Messi

by Guillem Balague

  When Leo was reminded that in England some say that it remains to be seen whether or not he would be capable of doing it on a cold, rainy Wednesday night in Stoke, he laughed. If you had given Picasso another pencil he would have been just as creative. ‘Messi is first and foremost an extraordinary talent, practically unrivalled. He would have developed anywhere, but he planted himself on fertile soil, within a system, where he was cared for and nurtured with affection,’ adds Ferran Soriano.

  Pep Guardiola designed a dressing room made to measure for Leo and he looked for allies to play the way he likes to. But in Pep’s last year, and with Tito Vilanova, it became more difficult to maintain the balance of a group that on occasions appeared overcommitted to Leo, with players, as well as coaches, distancing themselves from their responsibilities, the most worrying consequence of the formation and protection he received at Barcelona.

  ‘He came with a very individual game to which Barcelona added the team game, which helped him with the possession game played at a very fast pace, which suited him,’ explained Gerard Piqué during the summer of 2013, before the arrival of Tata Martino and Neymar. ‘But it’s true that in the past few years the attacks always finish with Leo. We play in a way that we have got used to and that always finishes with him. I think that’s good because we use it to maximise the skills of the best player in the world. But to be honest, when he isn’t there we get badly penalised.’

  SKILLS NECESSARY TO ‘WANT TO LEARN’

  2. Restlessness/motivation

  ‘I admire his capacity to keep on learning. I don’t know anyone who produces so many solutions to so many problems in something as variable as football.’

  (Andoni Zubizarreta, sports director of Barcelona)

  ‘We live trying to improve all of our ambitions and with football I am no exception. My objective is to grow, not to remain with what I have. I always say it. I have to get better in everything.’

  (Leo Messi after receiving his fourth Ballon d’Or, January 2013)

  Leo is a clever bloke. That’s how Charly Rexach defines him. He has learned how to play. He knows how to pick what he has to do at every moment. He speaks little but listens a lot. And that triumph is just another event, another step. Without realising, he does precisely what Rudyard Kipling counselled in his poem ‘If’ – he meets ‘with triumph and disaster and treats those two impostors just the same’.

  He keeps his eyes wide open and his mind constantly absorbs knowledge. Among the elite it is much easier to get to the top than to continue improving, and only the chosen few are capable of maintaining the motivation after having triumphed – Leo knows that if he doesn’t try to get better, he gets worse.

  ‘Without challenges to face, you will stop giving your best, you will get comfortable and the inertia that keeps you successful will begin to make you weaker,’ explains Pedro Gómez. ‘Your output will diminish without you really noticing. One day you’ll wake up and you will realise that you are becoming unfit to stay with the elite.’ Messi has no doubts: ‘I am my fiercest critic.’

  To keep going forward once you have reached such heights you have to have a love, a passion for the game unlike any other. As the producer of massive film successes The Sting and Jaws, David Brown said: ‘success isn’t so much about doing what you want, as it is liking what you’re doing.’ When someone is motivated principally for themselves, rather than financial rewards or social standing, they acquire a long list of psychological benefits: the struggle is less hard, persistence is a pleasure.

  Leo’s motivation also comes to him from an extremely powerful source. Messi is a Christian, although not an actively practising one. And he is convinced that there is another life after this one. That’s why every time he scores he thanks his grandmother for what she did for him. Celia is with him at the most intimate of moments. She continues to inspire him.

  3. Ambition, competitiveness and focus

  ‘He has three Champions Leagues but he wants four.’

  (Silvinho)

  ‘As painful as it was [the injection of hormones], he did it because he wanted to become better. He wanted to be the best!’

  (Víctor Vázquez)

  ‘I’m sorry for those who want to occupy his throne. He is among the greatest in every sense of the word. He is capable of doing what he does every three days.’

  (Pep Guardiola)

  ‘I am very happy. Now I want to keep on getting better, carry on winning things so I can have even more memories. I want to keep on achieving things that I will always remember.’

  (Leo Messi at the Ballon d’Or gala, 2012)

  ‘I am used to being the last person to leave; I like being in the dressing room. What’s more, I don’t have anything better to do. I love football and training sessions are part of football.’

  (Leo Messi at the same gala)

  In the Seventies Gordon Training International published some theories that time has diminished somewhat, but can still help us to understand four basic types of footballer. They called it the ‘four phases of apprenticeship’. The kid, when he strikes the ball against the wall or in the schoolyard, isn’t aware of how little he knows, how good or bad he is (unconscious incompetence). When he sees someone doing things with the ball that he can’t, he recognises his incompetence and consciously learns new skills in an academy to improve his performance (conscious incompetence). Finally, after a lot of practice, footballers are able to understand their ability and carry it out at a high level. They acquire the level of competence that permits them to become professional, a state in which the majority of footballers lead a comfortable life (conscious competence). There is one final, higher level, a group of malcontents who don’t believe they’ve made it merely because they have become professionals, and in this group you’ll find Lionel Messi.

  This final group, the privileged few, are those who never have enough, who don’t believe that they’re the best, who want to keep on working to reach the maximum level. They have practised so much that their abilities have become instinctive reaction and the practice of them easy (unconscious competence).

  ‘Leo used to say with confidence that he wanted to be the best. And he didn’t say it with any arrogance, rather as something that was going to happen in the future,’ explains Víctor Vázquez. ‘Cesc, Piqué or I could say it, but we had the fear of knowing that there were players in our position who played our type of game, but not with Messi, because with Messi there is no other like him. They are special players.’

  Having clear aims and objectives helps you go far: if you don’t know precisely where you want to go, you’re never going to get there. And Messi had it clear. He didn’t want to be famous, a star. He wanted to be the best footballer he could be. ‘We all want to win,’ reflects Gustavo Oberman. ‘But certainly he, with the qualities he has, will want to win more than the others. A half-good player will want to win a game; he wants to win the tournament, the Ballon d’Or. If I was Messi I’d also want to win it, but I’m not as good as that, so I limit myself to what I can win.’

  Oberman continues: ‘He also wanted to win during practice, when playing the mini games, and he’d battle for dead balls as if it was a match. Perhaps another type of player, with the same qualities as him, will play more calmly in training because he doesn’t have to demonstrate it, but he, like Kun Agüero and many others, oblige us to play to our maximum, because if you don’t play to your maximum with players like this it is very difficult to stand out: he clearly has all that deep inside.’

  ‘What?!’ adds the Manchester City defender Martín Demichelis. ‘He’s competitive even in the Friends of Messi against the Rest of the World! In one of the games he said to us, “come on now, let’s play seriously, I’m getting bored”.’

  This highly competitive nature, this winning mentality, this search for all-conquering new achievements creates such an excitement in him that on occasions he has vomited minutes before the start. It’s almost like filling a car with petrol before the start of
a race. Or like the singer who, before going on stage, before the applause, feels his temperature rising, his nerves jangling. But after that brief moment, as soon as he walks onto the pitch, he resets his body to neutral, his objectives become crystal clear.

  His focus, the sports psychologists say, is absolute, centred. It is neither wide nor diffuse, but, rather, reduced. Many of those who stand out in science, culture or sport have the same vision. They say that Archimedes remained focused on an experiment, while Syracuse, the city he lived in, was being invaded. The order had been given that the inventor and astronomer should not be harmed, but he sat concentrating on what he was doing until he noticed the soldier. ‘Noli turbare circulos meos!’ – ‘Don’t mess up my circles,’ he told him, as he sat drawing in the sand. The Roman killed him with a single blow.

  Those who live in the rarefied realms of the elite, create and dwell in their own world, which, by its very nature, cannot be shared with lesser mortals. Every now and then they emerge from their cocoon and share our world with us. Like actors they need to learn how to come out of character, something that Leo does in private. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about an actor who played the part of William Shakespeare for 15 years, and at a given moment, when he wanted to date a girl, he wooed her as if he was actually the real Shakespeare. He’d forgotten how to be himself. The elite footballer runs the risk of finishing up locked away in his own private world. Leo tries to ensure that his contact with his nephews, his wife and son, Thiago, his dogs, help him to open up the windows of his life and remind him that there are other worlds beside the rectangle of the football pitch.

  But to conclude, as ex-footballer Romario has recently, that his reduced vision and world is proof that Messi has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, is very simplistic. In fact it’s false – not only is it extremely complicated to diagnose Asperger’s, the fact is that it has never been diagnosed. The superficial use of medical terminology is dangerous.

  It’s a fact, though, that Messi can become so focused, so centred on his own affairs, that his reactions can appear strange. At the end of the Peru vs Argentina game in the quarter-finals of the Copa América in 2007, and just before entering the tunnel to go to the dressing room, a female fan leapt from high up in the stands so that she could get a hug from the star. In the television footage you see Messi looking up, urging the girl not to jump, while he carries on walking. Suddenly a body falls to the ground from at least four metres up, bends double before getting up and embracing the footballer who waits there briefly before carrying on towards the dressing room. Someone asks him for his shirt and you see him debating whether or not to give it. Almost as if nothing had happened seconds earlier.

  That’s how it appeared from the outside. And Messi explains what he felt inside: ‘Wow, it was incredible. I was making signs to her not to jump, but she jumped anyway. I swear to you, I didn’t know what to do. It was from at least four metres up. She nearly killed herself, and what’s worse they just got the poor kid out of the way as quickly as possible without making sure whether she was okay or not.’

  And when he cries after a game? How can you explain both extremes in the same person, the coolness before taking a penalty and the tears? A football match is not for crying, they say in Argentina. If someone does, it’s because it is more than just a game of football. What has he played in 90 minutes that has made him cry? A defeat for Leo is not just anything: until he calms down, say the psychologists, immersed in his own world, focused to the extreme, he feels as if he has lost his life. Viewed like that, crying would seem appropriate.

  ‘Leo is very special,’ says Piqué. ‘When he loses a game, you think, whoa, I wouldn’t like to be his wife, or girlfriend. You can imagine that he goes home and spends the rest of the day without saying a word. And that is what happens – he doesn’t talk to anyone, he locks himself in his room and he might even arrive late for training the next day, or not even appear. Not winning, not scoring, hurts him that badly. It will take him a day or two or three to get over this wall of silence, but he can’t help it. And the next time he loses, the same thing again.’

  Winning is something he has to do. After a victory Leo is left with the feeling of a job well done. They say that the great wins are accompanied minutes afterwards by a type of depression, a drop in physical and mental wellbeing caused by the great effort. ‘Is that it? All that effort for this?’ top sportsmen ask at that point. Normally it lasts only a few minutes. Leo feels satisfaction from having achieved his objective, and he knows how to celebrate. But before he has a chance to suffer any kind of attack of ‘champion’s depression’, he has already found new challenges. ‘The great geniuses are different from the rest of us,’ says Silvinho. ‘Sometimes they don’t seem human. They want more and more … I love this, because if I see a person, a player, who can do more, who has the talent to do better, but doesn’t do it … yuk. It’s painful. Leo doesn’t need money, he doesn’t want beautiful things … he’s just looking for more successes, to win more.’

  Attaining this level of focus is key to advancement. ‘Publicity very often confuses a player,’ writes El País journalist Santiago Segurola. ‘It obliges him to be the best in the world in every move. And that cannot be. I don’t believe players are prepared for the extreme pressure that journalism, critics, success, fame, celebrity, travel, continual sponsorship demands, put on them. They are things that can distract, that can slow you down.’

  But nothing distracts Leo. Ex-Real Madrid and Rosario-born Santi Solari told his pupils during his first experience as a coach with a blancos youth team not to waste their time, to make the most of their football education, and not to be distracted by adolescent things, by going out and partying. He was saying this to 15-year-old boys, who were at an age when wasting their time was precisely what they should be thinking about. Those who understood what Solari was talking about, those who were mad enough to recognise and follow what he was saying, those are the ones that have the footballing gene. Nothing will distract them.

  While Leo was with Tito Vilanova’s youth team, Barcelona received an offer from Juventus for him. Messi did not want to go: he had marked out his road and his ambition was to triumph at Barcelona. ‘Leo lives, thinks, enjoys, or is saddened by, or whatever, with football,’ points out Ferran Soriano, the former vice-president of Barcelona and now executive director at Manchester City. ‘It is clear that he thinks that to be the best in the world he has to have a special type of focus: he plays football, trains, even plays football on PlayStation. I remember dining with Fernando Alonso a few years ago. I left with the same impression that I have of Messi: all he talks about is races and cars, nothing else. What will occupy them when they finish their careers?’

  SKILLS NECESSARY TO ‘KNOW HOW TO LEARN’

  4. Constancy

  ‘From what my mum and dad tell me, by the time I was two or three I already had a football. Since I was small I knew that I liked it and that it was what I wanted to do. And as I grew I became more aware of everything … I wanted it even more.’

  (Leo Messi in an Audemars Piguet commercial, ‘Defining Moment’)

  ‘Messi understands football as if he’d been playing for a hundred years.’

  (Santi Solari)

  ‘I have never seen a better footballer than Leo; one who can surpass him in effectiveness. He dedicates himself to winning games with an amazing continuity, and he will always surprise us with something different, like a new brilliant rewarding brushstroke.’

  (Jorge Valdano)

  ‘He has been gifted with a great talent, but if it wasn’t for an almost insane willpower to give everything and to progress it would have served him nothing.’

  (Rodrigo Messi in France Football)

  ‘People buy tickets just to see him play and he is leaving something unique. Tell me another player who has kept this level up for four years. Who else has this tremendous physical capacity, who fights like he does? I have never seen anyone who is so consistent … perhaps I am
too young but I have never seen a team-mate like this or, as a coach, had a player like this. He is superior to the rest, he has a special gift.’

  (Pep Guardiola in 2011)

  There are no short cuts on the path to the summit. You have to learn by trial and error. When it looks like you can’t make it, you have to think that you still can. And when you get there, you have to be clear that you haven’t arrived, you have merely advanced. A graphic and imaginative example of this is the advertisement in which Cristiano Ronaldo is tormented by his alter ego. ‘He appears at the end of every game,’ Ronaldo says. ‘He follows me. He stalks me. Even if I have scored and had a great game. He always has something to say. He’s a pain. I should have got to that pass, I should have controlled that ball, every free-kick should be a goal. His favourite expression? If you think you’re already perfect, then you never will be. And he goes on, and on, and on … every flaming day. Seven days a week. But you know what? I love the bloke.’

  We have already seen that is how the greats think. Without this mentality they would not achieve their great objectives. But what else makes them achieve such heights? What path do they take? Can it be taught? Can it be repeated?

  For centuries we have believed that success is linked with talent and genetics. ‘I became the British table tennis champion, and the number one in 1995,’ explains Matthew Syed, Commonwealth table tennis champion and journalist with The Times who explores the subject of success in his extraordinary book Bounce. ‘It was a huge surprise for the sports community in Great Britain. I was very young and not many people thought I would get to the top so quickly. I grew up in Silverdale Road in Reading, in a pretty yet unremarkable street except for one thing: this little community produced more great players of table tennis in the 1980s than the rest of the country put together. Now if you think this is all created because of genetics, then why was just one specific street affected?’