Football owes him that. We owe him that much, just to watch, and hope.

The Last Time

There is a moment at every World Cup when you realise you are watching something that will not come again. When a great player takes the ball for the last time in a tournament, and you do not know it yet and then the whistle goes, and the realisation arrives slowly, like a tide coming in.

This summer, that moment will come four times. Four times, the lights will go down on a player who made football worth watching, worth arguing about, worth loving. Four men who gave us things we will spend the rest of our lives describing to people who were not there.

Messi, Ronaldo, Modric, Neymar. They were here. They were magnificent. They were, in every sense that matters, once in a lifetime.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup begins. Before the lights go out, before we are left with only memories and highlight reels and the aching, hollow space that great players leave behind, let us watch. Let us be grateful. Let us feel every single moment of it.

Because when it is over, we will miss them more than we know.