Messi on Instagram:

“Last night I returned to a place I miss with my soul. A place where I was immensely happy, where you guys made me feel a thousand times the happiest person in the world.

"I hope one day I can come back, and not just to say goodbye as a player, as I never got to..."

Leo Messi: "Spain is a great team with outstanding players and a very distinctive style of play. They’re a team I know very well, with a football philosophy they’ve been following for many years. I know their players too. I’ve faced many of them, and I still follow them. Several of them play for Barcelona, a club I love and continue to follow. So it will be a special match because it’s a World Cup final, and naturally I expect it to be a very even game.”

It's like a passing-of-the-torch moment between the past and the future of football, from Leo to Lamine.

Just a year or two ago, we were looking at those old photos of Leo bathing a baby Lamine, and now they were competing against each other for the World Cup.

What are your thoughts on Lamine’s development over the past year? Do you think we will ever see them face each other again?

Visca el Barça! 🔵🔴

I don’t think people realize how insanely good Messi was at such a young age. Makes you wonder if we’ll ever see anything like this again but I guess they said the same about Maradona so who knows

Possibly the hardest pic for us considering the context and what followed through (not to mention everybody was losing their mind over mbappe joining madrid and how over it was for us)