“Messi is a joke!” : Wayne Rooney’s 14-year-old tweet resurfaces after the Argentina icon’s record-breaking World Cup heroics

While Lionel Messi is still basking in his glory at the 2026 World Cup, Wayne Rooney’s 2012 tweet calling Messi a “joke” but the “best of them all” has resurfaced and sparked conversation among fans. (Photo/IANS) Following Lionel Messi’s historic master class against Austria at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, England and Manchester United legend Wayne Rooney’s iconic 14-year-old post has resurfaced online and sent football fans into an absolute frenzy.The year was 2012. The great Lionel Messi had just scored an incredible five goals in a single UEFA Champions League game for Barcelona against Bayer Leverkusen. A stunned Wayne Rooney watched the magic unfold, taking to his X account (formerly Twitter) to declare that it was absolutely obvious.“Messi is a joke. Best of all for me,” Rooney wrote on March 7, 2012.Fast forward 14 years later to Dallas and those words have aged like the finest wine. On Monday night, the 38-year-old Argentine wizard showed the world again why Rooney’s decade-old prediction was spot on. Messi scored a sensational performance to lead defending champions Argentina to a comfortable 2-0 win over Austria, officially sending his country into the round of 32.More importantly, the double strikes catapulted Messi to the top of football history. He scored an unprecedented 18 career World Cup goals, officially surpassing Germany’s Miroslav Klose’s long-standing men’s record of 16 goals and becoming the all-time top scorer in the tournament’s history.As soon as the final whistle blew in Dallas, fans dug out 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 remained steadfast in his position in the never-ending ‘Greatest of All Time’ (GOAT) debate, routinely putting the Argentine ahead of his former Manchester United teammate Cristiano Ronaldo. As Messi still dominates the biggest stage of all in 2026, football fans are loudly reminding the world that Rooney called it first.