Soccer team got a qualitative leap

AP reports on Lionel Messi, the Spanish soccer star from Argentina:

Even on a team full of World Cup winners and European champions, Messi stood out.

United manager Alex Ferguson calls Barcelona the best team he has come up against in almost four decades of coaching, and Barcelona’s Pep Guardiola says Messi is the key.

“We have good players in the team, but he makes the difference,” Guardiola said. “We can compete, but without him we would not have that qualitative leap that we do have with him.

“We have hard work, we have talent; we’ve used tactics and we’ve tried to put players at their ease. But Messi is unique, he is a one-off.”

Note that Messi is a "qualitative leap", and not a quantum leap. A quantum leap is a atomic electron transition, or more colloquially, and small discrete shift. Maybe the reporter noticed my argument that The quantum leap is a Marxist plot.

The term one-off is more popular in Britain, and is something that is singular or unique. It suggests that some assembly-line manufacturing process had to be interrupted to make a custom product.