World Cup has perfect '10' no matter who's wearing it

Futbol Club Barcelona's No. 10 jersey is the most famous shirt in soccer, a sort of maroon and blue vertical striped cape passed down from one superhero to the next. "The world goes on and new geniuses emerge," said Barcelona president Joan Laporta. Diego Maradona wore it during his time with Barca in the 1980s. So did Rivaldo, the great Brazilian midfielder, one of only 10, naturally, players to win the World Cup, the UEFA Champions League and the Ballon d'Or, given to the world's top player each year. And so did another Brazilian superstar, Ronaldinho, a two-time FIFA Player of the Year and Ballon d'Or winner, who passed down the iconic jersey to a then 21-year-old Lionel Messi before he left for AC Milan in the summer of 2008. "Before leaving the club (Ronaldinho) was coming off a few months where he was thinking about things," Messi said in 2015. "He had it in his mind that he was leaving and he told me to have his number. I took it without looking at what he had done with the shirt. If I did, I would not have taken it." Lamine Yamal displayed no such second thoughts when he was awarded the Barca No. 10 last July, just days after his 18th birthday, on the occasion of his signing a six-year contract with the Catalan club worth $45.8 million annually and comes with a reported buyout fee of $1.1 billion. That's billion with a "B" as in Barcelona. "When I was a child, my dream was to debut for Barça, to grow up and play with the No. 10," said Yamal, who turned 19 Monday. "Every kid born in Barcelona dreams of that. Messi has made his way, and I'm going to make mine." Messi and Yamal, despite following similar courses to the global spotlight, will meet for the first time on a soccer pitch in Sunday's World Cup final at New Jersey's Met Life Stadium. The grand finale of the largest and richest sporting event in history, a match with epic potential and unmistakably marked by the influence of the franchise whose motto is "Més que un club." "More than a club." Sixteen current Barcelona players were on World Cup rosters, more than any other club. Spain features eight Barca players. The World Cup semifinals also featured Barca defender Jules Kounde playing for France and new signee Anthony Gordon scoring for England in a 2-1 loss to Argentina. Then there's Messi, who played 17 years for Barca, appearing in 772 matches, scoring 672 goals and winning 34 trophies, including UEFA Champions League titles, before leaving for Paris Saint-Germain in 2021. "I give my full support to all the Barca players who are playing in the World Cup," Laporta told reporters this week. "I know that their success is our success." The final between Argentina, the reigning World Cup holder, and Spain, the European champion, is also a reminder of the late Johan Cruyff, the Dutch master, who transformed Barca and remains one of the most influential figures in the sport today a decade after his death. "Cruyff is the inventor of the football we know today," Barca and Spain midfielder Pedri said. "I think he's the most important person in Barça's history when it comes to philosophy." Cruyff joined Barca in 1973 after leading Ajax to three consecutive European Cup (now the Champions League) titles. In his first season at Camp Nou, the club's 105,000 seat cathedral of a stadium, Cruyff, wearing No. 9, propelled Barca to its first La Liga crown in 14 seasons and became the first player to win three-straight Ballon d'Or trophies. Cruyff's connection to the Barca fans went beyond the pitch. When Cruyff's son was born in 1974, he wanted to name him Jordi after the patron saint of Catalan Sant Jordi, St. George. But the name was banned in Spain at the time by the Franco dictatorship because it was a Catalan name. So Cruyff flew with is family to Netherlands to officially register the newborn as Jordi. After retiring, Cruyff returned to Barcelona in 1988 to coach, expanding on Ajax and the Netherlands' coach Rinus Michels philosophy of "Total Football" which emphasized positional interchange, spatial management and required that all players be technically gifted and tactically intelligent. "Football," Cruyff once said, "is to be played with your brain." Under Cruyff, Barca won La Liga in 1987-88, its first Spanish league title in 14 years and the first of four league crowns captured with the Dutchman. Cruyff coached Barcelona to its first Champions League title in 1992. More than 30 years later, Cruyff's influence can be seen in a style known as "tiki-taka," the possession emphasized, quick, vertical passing Spain has used to pick apart opponents throughout this tournament, just as a Spanish side featuring seven Barca players did in winning the 2010 World Cup. "Technique is not being able to juggle a ball 1,000 times," Cruyff said. "Anyone can do that with practice. Then go and work in the circus. Technique is passing the ball in one touch, with the right speed, at the right time, to the right foot of your teammate." A style used by Cruyff's protege Pep Guardiola, a former Barcelona and Spanish national team midfielder, to coach Barca to a pair of Champions League titles and Manchester City to six Premier League crowns and another Champions League triumph in seven years. Cruyff, a chain smoker, forced by doctors and his family to trade cigarettes for lollipops in the late 90s, died of lung cancer in March, 2016. He was 68. "I would not be here without Johan Cruyff," Guardiola once said. "He was unique, totally unique." Cruyff's influence can also be seen in the flair, technical skill and vision in which Yamal and Messi play with, drawing opponents to them opening up space for teammates. Both the undersized Messi and the skinny Yamal came up through and were shaped at La Masia, Barcelona's youth academy, which Cruyff based on the Ajax academy where he developed as a youngster. "The FC Barcelona youth academy's philosophy is fundamentally built on Johan Cruyff's Total Football," according to the club, "which emphasizes tactical intelligence, fluid positioning, and ball retention over physical size." Messi made his first team debut at 17. He was 20, already a La Liga and UEFA Champions League winner, when the club booked him for a photo shoot in the visitors' locker-room at Camp Nou where he found a mother steadying her infant son in a small plastic bathing tub. Sheila Ebana and her husband, Mounir Nasraoui, had earlier entered a raffle sponsored by a Spanish sports newspaper. The winners would get their photo taken alongside a Barca star for a charity calendar benefiting UNICEF. The couple were selected. It was the first time Messi met Ebana's son — Lamine Yamal. Yamal was just 15 years and 291 days when he played his first match for the senior Barca side. At 17 years and 1 day, Yamal led Spain to the European Championship title, assisting on the first goal in the final against England, capping his record-shattering Euro in which he became the youngest player in the tournament's history, the youngest to score, the youngest to be on the tournament winning side, tied the tournament assist record and was also credited with the "Goal of the Tournament." Yamal's Barca No. 10 is the best-selling jersey on the planet, fans buying 1.32 million shirts last year. His Barcelona teammate Dani Olmo will wear No. 10 for Spain Sunday because of his seniority over Yamal, who wears the No. 19 on his red jersey in the final. Messi's sky blue and white striped Argentine jersey will feature "10." But to many, Sunday's showdown, this summer's true blockbuster, is the ultimate showdown between Barca 10s, the heirs to Maradona and Ronaldinho, the collision of two odysseys launched on the Catalan coast, guided by the vision of a defiant genius. "Lamine is Lamine Yamal and Lionel Messi was Lionel Messi," Laporta told reporters last year. "Messi has been the best player in the world, and Lamine, I think in the current moment, is the best in the world. But, we will have to see."