Simon Bank on Messi’s secret modus operandi
Doha. Yesterday was yesterday, today is today, and tomorrow may be over for the only person who can turn back time.
And what will we do next?
What would football do without Lionel Messi?
I can’t say I was there when it started, but I was there anyway. In November 2005, Lionel Messi for the second time in his life played a first-team match from the start, and I managed to make my way to the stands at the Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid.
This was at a time before the football world had turned 180 degrees, there was still plenty to suggest that the future belonged to a mix of basketball players and MMA fighters. Johan Cruyff thought differently, because that’s what he did. Behind the scenes of La Masia, a generation of lads were waiting to change the way we saw football.
Barcelona danced live at Real Madrid that night, and Ronaldinho received a reluctant standing ovation from Socios Madrid. He played soccer, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out who he plays better with.
She wrote that he “wandered around the field with the ball as an extra body part” and that he “sought after Messi to play with another genius”.
Is he Argentine or European?
Lionel Messi was eighteen years old at the time, and it was a bit of a surprise that Barcelona coach Frank Rijkaard would choose him instead of Ludovic Giuly on the right wing, in such a big game. But the world is starting to turn, and it will be a bound young man from Rosario who is holding the wheel.
Seventeen years later, I’m going to football and I know it might be over.
Not a football career, but the dream of winning the World Cup gold that, even in a wide opinion, would put Lionel Messi on the throne next to Diego Maradona.
Neymar cried and went home, Cristiano Ronaldo cried and ran out. He left Messi with him Crazy swollenI heard about Argentinians who bought plane tickets to go to Qatar for the day. Twenty hours flying, landing, watching a game, twenty hours returning home.
Nothing interests me more than categorizing or categorizing footballers in binary systems, especially since it became clear early on that Lionel Messi has something no one else has in modern times: it is a mystery that has never been solved.
Messi has more in common with La Castellane’s Zinedine Zidane than the others. Is he single Baby, a kid from Rosario Street soccer, or a manufactured product from the La Masia soccer factory? Both parts. Is he Argentine or European? Yes, at the same time. Is it individual or collective? yes.
Simon Cooper, who has written books on the inner physiognomy of FC Barcelona, stated that “Messi has turned 30 without saying a single interesting sentence in public.” The deeply problematic nature of an artist’s recapitulation who gives no clues himself was provocative to many, perhaps even more so now than seventeen years ago.
We want to understand, and that means we want to measure. We want framing, and that means we want numbers.
It can reveal the magician’s tricks
How fast was the ball traveling when the free kick was taken? How fast does Kylian Mbappe accelerate when he runs free? What percentage of ball possession does Morocco actually have? How many tickets were sold? How much does a fantasy landscape in West Bay, Doha, cost in the billions? What are France’s expected goal numbers against England?
We can count Messi’s goals and titles, his maximum number of runs and finishes, but basically he stands at the absolute epicenter of the World Cup and allows the numbers to fall to the ground.
In the quarter-final against the Netherlands, Friday’s larger-than-life drama, every Argentine player ran towards the winner Lautaro Martinez when it was over, Messi was the only one to run into goalkeeper Depo Martinez. Everyone went one way, and Messi went another. This was not the only time.
In a completely normal Messi match, there were two very typical Messi sequences. I’ll come back to the second, but the first was obvious – that 1-0 Nahuel Molina game, where he challenges the entire Dutch backline and doesn’t seem to look forward before slipping a perfect pass into the box. Feedback echoed throughout his career: He is not watching! How does he know?!
The next day I sat down and played the sequence over and over again, to see if it was right. Could he really know without looking?
In the end the magician’s trick can be revealed. Well, he’s watching. He peeks as soon as he receives the ball from Molina, mid-body tackle against Nathan Ake, then looks up. When he releases the ball four seconds later, he has tackled four or five opponents’ buff and Molina’s run. He doesn’t know, but he has a sense of what the world must look like when he slides the ball past Timber, between Van Dijk and Blind.
Is it possible to understand it?
Well, it’s not like people haven’t tried.
“It’s not about what happens, but about when.”
There are German researchers who concluded that his greatness is not that he has a wider field of view than others, but that he can analyze the information he receives more quickly and he is also technically skilled enough to work on it. Ten years ago, a professor at the University of Kassel compared it to how the greatest chess players see not just individual pieces, but combinations of pieces, and can anticipate the game in several moves (before the World Cup, Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were photographed) on a chessboard by Louis Vuitton, they recreated creating a five-year-old match between the greats Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura). Other researchers have argued that Messi has unique brain capabilities that cause him to experience a slowing of time in such situations.
Dani Alves once said about Xavi that he “lives in the future”. Pablo Aimar, one of those once dubbed “the next Maradona” and now one of the lieutenants to the Argentina captain, once tried to describe Messi by summing up the whole sport: “Football isn’t about what, it’s about when.” Xavi, who lived in the future, was interviewed in-depth in 2010 by two journalists from France’s l’Equipe, who wanted to know how the Barcelona game worked in practice.
They wondered if he always knew who he matched with.
– yes. Always always. If I see Messi, I will give it to Messi. If Pedro is alone and Messi too? Then I give it to Missy. If Pedro is better than Messi, I will give it to Pedro.
Barcelona knew exactly what to do with Lionel Messi, they believed in him almost religiously. That’s what they say in football: “We trust Arsene,” but it’s a motto, as the name can be changed whenever appropriate, and when faith subsides. When Barcelona embraced Messi, they trusted him to be the chosen one, and others just had to adjust to that.
Pedro never got better, nobody gets better.
We write in 2022, Argentina will play the semi-finals of the World Cup in Qatar, but the mystery remains the same, and no one has been able to solve it.
Nine years ago, Brazilian journalist Roberto Amada published a text confirming that Messi had been diagnosed as an eight-year-old with a form of Asperger’s disease, a condition on the autism spectrum. Wasn’t he looking for repeating patterns, didn’t he have a special way of processing information? And in La Masía, his colleagues were convinced for a long time that he was silent, because he never spoke.
Be shy in a world full of vanity
The information was strongly denied by both the family and the doctors, but the fact that it came to light was probably another (in itself a Brazilian) attempt to understand how it was possible.
He was quiet in a screaming environment, shy in his superego realm. Time has changed him, and now we see the tattoos, the beard, the roar, the pumped arm when Argentina scores – it’s as if eighteen years of big football had been etched on other people’s expectations, the rings of years on a white sheet.
Another sequence of the match against the Netherlands: as extra time begins, after a 2-2 draw in the last second of stoppage time, Lionel Messi disappears.
Or, he’s in the field, but he’s just wandering around in his own world, far from everything that’s going on there.
No other footballer does that, that’s part of Messi’s secret, one how to operate. What is really going on inside him in those minutes? There is a clip in the documentary This is Football where Pep Guardiola can watch a video of Messi at the start of the game doing just that, wandering around in his own world. Pip smiles, moves, realizes it. You know what that means:
– He’s walking around… That’s what I like the most. He’s not out of the game, he’s in it! Moves his head: right – left, left – right. He knows exactly what will happen. Sniffing out the weaknesses in the opponent’s backline, after five to ten minutes he has his map.
Tonight, Argentina plays Croatia. In one game, maybe two, we’ll know how Lionel Messi’s quest for the Holy Grail ends.
and then? In Simon Cooper’s book on Barcelona, a Barcelona captain predicts a future without him at Barcelona:
After Messi, you see the desert, you see darkness.
It’s been seventeen years since an eighteen-year-old danced at the Bernabéu, and I’m going to Doha to see him play football again. It’s dark here, and the desert is a few miles to the south.
Ninety minutes Messi. And what will we do next?