Are we obliged to introduce this by saying ‘move over Messi and Ronaldo’? Yes? Alright, if you insist: Move over Messi and Ronaldo: the quarter-finals of Euro 2024 is going to serve up a direct head-to-head between not just the two best sides in the competition, but the two best individual players.
One of the babies of the Spain squad at the World Cup 18 months ago, Nico Williams has used this tournament to announce himself to those who were not already familiar with his talents.
Running the left wing for Germany, meanwhile, will be Jamal Musiala, previously most famous as the one Chelsea and England let slip the net, but now simply an exceptional talent who has come into his own for club and country.
Why Germany Have Been The Best Team At Euro 2024 (So Far)
Are we now entering the age of Williams vs Musiala?
Among all the stories to be told in what already looks untoppable as the most mouth-watering of the quarter-final ties, seeing which of those two 21-year-olds comes up with the goods is the most exciting.
After a relatively quiet opener against Croatia, Nico Williams seized the spotlight especially against Italy with a performance that we suspect still has Giovanni Di Lorenzo dizzy. Williams’ absence from Spain’s final group game against Albania has done nothing to dent his credentials to win the player of the tournament.
The Athletic winger set up Rodri to equalise against Georgia in the round of 16 before later scoring a sensational solo effort on the counter-attack to make it 3-1 and kill off any hopes of a Georgian comeback.
When Williams gets going, he looks unstoppable. It’s not uncommon, for obvious reasons, for wingers with prodigious dribbling stats to also be fouled just as often. With Williams, they can’t even get close enough to kick him – he’s been fouled just once all tournament, according to WhoScored.
Musiala, meanwhile, has the best case of anybody to claim the golden ball this summer: his three strikes put him joint-top with Georgia’s Georges Mikautadze and Slovakia’s Ivan Schranz, both of whom will now head home from the tournament after ending up on the losing side on Sunday night.
This tournament has been lit up by a new generation of talents in their early 20s or teenage years. All the talk of Luka Modric, Toni Kroos and Cristiano Ronaldo’s advancing years at what could well be the last hurrah from major tournament football for all three players underlines that point, but they are merely one extreme end of the spectrum.
Such is the relentless march of time that even players that we still think of as relative youngsters with their best years ahead of them – Kylian Mbappe, Declan Rice, Gianluigi Donnarumma – have so far been put in the shade by Lamine Yamal, Jude Bellingham (when it has mattered), and Giorgi Mamardashvili.
None of them have caught the eye as much as Williams and Musiala, however, and it’s only a shame that the draw has fallen in such a way that they will meet in the quarter-finals and not the final. It feels extremely wasteful for the football gods not to allow us to enjoy them both until the very last day.
The question, longer term, is just how far these two can go on the international stage: is this a one-summer thing, like Andrei Arshavin at Euro 2008, or could this become a running battle for years to come?
Dare we even ask it: might it not only be move over Ronaldo and Messi, but move over Mbappe? So far at Euro 2024, it has.
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