The tale of Eklavya and Dronacharya in the Mahabharata holds both tragedy and authority. But the Mahabharata tells us something more: before time, even Dronacharya is uncertain, and so is Eklavya. History is never the property of a single hero. Nor is the World Cup. A quarter of the way through this century, then, the question is not merely romantic but deeply philosophical — is Lamine Yamal an Eklavya, and Lionel Messi a Dronacharya? Or the reverse? Or neither? Does the World Cup’s coveted golden trophy really surrender to any mythological metaphor?
In the history of world football, Lionel Messi is a long torch of light. For nearly two decades he has been not just a footballer but a language, an aesthetic, an art form; Messi is the name on the posters that adorned countless children’s walls. The same is true for today’s wonder-boy, Lamine Yamal, in whose footballing vocabulary Messi is an inevitable word. The Mahabharata’s Eklavya, rejected by Dronacharya, still took him as his guru in his mind, shaping himself by watching and imitating from afar. In that sense Yamal too is a kind of Eklavya of modern football, schooled on Barcelona’s grass and in European football’s aesthetics, growing up in the artistic language Messi left behind — taught by football that a master does not always sit in front of you; often he becomes an ideal, a shadow, a dream, even from a distance.
But here the metaphor becomes dangerous, because the relationship between Dronacharya and Eklavya was one of unequal power, marked by rejection and the cruelty of class and caste. Lionel Messi has never demanded a price on the path of Lamine Yamal’s rise. Rather, this is football’s beauty: one legend makes room for the birth of another. Messi’s legacy is no narrow inheritance; it is a river that welcomes new currents.
Yet in the context of the World Cup this metaphor takes us elsewhere. Football’s cruellest truth is that the World Cup owes no one anything. Johan Cruyff never won it. Ferenc Puskás never won it. Paolo Maldini never won it. Ronaldo Nazário has two, but Ronaldinho one; and a single Andrés Iniesta goal made him immortal. The World Cup is not always a court of justice; it is also the most beautiful arena of uncertainty — perhaps football’s greatest democracy. In 2022 Messi won the World Cup, and football repaid its debt to him. But in truth football owes no one. Had he lost that final, he would still have been Lionel Messi, just as he was one of the greatest of all time even after 2014. Likewise, if Lamine Yamal wins a World Cup in the future, he will be an epic figure of his generation — and if he never wins one, will the value of his art diminish? Does a Michelangelo sculpture lose value for not winning a Nobel Prize? Art is not always measured in prizes, and football too is finally a form of art.
Without meaning to, we have made the World Cup a final moral judge, as if the trophy decides who is great and who is not. Yet the World Cup’s history has shown again and again that it is a shared theatre of talent, preparation, luck, timing, injury, a single wrong pass or a shootout. Those who say Yamal will be the new Messi are perhaps overly generous to the future; those who think reaching Messi’s height is impossible are perhaps failing to value the creativity of time. One of history’s greatest mistakes is trapping the next generation in the shadow of the last. The Mahabharata’s Eklavya finally sacrificed his own thumb — but modern football’s Eklavyas need no thumb cut off; they need to cultivate their own originality, for true inheritance lies not in imitation but in surpassing.
So whether Yamal is Eklavya or Messi is Dronacharya should not be the question. The question should be: what does the uncertainty of the World Cup teach us? It teaches that the golden trophy may be a destination, not an identity. The World Cup may be the brightest ornament of a player’s life, but not the sole measure of his art. Messi is great having won the World Cup; Yamal can be great without winning it — and the reverse can be true too. Because football, in the end, is not the Mahabharata, where a pre-written fate waits. Football is an epic whose final page has not yet been written, where even a Dronacharya is one day surprised, and an Eklavya writes history in his own language. The World Cup’s golden trophy is another name for that inescapable truth — uncertainty.
MM Khalekuzzaman is a lawyer at the Bangladesh Supreme Court. This op-ed was first published in the daily Samakal.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report