Lionel Messi At the age of 23, he scored zero goals in the World Cup. He has scored 19 runs in six matches since then. Nothing about the conventional story of a player’s decline applies to him. How long he can continue is not worth asking. So he continues to heal.
Against Austria, he missed a penalty in the ninth minute, then scored twice to break Miroslav Klose’s all-time World Cup record. He then came off the bench against Jordan to ping in a free kick.
Watch the record breaking goal against Austria. Messi got it wide, close to the touchline, close to two Austrian defenders. He doesn’t dribble or run, plays first from the other side of the pitch, creates a four against two, gets to the near post before the ball leaves his feet. Every defender on that block had already moved to him. That fear created space on the other side. Messi standing in the right place is one of the most dangerous things that can happen on a football pitch.
Most players run and then tackle the ball. Messi runs like the ball isn’t there, like it takes nothing to control, nothing to get through the stride. At full speed he moves unencumbered the way other players move. The ball is only with him.
Joao Pedro, who faced him in the Copa America, explained this on Rio Ferdinand’s YouTube channel. “He’s hard to explain, you know? He’s not tall, he doesn’t look strong, but he holds the players, he doesn’t drop, he stays there. The team runs for him. Every ball comes back, he goes to Messi. You know, he moves and comes. It’s magic, how you say it.” He stopped. “If he gets the ball near the area” [laughter] “problem”.
Lionel Messi plays for Inter Miami. (file photo)
“At Inter Miami and across the 2024 Copa America, Messi walks more than runs,” Spanish football writer and Messi biographer Guillem Balague wrote for the BBC. “It was once used by critics against him. Now it is read as mastery.”
***
It didn’t work.
The first version of Messi was a teenage winger at Barcelona, explosive and direct down the right, relying on acceleration and flexibility. Both were limited. Guardiola understood this before Messi. On May 2, 2009, at the Santiago Bernabeu, he pulled him from the right wing and put him on the edge of the attack: drop, receive, decide. At full time it was 6-2.
Story continues below this ad
“I wasn’t paying too much attention to tactics,” Messi told journalist Juan Pablo Varski in 2024. “But with Guardiola I learned a lot. I started to understand space, ball retention, how the game really works.”
Xavi then left Barcelona in 2015 and Iniesta in 2018. Gone is the midfield that was his safety net. He fell deeper. Assists began to collide with goals. Iniesta had become a goalscorer.
“Football has changed a lot,” he told Zinedine Zidane in a 2023 interview. “Today’s game is much more tactical and physical than it used to be. Before, you found more spaces.” He said that he who had spent fifteen years searching for an open space, saw no one.
Lost three finals in a row. Which was not retirement. Copa America 2021 will then be released at the Maracana. Qatar 2022 has become a burden fuel: seven goals in seven matches, twice in the final. He lifted the World Cup.
There is no denying the running Messi. This is distillation.
Story continues below this ad
The numbers agree. Messi has covered 17.23 kilometers in this World Cup, at 6.95 per ninety minutes, one of all 618 outfield players with 90-plus minutes in the group stage. Almost two-thirds of that distance, 10.64 kilometers, was walked. Mbappe covers more than twice Messi’s total and still spends half as much walking. Holland’s figure is still low. The two men chasing him for the Golden Boot had to run for their targets, sprint for them, chase them. Messi just walks, as if he doesn’t feel anything and still averages one every 37 minutes.
***
Distillation presents different problems to different opponents. Here’s what Craft is designed to fix.
Against Brazil, the man who runs the match has nothing to say: no pace to read, no shoulders to turn to escape the trap. The moment a midfielder commits, the ball will first pass into the space behind him. Brazil knows this. In 2021, he won the Copa America Maracana, his home ground, in his final. The hunter has caught him before. He has to be caught again.
Lionel Messi in action. (file photo)
The high line against Spain will be an invitation, but not for Messi to run. Alvarez does that now. The centre-back will face the same dilemma that Real Madrid faced at the Bernabeu that night: go at him and leave space, or hold back and give him time to think. Guardiola had just changed his position. Seventeen years later, the situation has changed again. Neither is answered.
Story continues below this ad
Against France the problems start quickly: Mbappe at the back, wide players who punish any team, a counter press that stifles slow build-ups. But the man who lasted ninety minutes cost nothing and Mbappe at the other end doesn’t understand what Messi does. Needing one in the finals in 2022, France had no answer. They will now have a new question.
***
Such is the theory. What actually happened started twenty years ago.
He scored his first goal in the World Cup on 16 June 2006 at the age of eighteen. Twenty years later, on this day, 16 June 2026, his hat-trick against Algeria came against a goalkeeper named Luca Zidane, son of Zinedine Zidane, who is now 28 years old. Zinedine’s last World Cup was Messi’s first.
23 for nil. Nineteen in six contests.
Pablo Aymar, his childhood idol, once said: “The last Messi is always the best Messi.” Aimer had no idea when he said this. He watched from Rosario.
(- with stat inputs from Shubhaditya Bose)