Every generation does this. A teenager breaks through, shows something unusual, and we rush to label him “The Next Someone.” It feels helpful, even flattering. In reality, it is a shortcut born out of impatience. Instead of taking time to understand what a player actually is, we borrow a finished identity from the past and paste it onto an unfinished career.
There is an important distinction here. Saying a young player shares traits with a legend is normal scouting language. Turning him into a successor is something else entirely. That move replaces curiosity with expectation. The player is no longer allowed to explore his game in public. He is asked to reenact someone else’s highlight reel while still learning his own timing, body, and decision-making.
My core argument is simple. The “Next” label is not neutral. It strips a player of authorship over his own career and forces him to chase a ghost that never had to live in his timeline.
The reason this keeps happening is not accidental. Modern football needs continuity of icons. When a figure like Lionel Messi begins to fade from the center of the sport, a vacuum opens. Broadcasters, sponsors, clubs, and brands all feel it at once. Someone has to inherit the spotlight.
Calling a teenager “The Next Messi” is not just lazy analysis. It is efficient marketing. It gives fans a familiar reference point and gives advertisers a future they can already sell. A story titled “A Promising 16-Year-Old” does not travel as far as “Messi’s Heir Has Arrived.” Agents understand this too. Comparisons inflate value early. They accelerate conversations that would normally take years. Everyone involved benefits from the hype while the player is still young enough that failure can be explained away as “development.” The bill only comes due later, when growth slows and patience disappears.
From the player’s perspective, the damage is subtle but constant. Development is supposed to include mistakes. When you are labeled as “The Next,” mistakes stop being part of the process and start becoming evidence.
A missed chance is no longer a missed chance. It becomes a clip. A compilation. Proof that you are not living up to someone else’s peak years. You are not judged against players your age. You are judged against a legend’s best moments, edited and remembered without context. This is where identity begins to erode. Young players talk about feeling like they are always disappointing people, even when they play well. The standard is no longer improvement. It is replication. Over time, that pressure pushes players to mimic rather than discover, to copy gestures and tendencies instead of leaning into their own instincts.
The most dangerous consequence of the “Next” label is how it leaks into tactical thinking. Once a comparison takes hold, it starts to influence where people believe a player should play, not where he actually thrives. You can already see this at FC Barcelona with Lamine Yamal. Because he shares creative qualities with Messi, there is growing pressure from parts of the fanbase to move him inside, closer to the number 10 space. The logic is emotional, not functional.
Right now, Yamal’s value comes from width, isolation, and timing. Out wide, he can see the game in front of him, choose when to accelerate, and decide whether to pass, dribble, or shoot. Moving him centrally early would reduce space, increase traffic, and demand decision-making under pressure that does not suit his current strengths. This is how labels distort development. The player stops being treated as a tactical problem to solve and becomes a narrative problem to complete.
Most players do not survive this weight. History is full of talents who carried comparisons they never asked for and were quietly discarded when they failed to become myths. The survivors are rare because survival requires more than talent. It requires either overwhelming physical dominance or a complete reframing of identity. Kylian Mbappé escaped his early comparisons by becoming something explosively different. Neymar did it by leaning into showmanship and branding himself as an event rather than a successor.
Bojan Krkic wasn’t as lucky as the above two as he stated in a documentary that the pressure of being such a huge talent, a wonderkid as well as constantly being compared to Messi was too much and it affected his mental health.
For most players, the only escape route is drastic. A new league. A new role. A public reset. Without that break, the comparison lingers, quietly reshaping how every performance is interpreted.
What makes this era harsher than previous ones is permanence. Social media never forgets. Every comparison is archived, clipped, and replayed. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram thrive on visual similarity. Side-by-side videos turn development into aesthetic judgment. It is no longer about effectiveness. It is about whether the body shape, the touch, the movement “looks right.”
The narrative also turns faster. A player can go from “Future GOAT” to “overhyped” in one season. There is no middle ground. Growth curves, which are naturally uneven, are treated as moral failures.
The “Next” label pretends to be praise, but it functions like a leash. It narrows possibility instead of expanding it. It asks teenagers to honor history instead of building futures. If we actually want new legends, we need new language. Describe what players do well. Describe their tendencies, their strengths, their flaws. Stop assigning destinies before careers have even started.
Every great player in football history became great by being unrepeatable. None of them succeeded by trying to become the sequel. If we want the next era to produce its own icons, we have to stop resurrecting the old ones.
