I grew up in Chicago, trained in stats, and still find football’s magic in the numbers. Lionel Messi didn’t just score goals—he engineered them. At 38, his career is a living regression model: 778 apps, 672 goals, 8 Ballon d’Ors. This isn’t fandom. It’s forensic poetry written in blue-and-red algorithms. I’ll toast him not with champagne—but with a clean dataset.