Messi, Ronaldo & the poorest football advert you’ve never seen
El Clasico reached its zenith in the early 2010s, when Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, representing arguably the two greatest teams in football, squared off on opposite sides of the divide.
Add to that the reality that Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho built superteams around their respective superstars, and it becomes difficult to argue otherwise.
It is a football era that set the tone for the next decade and continues to dominate social media to this day, in the form of nostalgic remarks and Twitter users engaging in enthralling debates over who is the greater fraud, Pessi or Penaldo.
But an advertisement featuring Messi and Ronaldo from 2012, arguably the zenith of El Clasico, makes the Pessi/Penaldo memes appear to be genuine intellectual discourse – truly, you should see the effort that goes into those memes.
Not sure this 2012 advert for El Clasico involving Messi and Ronaldo will ever be topped, to be honest.
— Planet Football (@planetfutebol) July 18, 2023
Pure cinema. Brings a tear to your eye…pic.twitter.com/FedWEnsbMN
It is important to contemplate that this advertisement is now over a decade old. Branding and investment in commercial campaigns have progressed by leaps and bounds over the past decade, with the effectiveness of advertising being better understood and more carefully considered than ever before.
So long, disclaimer. Now we can proceed to the best part.
This television commercial featuring arguably the two greatest football players of all time and some of the most renowned athletes on the planet in the 21st century is hilarious.
Even more hilarious when one considers the magnitude of the personalities involved and what they accomplished.
Is not there art? An everlasting classic.
Forget your Barbies, your Oppenheimers. Absolute nonsense. Iconic Nike advertising? Nah. Crap. This trumps all others.
This appears to be a product of a GCSE ICT classroom, as it was directed and produced by a group of students who spent the majority of the class creating football boots on Nike ID and devising all-time XIs in the style of a Monday Night Football episode.
There are a few topics to address here, so let us break them down.
The obnoxiously loud, royalty-free music in the background sounds like it belongs in the least helpful YouTube tutorial conceivable.
You are off to a great start in your bid to win the GCSE Media Studies assignment bingo thanks to this and the excellent graphics at the conclusion, which make allusion to “The Classico.”
Those visuals are impressive, however. Who has approved this? We had enough money to hire the two greatest footballers on the planet at the time, but we could not spare a few dollars to stop creating the remainder of the advertisement in PowerPoint? Stinker.
Messi sitting there in his Barcelona uniform, preparing for a match that does not appear to be happening for at least the next few weeks, is also quite amusing. This gentleman is, without a doubt, devoted to “The Classico.”
While we are on the subject of the Argentine, it is time to address that home screen, which is the most comically 2012 iPhone home screen conceivable.
On ‘Messi’s’ phone, before he accesses his messages to text ‘Ronaldo CR7,’ we can view a selection of his downloaded applications, which include the ITV Player and the pièce de résistance, Talking Tom.
Our seven-time Ballon d’Or winner is a straightforward individual. Enjoys watching British soap operas and animated animals. We can only assume the phony beer-drinking app is buried on a different page.
Ronaldo is a more solemn individual. All company. His attire and Samsung indicate this to us. There were no fun applications, only a background image of his cherished Real Madrid. That individual is a company man.
The couple’s texting banter erodes their earnestness. All-caps banter with a peculiarly British tone.
Ronaldo is well-known to communicate English, so this is not surprising. It is difficult to envision a world in which Messi texts his former adversary about “scoring against you lot” as if they were on the playground at dinnertime.
It is quite remarkable to see how far advertising and branding have come in a relatively short period of time, as well as to see two superstars of the game involved in something that today probably would not receive a grade higher than a C.
If ever there was a piece of media that conveyed the intensity and caliber of the rivalry that was El Clasico in the early 2010s, this was not it.
Messi, Ronaldo & the poorest football advert you’ve never seen