Messi

by Guillem Balague

  ‘The “conductor of the orchestra” or the most influential player has always conditioned the team’s formation in football,’ explains Josep María Minguella who was Vic Buckingham and Rinus Michels’ assistant at Barcelona for six seasons, as well as an agent. ‘Di Stéfano used to do it, or Cruyff, who had total control at Ajax. When there are players who bother the top guy in some way, the coach looks for a way to make it easier for him so he is relaxed. It’s not about discussing the quality of Eto’o or Ibrahimović, two sensational players, but if you want to look for a game style that suits the top man better, you don’t play them. On top of that, it helps having excellent, educated players who keep a low profile in the dressing room instead of those with strong personalities, like those two.’

  What broke the Pep−Zlatan relationship? Was it the tactical evolution of Messi asking for space or the character of a player who does not accept change for the benefit of the team? Ibra had been the protagonist at all his clubs, it is what he asked for, so he was not willing to make space for Leo. In part because it went against his style of play to create space for ‘the Flea’. And when a player of that level is required to do things that do not fit with his natural style, the relationship with the one who forces him always snaps.

  Ibra told the story in his own way in his autobiography, I Am Zlatan. And his own way, even though couched in the language of the street, does not differ much from Leo and Pep’s version. Sometimes he seems to understand the motives, but resented the way issues were handled. At other times he seems to understand nothing.

  ‘Everything started well but then Messi started speaking. Messi is remarkable. Fucking incredible. I don’t know him very well. We are very different. He arrived at Barça at 13 and grew up in the culture. He has no problem with all that school bollocks. The game revolves around him in the team, which is natural. He shines, but I had arrived, and I was scoring more than him. So he went to Guardiola and said to him: “I don’t want to play on the right wing any more. I want to be in the middle.” That is where I was. But Guardiola didn’t give a shit. He changed tactics. He went from 4-3-3 to 4-5-1 with me up top and Messi behind, and he left me in the wilderness. Every ball went through Messi and I couldn’t play my game. I have to be free like a bird on the pitch. I’m the guy who wants to make the difference at every level. But Guardiola sacrificed me. That is the truth. He trapped me up there. Well, I can understand his situation. Messi was the star. Guardiola had to listen to him. But come on! I had scored goal after goal at Barça, I was lethal too. He could not adapt the team just for one man. I mean: why the hell did they sign me then? Nobody pays that amount of money just to strangle me as a player. Guardiola had to think about both of us and, of course, the atmosphere at board level changed slightly. I was their biggest investment and didn’t feel right in the new formation. I was too expensive not to feel right. Sporting director Txiki Beguiristain was pushing me, he was telling me I had to speak to the coach. “Resolve it!”

  ‘So I addressed the coach. I went up to him on the pitch during training, and I was careful about one thing. I didn’t want a fight, and I told him:

  ‘“I don’t want to fight. I don’t want a war. I just want to discuss things.”

  ‘He nodded his head. But he seemed a little scared, so I repeated:

  “If you think I want a fight, we will leave it. I just want to speak.”

  ‘“Good! I like speaking to my players.”

  ‘“Listen!” I continued. “You are not using my ability. If I was not the goalscorer you wanted, you should have bought Inzaghi or someone else. I need space, and to be free. I can’t go up and down constantly. I weigh 98 kilos. I don’t have the physique for it.” He stood there thinking. He often did that. “I think we can play this way. And if we cannot … Well, then it is better if you leave me on the bench. With all due respect, I understand you, but I am being sacrificed for other players. This is not working. It is like you bought a Ferrari, but you are driving it as if it were a Fiat.”

  ‘He carried on thinking: “Okay, maybe it was a mistake. This is my problem. I’m going to work on it.”

  ‘I felt happy. He was going to work on it. … The conversation seemed to go well, but suddenly Guardiola started to ignore me.’

  After the book was published, Zlatan explained it all with this sentence: ‘Guardiola sacrificed me for Messi and didn’t have the decency to tell me.’ What Ibrahimović doesn’t say is that he demanded the coach make a change that would benefit him: ‘The midget has to be dropped.’

  ‘Leo never asked for Zlatan to leave,’ assures ex-director of football Txiki Beguiristain. ‘His football demanded his coach make a decision. And it was not in Barcelona’s interests to stop that process.’ The proposal was clear: the individual had to be sacrificed for the benefit of the group and the Swede did not want to do it. In his book El largo viaje de Pep (‘Pep’s Long Journey’), Martí Perarnau quotes anonymously from a first-team player: ‘At Barça, when the ball is in one part of the pitch, the team knows that it must have a concrete formation. If the ball moves into another area, everyone’s obligations change. There are some established criteria and we all follow them. Nobody is excluded, but Ibra excluded himself from them, he didn’t want to participate. When he didn’t have the ball, he didn’t follow instructions. And when he had the ball, he did his pirouettes and didn’t co-operate with the others.’

  But Ibrahimović, who had taken a pay cut to go to Barcelona, is right about a number of things: Pep realised he had made a mistake by signing him and he took Leo’s side. Since then the Swede has insisted on one thing: Leo is the best in the world and he did not have a bad relationship with him. ‘That is gossip that someone spreads. I never had any sort of conflict with him,’ he explained in Swedish newspaper Fotbollskanalen.

  So at the end of that season, Ibra was going to be sacrificed.

  In Guardiola’s second year, Barcelona won the league with 99 points, three more than Real Madrid and with only one defeat. Leo scored 34 goals in domestic competition, a number that used to belong to another era; in fact the closest to him was Real’s Gonzalo Higuaín, the second highest scorer with 27. After Zlatan’s loan move to AC Milan the following season, David Villa arrived. He was told to forget about being the team’s top scorer and was asked always to run into space and give depth.

  Villa, who thought he was signing as a number 9, understood the situation soon after arriving and accepted the conditions.

  7. THE 5– 0 AGAINST MOURINHO’S MADRID AND THE FOUR CLÁSICOS IN TWO WEEKS

  (The interview with Martín Souto on TyC from 2013 shows a video of Messi’s altercation with Marcelo in a clásico against Real Madrid):

  –

  You’re a hothead, aren’t you?

  –

  Yes.

  –

  A bastard.

  –

  Yes, I’m a hothead. More so when I’m playing for something important. I don’t like to lose and I get agitated if I think I might.

  After two consecutive league titles, the 2010−11 season arrived in an air of optimism. Yaya Touré, Dmytro Chigrinski, Thierry Henry, Hleb, Rafa Márquez and Zlatan had all left the club. The message had to be reaffirmed: the side had to keep one step ahead of its rivals’ defences who now recognised Barcelona as the greatest side in the world, and Leo as the greatest player of his generation. In addition to David Villa, versatile Brazilian Adriano and winger Ibrahim Afellay both arrived.

  Leo was coming from another disappointment with the national side – Argentina had gone down in the quarter-finals of the World Cup against the hosts, Germany – and was now hoping that the following 2011 Copa América that was being played in Argentina would help repair the damage caused by the World Cup defeat.

  At the World Cup, Leo had found himself a new friend. Javier Mascherano, the central midfielder from Liverpool, had spent the summer filling his head with the idea that he should convince Guardiola: he wanted to come to Barcelona, for whom he had been c
lose to signing twelve months earlier. ‘At the World Cup Leo had told me that Pep was looking for a central midfielder now that Yaya Touré had gone, and so I said to him, “Go on, speak to him, please …” and he would answer me, “Yes, I’ll mention it”. “Tell him I’m not going to be one of those bad Argentines”,’ the ‘little boss’ Mascherano explained jokingly. ‘When you’ve got someone like Leo at your club and he gives you a good reference, this helps you a great deal. Both he and Gabi Milito helped me. A big part of the reason I am here and have been able to live all of this is because of Leo.’

  Mascherano arrived at a club that had finally mapped out the route it intended to take, and also knew those they needed to help them reach their destination. ‘I arrived there halfway through that journey, and, from what I could see, Leo had a special bond with Pep because of all the things he did. How do you see that? Well, you notice it when a coach is surprised by some of the things that a player can do and shows that surprise, and also in the way Pep talked about Leo, with admiration, awe. It’s very unusual to find that.’

  When the signing was confirmed and Mascherano flew to Barcelona, Leo waited to see him, once all the necessary protocol had been completed. Mascherano had his photograph taken with the club badge at the Camp Nou, gave a press conference and Messi, waiting alone, embraced him in the room where families wait at the end of a game. ‘Welcome,’ he said.

  The ‘little boss’ found that, on the pitch, his team-mates looked to Leo because the team had been built around his qualities, and also so they could benefit from the ease with which he understood the game. ‘Leo reads games very well and knows how to adapt to any particular situation,’ explains Pedro Rodríguez. ‘If an opponent plays very forward, he always looks for the back of the defence; if he is back, he tries to come behind to get the ball to help us create space, to create the play. It sounds simple to know what’s going on at every moment of a game and to know where to go, but it’s not.’

  The connection with Pedro and the players who surrounded ‘the Flea’ (Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets) reached a point where words were no longer necessary. ‘There are always moments on the pitch, where we have to correct ourselves,’ explains Pedro. ‘“Listen, close down more here”, or “close down deeper”, but they are unusual. In this team everything runs like clockwork, we know one another very well, we have spent a lot of time playing like this, and it all comes naturally, we hardly ever need to speak. There are times when I can play a whole game without saying a word to Leo.’

  Martín Souto: With Barcelona’s game, there are moments when the team brings the ball from one side to the other and you’re stopped for something like a minute, and then suddenly they pass you the ball and ‘goal’. In these situations is it like you’re taking a breather so later on you can trick them, or is it something natural?

  Lionel Messi: No, it’s natural, because I know what our players are like. I know that at one time or another, the ball is going to come to me. I don’t have to drive myself mad and where I’m stopped I know I can hurt my opponent. I wait for the moment because I know, because of the players we have, that it will come to me. We have become used to having the ball practically throughout the game.

  (Leo Messi with Martín Souto on TyC)

  It is clear that Leo Messi and Barcelona had developed what seemed to be an eternally symbiotic relationship. Eternal? Leo had been close to going to Inter and Real Madrid ‘came looking for him every year,’ according to Joan Laporta.

  Since the time when Jorge Valdano was director of the blancos, Real Madrid never closed the door on Leo. No one ever contacted Barcelona directly, but various intermediaries close to president Florentino Pérez kept in permanent contact with all those in Leo’s entourage. ‘I don’t blame him, because he is the best player in the world and it’s normal that a club like Madrid, like Milan, like Inter, like Juve, like Chelsea … should want him,’ reflects Laporta. ‘Madrid have people who can get into Leo’s entourage, but Leo has always rejected their advances outright.’ Approaches have also come from London and Manchester, but have always been ignored.

  The Real Madrid president’s admiration for Leo is well known. In the summer of 2012, Cristiano Ronaldo announced in the press room at the Bernabéu that he was so ‘sad’ when he scored two goals against Granada that he chose not to celebrate. He confirmed that this was for ‘professional’ reasons and those ‘within the club’ knew why. Ronaldo had met the previous day with the president to tell him that he did not feel valued at the club and that he wanted to leave. According to the journalist Javier Matallanas, Florentino Pérez answered him, ‘If you want to go, bring me the money so I can sign Messi.’

  Inevitably, the matches against Madrid are marked in red on Leo’s calendar. And that 2010−11 season saw the first clásico with José Mourinho in charge of Real. He had been appointed from Inter with a brief to halt the blaugrana advance and modernise the historic club. In a preview of the game, Mourinho had insisted that football was a ‘box of surprises’ and he wasn’t sure how his troops would respond. That night at the Camp Nou there followed an extraordinary meeting of minds between players, fans and a coach, between an ideal and its practical execution.

  GB: Is a match against Real Madrid like any other match for Leo?

  PG: Leo doesn’t do what he does for me, he does it for himself. There are players who will do anything to gain their coach’s love, so their colleagues will sing their praises, so they will be spoken of well in public. He competes against himself as well as against his rivals. And, of course, against his most direct rivals, as Cristiano does and by the same token Ronaldo competes against Messi, Barcelona vs Real Madrid…And not only does he compete against himself, he is also the most demanding player of all, much more demanding of himself than I ever could be of him. He’s unhappy when he does not play well and he feels that he is letting people down or letting himself down, not giving everything he could give. That’s why he has achieved what he has and why he can maintain this extraordinarily high standard and that’s why the team continues to support him.

  Matchday 13 (29 November 2010) Barcelona 5–0 Real Madrid

  Barcelona: Valdés; Alvés, Puyol, Piqué, Abidal; Xavi (Keita, 86th minute), Busquets, Iniesta; Messi, Villa (Bojan, 76th minute) and Pedro (Jeffrén, 86th minute). Subs not used: Pinto; Adriano, Maxwell, Thiago and Mascherano.

  Real Madrid: Casillas; Ramos, Pepe, Carvalho, Marcelo (Arbeloa, 60th minute); Khedira, Xabi Alonso; Di María, Özil (Lass, 46th minute), Ronaldo; and Benzema. Subs not used: Dudek; Albiol, Granero, Pedro León and Higuaín.

  Goals: 1–0. 10th minute: Xavi. 2–0. 18th minute: Pedro. 3–0. 55th minute: Villa. 4–0. 58th minute: Villa. 5–0. 90th minute: Jeffrén.

  Santiago Siguero, Marca: One more season, and counting, Barcelona showed Real Madrid the huge gap that separates them. Away from the impressive score, five goals that could have significant repercussions for both teams, the game reflected again the differences between a unit that knows what it wants, and another one that needs to be built, yet … Messi again. He didn’t score but destroyed Madrid once again. The white team suffers like no other from the Argentinian’s talent. Guardiola placed him few metres deeper than usual. From a position in the hole, in the second part he could not stop passing balls in behind the Real defenders.

  Conscious of the fact that his side contained more quality than he had ever had before, Mourinho looked to face Barcelona head-on. But he made various errors. He asked the physically fragile Özil to cover too much space in defence, including when Leo had the ball. The merengues should have kept a very tight central pressing line but ended up being an unresponsive unit with lines set too far apart with plenty of gaps to attack: a joy for Leo. The central defenders had no point of reference because ‘the Flea’ was moving around all of the attacking zone and Khedira and Xabi Alonso were always outnumbered. In the second half Mourinho brought on Lass Diarra as a third central midfielder, a precursor to what he would do in future encounters.

&
nbsp; GB: What do you remember about the 5–0, what did you ask Leo to do?

  PG: We adapted ourselves to Cristiano’s counter-attacks. Based on where Cristiano was, our full-back had to go forward or come back. That was the defensive question; we knew from experience that, being a Mourinho side, they would attack the spaces. I was clear that they would wait for us to lose the ball to attack us as quickly as possible in behind our defenders, especially through Cristiano, who was always more isolated waiting for the counter. And when in attack, we should look for Leo. We had to find him in positions where he could be in space, and move freely and score. Curiously, he didn’t score, but he did set up a few goals. We played well.

  GB: In that season there was another Leo moment that had nothing to do with scoring. I remember him doing an incredibly long run after he had lost the ball in his opponent’s half, to get it back off Kun Agüero. Have you ever used him to say, ‘look, if a player like this does it …’?

  PG: Yes, sometimes we have used our forwards who have made an enormous effort in defence to say: that’s how we are as a team, it’s not just the defenders that run, that’s how we are as a team, don’t ever forget it. That particular incident has become famous. Leo constantly needs challenges and at that particular time there were debates as to whether Kun was better than Leo. It was then a personal duel: now I’m going to run and take the ball off you. It’s probably all about personal challenges, when he has them there are no problems.

  It’s worth taking a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YxOSDgrPzIJzBvB5TcdQ

  GB: From 17 April to 3 May those four famous and controversial clásicos were played. Firstly in the league, the Copa del Rey final, and then the Champions League semi-final. How was Leo during those days with tension at an all-time high?

  PG: Well, the pressure he carries inside. Sometimes we forget he carries the weight of being the best player in the world, of all time, that he has a whole country behind him and a club that hopes he can win them games. And this on a daily basis. I always think that he is the best in history for that reason, for the continuity of things that he has done. I am convinced that Cruyff changed football, Pelé, of course, Maradona, but they were from another era. It’s true that there are more cameras and for that reason less aggression than before. Before, so they say, there was a lot more kicking and the game was much harder than it is now. But it is also true that today everybody is physically much better prepared. Bear in mind that this bloke has the ability in this day and age to score 50, 60 goals and appear in every game, every day. It’s very difficult for a youngster to be able to do this over such a long period of time. More than just the titles he has won, no one will change my opinion of him whether he wins a World Cup or not. If he does, congratulations to him, but if he doesn’t my opinion won’t change. He is a unique player and his challenge now is the World Cup, we’ll see. In those days of the clásicos he probably felt the pressure but I thought he looked okay, as always. I was probably more occupied looking to find a way of winning rather than concerning myself with how the others were. I spent days thinking and studying what both we and our rivals had done and what we had to do to win, who we had available …the day of the semi-final of the Champions League, Iniesta injured himself and we had to put in Keita …you are always occupied with matters like this.