Following Lionel Messi’s historic masterclass against Austria at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, an iconic 14-year-old post by England and Manchester United legend Wayne Rooney has resurfaced online, sending football fans into an absolute frenzy.The year was 2012. An early Lionel Messi had just scored an incredible five goals in a single UEFA Champions League match for Barcelona against Bayer Leverkusen. Watching the magic unfold, a stunned Wayne Rooney took to his X account (formerly Twitter) to state the absolute obvious.“Messi is a joke. For me the best ever,” Rooney had posted on March 7, 2012.Fast forward 14 years to Dallas, and those words have aged like the finest wine. On Monday night, the 38-year-old Argentine magician once again showed the world why Rooney’s decades-old prediction was spot on. Messi scored a sensational brace to lead defending champions Argentina to a comfortable 2-0 win over Austria, officially taking his country into the Round of 32.More importantly, the twin strikes catapulted Messi to the pinnacle of football history. He reached an unprecedented career high of 18 World Cup goals, officially breaking Germany’s Miroslav Klose’s long-standing men’s record of 16 goals to become the all-time top scorer in the tournament’s history.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, garnering millions of fresh likes, shares and comments from fans echoing the same sentiment.For more than a decade, Rooney has stood firm on his position in the never-ending ‘Greatest of All Time’ (GOAT) debate, regularly putting the Argentine ahead of his former Manchester United team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo. With Messi still dominating the biggest stage of all in 2026, football enthusiasts are loudly reminding the world that Rooney called it first.
