It was preseason, back in 2005. Juventus's Patrick Vieira was the most dominant midfielder in the world: a gangly 6-foot-3 colossus, able to break up any attack that dares come near him and just as easily push play forward with the ball at his feet. Samuel Eto’o, meanwhile, had just started to make his case as the Vieira of strikers. He had the near-performative tenacity of a Duke point guard, but with world-class speed, top-tier strength, and elite ball control. At the time, Eto’o was coming off of his first season with Barcelona, where he’d scored 24 goals and led the Catalan club to their first La Liga title in six years.
Barcelona and Juventus were about to contest the Gamper Trophy, an exhibition match Barcelona plays at the beginning of every season in honor of Joan Gamper, one of the founders of the club. Both Eto’o and Vieira were at the top of their craft, the 99.99th percentile of practitioners at their positions, but when Eto’o met up with his buddy before the match, he didn’t wanna talk about himself, didn’t wanna ask Vieira how things were going, none of that. No, Eto’o had a warning. He pointed across the pitch at a gnomish 18-year-old with a terrible haircut and translucent skin. “I told him”, Eto’o said, “one day it would seem like every player who came before Messi was playing a different sport.”
Sixteen years later, it’s safe to say that Eto’o was right. On Thursday, FC Barcelona announced that Lionel Messi “shall not be staying on at FC Barcelona.” It was an abrupt announcement, prompted by the club’s lavish spending over the past half-decade and the contracting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on revenues. It’s possible something still gets worked out—soccer finances are part magic—but there’s a real chance this is actually the end of Messi in the red and blue stripes. And if it is, it’s also the end of the greatest stretch of athletic excellence we’ve ever seen—and probably ever will see.
The Messi story starts—well, wherever whoever's telling the story wants it to start. There are the bombs: legend has it that 15 explosives were detonated in Argentina on the day that Messi was born in 1987. There’s the rumor that a youth coach at the Buenos Aires club River Plate refused to play little Messi at a tryout—only to relent in the final minutes of a match, and only for Messi to immediately nutmeg multiple defenders and then score at least 10 goals in the next game. Or how about this one: Barcelona decided they wanted to sign him because someone at the club saw a video of him juggling an orange and a ping-pong ball.
Here is what is true: Messi doesn’t look like the common conception of an athlete, never has. At age 7, he was four feet tall, and by the time he turned 10, he’d only grown another two inches. A local doctor discovered that young Leo’s body wasn’t producing a certain growth hormone, and so his dad, Jorge, began paying for the hormone treatments. They were too expensive, though, so when Barca showed interest in acquiring his pre-teen son, Jorge issued them an ultimatum: you can have my kid if you pay for the hormones and you get me a job. Another legend: Barca were so eager to agree that rather than flying back home and doing it the formal way on club letterhead, they wrote up a contract on a napkin and got Jorge to sign it.
The rest is history, quite literally. “Messi at Barcelona” is the history of modern soccer. It’s the story you tell; anything else hangs off the side. The team itself redefined the way soccer was played at the absolute highest level. Since the modern game was created in the 1800s, there’s been a philosophical argument about the ball: better to have it, or let them have it? It sounds absurd, perhaps, but teams that tried to keep possession would often fall prey to organized, counter-attacking sides that would sit back, draw their opponents forward, and then quickly exploit the space in behind when they regained the ball. Messi’s Barcelona pretty much put an end to that discussion by saying, “We’re gonna keep the ball, forever.” Barca controlled possession to never-before-seen levels—against even the best teams in the world—thanks to a group of players and coaches that prized small-space skill and off-the-ball movement. They won the Champions League in 2009, 2011, and 2015. And from 2009 through 2019, they won the Spanish league title eight times—despite the presence of Real Madrid, the world’s other richest club.
The biggest reason why all that passing worked, though, is that Barcelona had Messi. “He’s better than you with his right foot, left foot and his head,” said Xavi, the legendary Barca midfielder and lodestar for the pass-and-pass-and-pass-some-more philosophy. “He’s better at defending and attacking. He’s faster. Better at dribbling, better at passing.”
In his 17 seasons at Barcelona, Messi played 519 matches in Spain’s La Liga. He scored 474 goals and added another 193 assists. That includes penalties, which skew a player’s true goal-scoring ability—but even if you chop those off, Messi sits at 413 goals. Add up the non-penalty goals and assists, and per 90 minutes, Messi averaged 1.3 non-penalty goals and assists. To put that into context: Cristiano Ronaldo is Messi’s closest contemporary. And on this count, he doesn’t even come close. Over his 19 professional seasons, Ronaldo only reached Messi’s average output one time!
And the greatness doesn’t stop there. Messi isn’t only, by far, the greatest goal-maker of his era. He’s also the best passer, and the best dribbler, and the best free-kick taker. He completes more dribbles, plays more through balls, and finds more passes into the penalty area than any other player. Messi would—easily—be the best player alive if he only scored goals and created assists. But he also does all of the little things that come before the final pass or shot, and he does them better than anyone else. I mean: there’s even a well-respected research paper that says Messi is better at walking than all of his peers, too.
And he has a whole lot more of those peers than most other athletes. While he can’t jump as high as LeBron James or throw a football like Tom Brady, Messi’s achieved an equal, if not greater, level of dominance in his sport. The potential pool of soccer players, though, is so much bigger than it is in basketball or football: according to a paper from Australian researchers, 28 percent of the global population has the baseline physique necessary to become a professional soccer player, while only about five percent are big enough to become professional basketball players. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and Leo Messi is as good at soccer as anyone has ever been at any other sport.
Then again, maybe it’s not all so impressive. As Eto’o said, Messi wasn’t really playing soccer. He, alone, was playing something else.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiPWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmdxLmNvbS9zdG9yeS9saW9uZWwtbWVzc2ktYmFyY2Vsb25hLXJldHJvc3BlY3RpdmXSAUFodHRwczovL3d3dy5ncS5jb20vc3RvcnkvbGlvbmVsLW1lc3NpLWJhcmNlbG9uYS1yZXRyb3NwZWN0aXZlL2FtcA?oc=5
2021-08-06 17:11:42Z
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