6 of the biggest foes in football
They say that we come alone and we shall go alone. This is the eternal truth. However, during the time in the middle—the time we spend on this earth—we are rarely ever alone.
There are friends, there are siblings and cousins, there is family. There is that one person you love beyond measure and there is that one friendship that eclipses every other acquaintance in magnitude.
However, this is the rosy stuff—and life is not all sunshine and roses.
There is not a single person on this planet who, in her/his lifetime, hasn’t displeased anybody. And that is the first step of any long-standing feud. In football, there are some great friendships, but there are some even worse rivalries that even borders on hatred.
While we can’t say for sure what line differentiates the two—and, frankly, we will just not go there—we can surely compile a list of the longest-standing feuds between footballers that will be remembered for a long time to come…
Pepe and Lionel Messi
El Clasicos are always heated encounters. It is not just a football game— it is a game between two ideologies, two cultures. So it is natural to see and feel hostility in a clash of such high importance and in these moments of fire, we find some players burning each other with acts that border on enmity.
One such individual clash is between Lionel Messi and Pepe.
The Real Madrid man is infamous for his hot temper, something that precedes him and makes people think that he is nothing more than just a thug despite the fact that he hasn’t seen a red card for Real Madrid since November 2011.
And it was these heated face-offs that became the beginning of the rift.
As Lionel Messi was lying on the ground, Pepe, in a vulgar act, stamped on Messi’s hand—and it was intentional. In the next leg, Messi was seen pushing Pepe off the ball, for which the Argentine earned a rare yellow card.
You know the Pepe vs Messi is a thing when someone as calm as Lionel Messi gets angry.