Following Lionel Messi’s historic masterstroke against Austria at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, England and Manchester United legend Wayne Rooney’s iconic 14-year-old post has resurfaced online, sending football fans into an absolute frenzy.The year was 2012. The best Lionel Messi had just scored an incredible five goals in one UEFA Champions League game for Barcelona against Bayer Leverkusen. Watching the magic unfold, an amazed Wayne Rooney took to his X (formerly Twitter) account to state the absolutely obvious.“Messi is a joke. Best ever for me,” Rooney posted on March 7, 2012.Fast forward 14 years later to Dallas, those words have aged like the best wine. On Monday night, the 38-year-old Argentine magician showed the world once again why Rooney’s decade-old prediction was correct. Messi scored a sensational goal to lead defending champions Argentina to a comfortable 2-0 win over Austria, officially sending his country into the last 16.More importantly, the twins catapulted Messi to the top of football history. He scored an unprecedented 18 career goals at the World Cup, officially breaking Germany’s Miroslav Klose’s long-standing men’s record of 16 goals and becoming the all-time leading scorer in the history of the tournament.As soon as the final whistle blew in Dallas, fans dug up Rooney’s old post from the archives. The tweet quickly went viral again, attracting millions of new likes, shares and comments from fans echoing the same sentiment.For more than a decade, Rooney has stood firm in the never-ending “Greatest of All Time” (GOAT) debate, routinely placing the Argentine ahead of his former Manchester United teammate Cristiano Ronaldo. With Messi still dominating the grandest stage of them all in 2026, football enthusiasts are loudly reminding the world that Rooney called first.
