There will never be another Lionel Messi. Never. But that doesn’t stop skilful dribblers, particularly short, left-footed ones, being dubbed ‘the next Lionel Messi’.
When Messi made his Barcelona debut in 2004, he was quickly hailed as the ‘new Maradona’, a label that was previously given to players like Ariel Ortega, Pablo Aimar and Javier Saviola.
Only a few seasons later, the benchmark was changed: a new generation of skilful young attackers would be dubbed not the ‘new Maradona’ but the ‘new Messi’, a tag that has proven bloody hard to live up to…
Just two years into Messi’s senior career, the website Foot Mercato published an article entitled ‘Bojan Krkic: le futur Messi?’.
Aged just 16 at the time, Bojan had excelled at Barcelona’s La Masia academy and would score 10 goals in 22 appearances for Barcelona B that season before graduating to the first team.
His career has since had its ups and downs. Short spells at Roma, AC Milan and Ajax were followed by a permanent move to Stoke City in 2014.
The forward enjoyed success in his first two seasons but was loaned out in both 2016-17 and 2017-18 before spending a campaign mainly on the bench as Stoke struggled in the Championship. In 2019 he signed for Montreal Impact in MLS and stayed for a year.
After eight months without a club, he joined Vissel Kobe in August 2021, joining fellow former Barcelona player Andreas Iniesta. Bojan retired in March 2023.
He’s now back at his boyhood club, helping look after the crop of youngsters sent out on loan.
Three years after Messi’s debut, Real Madrid thought they had fostered their own version of the Argentine phenomenon: 16-year-old Gerardo Bruna.
But Bruna was quickly snapped up by Liverpool, much to the chagrin of the Spanish side.
Four years on Merseyside produced no first-team appearances, and short spells followed at Blackpool, Huesca back in Spain, Tranmere, and non-league sides Whitehawk and Accrington Stanley.
In 2019, Bruna signed for Northern Irish outfit Derry City and in 2021 he moved to Dublin to play for Shelbourne FC in the Irish second tier.
An ACL injury prevented him from making any appearances and he left the club at the end of the season. He most recently played for Dungannon Swifts.
A familiar name to English football fans, Mauro Zarate has played for four different Premier League clubs: Birmingham, West Ham, QPR and Watford.
The forward moved to Lazio after his Birmingham loan spell, prompting the Italian club’s president, Claudio Lotito, to make some bold claims about his new player.
“The terms of the agreement foresee a valuation of the player which will rise to around 25 million euros because Zarate will turn out better than Lionel Messi,” he said.
Zarate scored 13 goals in 36 appearances in his first Lazio season but has rarely been as prolific since.
In 2018 he moved to Boca Juniors, where he won two league titles before leaving in May 2021 owing to a lack of playing time.
He signed for Brazilian side America Mineiro, helping them to an eighth-placed finish upon their return to the top flight.
Zarate’s last club was Uruguayan outfit Danubio and he retired from the game in 2023.
In 2009, Egyptian club Al Ahly turned down the chance to sign Abdessalam Benjelloun of Hibernian.
Their reasoning was simple: they already had a ‘new Messi’ within their ranks.
“We have a young Algerian player called Amir Sayoud and we consider him the young Messi,” Khaled Mortagey, a member of the Al Ahly board, told the BBC.
The comparisons have since ceased; Sayoud made just 12 appearances in four years at Al Ahly and moved on to Algerian top division side CR Belouizdad.
He is now a regular at Saudi top-flight side Al-Raed, after twice winning the Algerian league as well as the cup in 2019.
It’s hardly a surprise that many of the youngsters dubbed the ‘next Messi’ have emerged from the La Masia academy.
A few seasons after Bojan’s debut, another hot prospect emerged in the form of Israeli midfielder Gai Assulin, who was compared to Messi after excelling at Barcelona B.
In 2010 he signed for Manchester City on the advice of Yaya Toure. But he would make no first-team appearances at the club before heading back to Spain two years later to join Racing Santander.
Assulin was signed by Kazakhstani club FC Kairat in February 2018 but had his contract terminated by mutual consent just six weeks later, eventually joining Politehnica Iasi in Romania in September 2019.
In 2021, he moved to Crema in Italy’s Serie D but left the club at the end of the season and, after a short spell with Serie D side Unipomezia Virtus, is currently unattached.
After making his first-team debut for Athletic Bilbao aged just 16, Iker Muniain quickly earned the label of ‘El Messi del Botxo’ — the Messi of Bilbao.
In the 2011-12 season he reached the finals of the Copa del Rey and Europa League, scoring nine goals in 58 appearances in all competitions.
Despite rumours of a move to Manchester United early in his career, Muniain remains at Bilbao to this day with over 450 appearances for the club to his name at the time of writing. Unlike Messi, he is yet to hit double figures for goals in a single season.
He’s lifted the Supercopa as captain, but missed out on two Copa del Rey losses when both the delayed 2020 final and the 2021 edition were contested within a month.
Munian finally got his hands on the trophy in 2024 during his final season with Bilbao and now plays in Argentina for San Lorenzo.
Branded the ‘Japanese Messi’ and ‘Ryodinho’ after a successful loan spell with Feyenoord in 2011, Arsenal’s Ryo Miyaichi seemed destined for big things.
Loans at Bolton and Wigan were less successful, and the winger would leave Arsenal with just a single Premier League appearance for the Gunners.
Miyaichi moved to German second-tier club FC St. Pauli in 2015. After missing the entire 2017-18 season with a cruciate ligament rupture, the former future Messi, now 26, returned to fitness in 2018-19 to score five goals.
More injury issues saw him play just one game in 2020-21, however, and in July 2021 he returned home to sign for Yokohoma F. Marinos.
In 2013, 17-year-old Scottish attacking midfielder Ryan Gauld was being labelled the ‘Baby Messi’.
Gauld himself wasn’t so sure. “The comparison to Messi is quite laughable,” he told The Guardian. “It is good to read, I just don’t think about it too much.”
A year later, the Scot signed for Sporting Lisbon for £3million. He only ever played five times but a couple of outstanding seasons with Algarve club Farense earned him a move to Vancouver Whitecaps in MLS.
When Barcelona signed 17-year-old Croatian midfielder Alen Halilovic in 2014, the comparisons were obvious — especially with Halilovic sporting a Messi-like mop of hair.
Those close to the player seemed to agree. Halilovic was signed from Dinamo Zagreb, whose head coach Zoran Mamic called the youngster “a Messi-type player if there ever was one”.
In 2016, Barcelona sold Halilovic to Hamburg, who then loaned the player to Las Palmas for 18 months.
The 23-year-old moved to AC Milan in the summer of 2018 but was loaned out to Standard Liege and Heerenveen before joining Birmingham in November 2020.
Seventeen appearances for the Midlands club saw him offered an extension to his one-season deal, but he turned it down and moved to Reading instead.
Halilovic is currently turning out for Eredivisie club Fortuna Sittard.
There was massive hype around Norwegian teenager Martin Odegaard when he made his league debut for Stromsgodset aged just 15.
In 2015 he was snapped up by Real Madrid, who kept him in the Castilla squad for two seasons before sending him on loan to Heerenveen in the Dutch Eredivisie between January 2017 and May 2018.
He then spent a season at Vitesse before another temporary transfer, this time to Real Sociedad in Spain where Odegaard started to really catch the eye.
Another successful loan at Arsenal followed and the deal was made permanent. He is now tearing it up for Mikel Arteta’s ambitious Gunners side and will be hoping to captain them to glory this season.
Barcelona’s South Korean winger Lee Seung-woo was hyped as the next Messi not by a click-hungry journalist but by Barcelona legend Xavi.
“In one or two years he will be in the first team,” Xavi predicted.
Xavi, now Barcelona manager, was wrong.
In 2017, Lee was sold for €1.4million euros to Italian side Verona, for whom he made 43 appearances and scored two goals before joining Sint-Truiden in Belgium a couple of years later.
For the 2021-22 season, he has was sent out on loan to Portuguese outfit Portimonense but they opted not to trigger his buy option and he left Sint-Truiden.
After a few months without a club, he returned to his native South Korea and, after a prolific spell with Suwon FC, now plays for Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors.
He has 12 senior caps for South Korea at the time of writing, the last of which came in 2024 after a five-year absence from the national team.
In May 2017, Genoa’s 16-year-old Italian starlet Pietro Pellegri became the first player born in the 21st century to score a goal in Serie A.
To those at Genoa, it was hardly a surprise. Two years prior, club chairman Enrico Preziosi had boldly proclaimed: “We have the new Messi.”
Pellegri moved to Monaco for €25 million in January 2018 after which injury problems restricted him to six appearances in two and a half seasons.
In 2020-21, he recovered to play 16 times in Ligue 1 and got a first cap for Italy in November 2020.
He moved to AC Milan on loan for the 2021-22 season with the idea being the deal would be made permanent, but his loan was mutually terminated in January to allow him to move to Torino on loan instead for more game time – who he joined permanently in the summer of 2022.
Aged just 23, time is on his side – even if he is currently on loan again, this time at Empoli.
In July 2018, ITV News reported that a 15-week-old badger named Minty had been rescued from a roadside in Stratford-upon-Avon.
“Could Minty the badger be the next Lionel Messi?” the broadcaster asked, after Minty reportedly “found a new lease of life and a new hobby: playing football.”
Minty reportedly has her own “goal celebration” but is currently unattached.
“Man City set to land ‘new Messi’ with £20million deal for teen sensation Almada” read The Sun’s headline in April 2019.
The report suggested Almada, who is making a name for himself in Argentina with Velez Sarsfield, could first join City’s sister club Girona amid worries Pep Guardiola’s side could be hit with a transfer ban (they needn’t have worried).
Playing under former Manchester United defender Gabriel Heinze, the striker scored four goals in 21 appearances in his breakthrough season.
He made a high-profile move to Atlanta United ahead of the 2022 campaign in a transfer that made him the most expensive player ever in MLS history.
Almada caught the eye with his scintilating performances in the States and became the most expensive signing in Brazilian Serie A history in 2024 after signing for Botafogo.
A player of seemingly endless potential, Almada wasn’t in Brazil for long and was snapped up by Lyon in January 2025.
Hailing from Messi’s native Argentina, Sarmiento burst onto the scene with Estudiantes at the age of 16, and his dribbling ability and low centre of gravity have drawn comparisons with Little Leo.
Unable to sign the actual Messi, Manchester City sealed a deal for Sarmiento last year and sent him out on loan to Girona ahead of the 2021-22 campaign where he played a bit-part role in the second division.
The attacking midfielder never played for City and was eventually sold to Argentine outfit Tigre in 2024.
Fait is another product of La Masia and he had a brilliant first season in the senior ranks in 2019-20, scoring eight goals in 33 appearances.
In 2020-21 he made his senior international debut – opting to represent Spain, where he has grown up, rather than the nation of his birth, Guinea-Bissau – but his season was curtailed by injury.
With Messi having left, Fati was seen as the rightful heir to the Argentine’s throne, even being given the No.10 shirt.
But the little forward has suffered from a succession of injuries and endured an underwhelming loan at Brighton in 2023-24.
Safe to say the jury is out – and with the emergence of Lamine Yamal, the ship may have sailed for Fati at Barcelona.
Yes, that’s seriously his name.
If being Argentian, diminutive in stature and playing for Messi’s old club wasn’t enough to be called the new Messi, actually sharing his name should surely do the job.
Messi, the 22-year-old one, currently plays for Argentine Second Division side Estudiantes de Río Cuarto.
There was much excitement when Roque was given the No. 19 shirt by Barcelona upon signing for the club in 2023 – a certain Mr. Messi wore the same number during his early days at Camp Nou.
In hindsight, the fast-tracked move did neither the player nor the club much good as he looked too raw to make an instant impact in a new continent.
Spending the 2024-25 campaign on loan at Real Betis, Roque has four goals and two assists in 19 La Liga appearances.
But his long-term future at Barcelona remains uncertain and the player has been linked with a move to either Tottenham or Newcastle.
The best of the lot and arguably one the world’s best players already at the age of 17 – Yamal is the real deal and the successor to Messi’s throne Barca have been waiting for.
Signed by Manchester City in 2024, Echeverri has remained at River Plate on loan for the past year before moving to England this January.
A highly-rated prospect by all observers, the sky is the limit for the 19-year-old.
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