What does it feel like to play against Lionel Messi, the greatest footballer of all time?
It is the kind of question that nearly every footballer would consider themselves fortunate to answer years from now, sitting beside their grandchildren.
Messi leads reigning champions Argentina into the World Cup quarter-final against Switzerland, having already scored 8 goals in 5 matches at the tournament…
The year is 2006. Diego Maradona stands in the hospitality box with his arms raised, a broad grin across his face. All around him, Argentine supporters rise to their feet to celebrate a historic moment. At 18 years of age, Lionel Messi is about to make his World Cup debut.
Surprising as it may sound today, the long-haired teenager was practically an enigma to the players of Serbia and Montenegro.
“We didn’t prepare specifically for Messi,” recalls Ivan Ergić, who played that day. “Because we hadn’t yet grasped just how terrifying he truly was.”
As he prepared to come on for Maxi Rodríguez in Germany, he appeared slightly anxious. Messi’s first pass went astray. But four minutes later, he set up a goal for Hernán Crespo. And ten minutes after that, he scored himself.
Ergić, who would later face Messi twice more for Basel against Barcelona, was thoroughly spellbound. Now an author and playwright, Ergić speaks of Messi with a chest full of wonder and reverence.
“He is the kind of player where, even if you know in advance which direction he’s going to dribble, you still have no chance of stopping him. If you lean one way even half a second early, he’ll take the ball the other way. And just when you think you’re about to snatch it away, he’ll give it the gentlest touch to keep it under his spell, even in a dense thicket of bodies. In that particular space, he feels to me like a magician.”
“When I was playing, I used to write a column on football philosophy. I remember writing about the frustration of managers, especially José Mourinho, who, unable to find any way to stop him, sometimes resorted to dirty tactics.”
“Messi has kept the culture of the dribbler alive—modern coaches have nearly destroyed dribblers by reducing the game, in both training and matches, to a dogmatic ‘two-touch’ constraint.”
“Dribbling is a dying art, and I believe reviving that skill and restoring its relevance to world football is Messi’s greatest accomplishment.”
Both the naked eye and statistics confirm that Messi’s dribbling zenith arrived in those early years when he operated from the right wing as part of Barcelona’s attacking trident. Explosive acceleration, uncanny equilibrium, and dazzling footwork combined to make him near invincible.
“Even before we traveled to Camp Nou, I was getting calls from France asking what my plan was to stop Messi,” remembers former French international William Gallas, reflecting on the 2006 Champions League clash between Chelsea and Barcelona.
“I remember telling them: ‘I don’t know.'”
“The day before the match, I was watching video clips of him. He was still just a kid, 18 years old, but already a genius. It was probably better to watch him on television than play against him, because you certainly wouldn’t want to end up on his YouTube highlight reel.”
Even so, there was no shame in becoming Messi’s victim. For many, it was a badge of honor. Andrés Guardado, the former Deportivo La Coruña and Real Betis midfielder, took immense pride in having twenty photographs of himself sharing a pitch with Messi. The Mexican once remarked, “In none of them is the ball at my feet.”
Ergić echoes the exact same sentiment about his own encounters: “My feelings were mixed. As a competitor, you might feel frustrated and humiliated, but up close, you are witnessing a football genius who is likely the greatest of all time.”
“No strategy could ever contain him—tactical, technical, or physical; the best defenders of that era will attest to that.”
In his first full season at Barcelona, Messi completed an astonishing 76 percent of his dribble attempts. For an 18-year-old in one of the most demanding leagues on earth, it was an unfathomable success rate.
In those early days, Messi predominantly wove his spells from the right flank. Gradually, he shifted positions, migrating more centrally into midfield to dismantle opposing setups.
In 2007, operating as a right winger for Barcelona, he produced an iconic solo goal against Getafe. Receiving the ball near the right touchline, Messi glided past his first marker, nutmegged the next, slalomed between two more trailing defenders, sat the goalkeeper on the turf, and slotted home with his right foot.
The following morning, the Spanish daily Diario AS led with the banner headline: “Messi in Maradona’s Disguise.”
Much like his dribbling, Messi’s supreme gift when shooting was keeping defenders and goalkeepers entirely in the dark until the final millisecond. Keepers could never deduce whether he would target the near post or the far post, because with minimal backlift, he could generate ferocious power behind the ball.
Former Athletic Club goalkeeper Gorka Iraizoz fell victim to this deception time and again. Having faced Messi in 27 matches, he conceded virtually every manner of goal imaginable.
“You feel like you’ve covered the angle, you think you anticipate what’s coming,” Iraizoz explains. “And then, in the blink of an eye, he does something completely different.”
“His low center of gravity helps him hide the ball until the very last instant, without much swing of the leg, offering no hint of where he intends to strike. That allows him to wait: either whipping it to the far corner with a subtle twist of the torso, or drilling it hard at the near post.”
When Gallas crossed paths with Messi for the second time, in a friendly in early 2009, he was older, wiser, and far more seasoned. The problem was that Messi had grown even more devastating. He was on course to claim his first Ballon d’Or, playing—or at least seeing—the game through the eyes of the future.
“When he doesn’t have the ball, he just walks. But as he walks, he absorbs every scrap of information around him. Then, when he receives the ball, he already knows precisely what to do and where to go,” Gallas observes. “It felt like he was inside ‘The Matrix’: he saw everything before anyone else.”
Messi’s transformation from an inverted right-winger into a deeper ‘false nine’ unleashed an entirely new nightmare for opponents. Positioned in the central attacking channel, he had license to roam freely across the pitch. Often, he was simply seen walking. Yet in world football, few sights are deadlier than Messi ambling across the turf.
His reconnaissance missions across the pitch have become legendary. Frequently darting his eyes from side to side to read the landscape (a mechanism Professor Geir Jordet termed ‘micro-scanning’), Messi captures mental snapshots that dictate his choices in the seconds that follow.
“He is unique. I have never seen a player like him,” says Pablo Hernández, former Valencia, Leeds United, and Spain midfielder. “He thinks two seconds ahead of everyone else.”
Academics too have long been fascinated by Messi’s behavior, particularly his cognitive wizardry. David Sumpter, professor of applied mathematics and co-founder of Twelve Football, collaborated with Barcelona during Messi’s peak. He analyzed patterns of play, player decision-making, and their relationship with time and space.
“And what we discovered,” Professor Sumpter told Oliver Kay in The Athletic’s ‘The Soccer 100’, “was that Messi and his teammates would discover pockets of space that didn’t even exist yet. That space might not materialize for another two or three seconds. In that sense, yes, these elite players could see two or five seconds into the future. With Messi, it felt as though he could see ten minutes into the future.”
“I don’t mean that literally; football is a fluid, chaotic game. But right at the start of a match, he would map out where spaces might appear, and as the game unfolded, he ensured he was positioned precisely there.”
Yet this walking and surveilling held another cunning advantage: it was psychological warfare. By occupying zones forbidden to conventional marking, he tormented defenders.
“You have to communicate constantly just to figure out who is supposed to pick him up,” explains Raphaël Varane, who faced Messi 21 times across his spells with Real Madrid, Manchester United, and France. “Messi’s specialty is lingering in areas where you simply cannot tell who should step out to defend him. Is it the midfielder? The full-back? Or the center-back?”
“You think he’s just walking, not sprinting, so you relax your guard. But the reality is the exact opposite. He drifts into positions that allow him to launch an attack with maximum efficiency. He always inhabits an intermediary twilight zone. It’s extraordinarily difficult, because normally when we attack, defenders feel in control and the alertness drops. But against him, when you are attacking is precisely when your alertness has to be at its highest peak. In that moment, if you are even one meter off, it’s all over.”
Gallas nods in agreement: “Even when he walks, as a defender you don’t want him getting the ball, so you think about stepping tight to him. But the moment you step toward him, he has already won the battle. Because even if he doesn’t receive the ball, you’ve opened up space behind you—and that is exactly what he wanted.”
At Barcelona, Pep Guardiola envisioned the exact same trap. In May 2009, ahead of a momentous title clash, Guardiola identified an opportunity to deploy Messi as a false nine. The Barcelona manager had experimented with it briefly before, but the context here was colossal: Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu, with the league title hanging in the balance.
The tactical blueprint was devised around an inescapable dilemma: either a Real Madrid center-back would track Messi deep, vacating expansive corridors for wide forwards Samuel Eto’o and Thierry Henry to exploit; or Madrid’s center-backs would hold their line, allowing Messi to combine with Barcelona’s midfield to manufacture a suffocating 4-vs-3 overload.
It proved a tactical masterstroke; Barcelona dismantled Madrid in a 6-2 rout.
A few weeks later, when Manchester United met Barcelona in the Champions League final, they prepared for both contingencies: Messi on the right flank, and Messi through the middle as a false nine. Wherever he operated, their primary defensive objective was to sever the supply line to his feet.
In that final, that Messi found space between two United defenders to head home Barcelona’s second goal was scarcely a shock. But the manner in which the goal was orchestrated—a sumptuous, looping cross from Xavi—and how it was finished defied belief.
“The galling part was that Messi scored with a header,” admitted United’s then-assistant manager René Meulensteen. “We figured with the towering aerial presence of Edwin van der Sar, Rio Ferdinand, and Nemanja Vidić, whatever else happened, he certainly wouldn’t score against us with his head.”
“That untouchable quality—where the best defenders in the world simply cannot get near you—is remarkably rare, and that is what I remember most vividly about him,” former US defender Jay DeMerit told The Athletic years later, recalling his two encounters with Messi in international play: the 2007 Copa América and a friendly four years later in New Jersey.
“We all try to get close to him, choke the space, communicate with teammates, and cover for one another. But at the end of the day, he inevitably discovers that seam of space, remaining that crucial step ahead.”
“He scrambles your senses. He strands you in a spot where you wonder: ‘Where did he go? How did I get here? Where did he come from?’—all because of his uncanny movement off the ball.”
DeMerit added another poignant observation, one that nearly every opponent feels when looking across at Messi:
“You are in the presence of greatness. And that elevates everyone’s game. You are sharing a floor with Wayne Gretzky or LeBron James.”
Former Arsenal, Chelsea, and England left-back Ashley Cole noted:
“Individually, marking him was impossible. As a collective unit, you had to try to manage him, box him in around the penalty area. At Chelsea, we managed that. When he missed that penalty in the 2012 Champions League semi-final, that was our stroke of fortune on the road to lifting the trophy in Munich.”
At that juncture, such failure was an extreme anomaly for Messi. In 2012, he clinched his fourth consecutive Ballon d’Or. Even by his own stratospheric standards, the statistical output was unfathomable: he shattered Gerd Müller’s 85-goal calendar-year record, and eclipsed Archie Stark’s 87-year-old world record for the most goals in a single season.
The following campaign, Messi plundered 42 non-penalty goals in the equivalent of just 29 full matches. Three of those came against Athletic Club’s former keeper Iraizoz, including a solo masterpiece in a 2-2 draw at San Mamés that still leaves you breathless thirteen years later.
Collecting the ball thirty yards from goal, Messi embarked on an intoxicating slaloming run, darting this way and that, leaving a trail of defenders in his wake. As breathtaking as the dribble was, the swift, delicate flick of the ankle to dispatch the shot was equally sublime.
“That movement explains what I was saying earlier: you know he wants to shoot in that direction, yet he remains one step ahead, because he knows what speed to inject, what touch to apply, and where I, as a goalkeeper, can never reach,” Iraizoz explains.
And what of that mesmerizing dribble preceding it?
“A lot of it stems from his unique physiology. His lower body was immensely powerful,” Iraizoz says. “Thierry Henry once described it beautifully: how he could change direction with just a simple twitch of the ankle, and at furious speed. But it wasn’t just that one match. In the Copa del Rey final, Mikel Rico tried to kick him down by the touchline, but he wouldn’t go down. He was deceptively strong.”
In that final, Athletic manager Ernesto Valverde instructed left-back Mikel Balenziaga to man-mark Messi shadow-for-shadow—a ploy that on exceedingly rare occasions had worked for certain teams.
Colombian midfielder Carlos Sánchez had shadowed Messi like a ghost during a goalless draw in the 2011 Copa América, successfully confining him. Sánchez embraced the challenge, though he likened it to the relentless exhaustion of babysitting a toddler near the edge of a swimming pool on a summer holiday.
“You have to maintain unbroken concentration on him every single second,” Sánchez noted.
“In half a second, he can do something that renders everything you’ve done until that point completely meaningless.”
For Athletic and Balenziaga, Valverde’s blueprint collapsed inside twenty minutes. Messi evaded Balenziaga twice, left three other Athletic defenders flailing, and conjured a dribble that belonged on a school playground rather than a major cup final.
Xabier Etxeita told The Athletic: “Our defensive midfielders tried to stop Leo, tried to foul him, but hauling him down was impossible.”
“I stepped up to make the block, expecting him to curl it to the far post. And I positioned myself well; that angle was covered. But he possesses that terrifying gift to change his mind in the absolute last second, drilling a ferocious strike inside the near post. It was a golazo. That goal left us with a crushing realization: we did everything a football team could humanly do to stop him, and we were still helpless.”
Messi had delivered a similarly iconic demolition three weeks earlier at Camp Nou, leaving Bayern Munich defender Jérôme Boateng to collapse to the turf like a felled tree.
Heavily ridiculed at the time, Boateng made the fateful mistake five years later, during the quiet isolation of the Covid-19 lockdowns, of hosting a live Twitter Q&A.
One cheeky supporter quipped: “What was going through your head when Messi did ‘that’ to you? You know which one I mean #AskJerome“.
Social media erupted in laughter.
Boateng’s reply was disarmingly candid: “Honestly, I’d love to see each of you try defending against Messi.”
Messi’s longevity is not merely a tale of sustained genius, but of subtle reinvention.
Michael Cox penned a celebrated essay detailing the ten evolutionary phases of Lionel Messi’s greatness (though today that treatise may well warrant eleven or twelve chapters). The incisive, defense-splitting through-ball is an element of Messi’s game that deepened with time. It reached its zenith in the 2015-16 season, when he formed part of an electric forward trident alongside Neymar and Luis Suárez that eviscerated backlines.
That season, Messi attempted an average of 3.4 through-balls per 90 minutes—more than double the highest single-season tally recorded by any Premier League player since 2017.
Former Real Sociedad midfielder David Zurutuza, who squared off against Messi fourteen times, reflected in 2023: “I played against many great players, but Messi was something else entirely. I don’t just mean he was better. Cristiano Ronaldo was physically much more imposing, visually spectacular. But Messi was pure, unadulterated genius. He could accelerate with terrifying bursts, but the essence was his intellect. He saw everything before everyone else.”
“When you’re out on the pitch with him, you grasp just how fast he processes everything. It’s frightening. You can’t appreciate it on television. It is brutal.”
Clearly, an aura of mystique envelops the experience of facing Messi, manifesting in multiple ways.
Opponents frequently speak of how Messi forces them to elevate their focus. In the words of Varane and DeMerit, the second you step onto the pitch, you realize the urgent necessity to “raise your own game.”
Yet Messi’s very aura can also prove a lethal distraction. Involuntarily, players are pulled toward him; watching him on the ball, they become almost mesmerized by the dread he creates.
“When you play against top players, sometimes you want to be intensely aggressive to shut down their influence,” Varane explains. “But sometimes you have to realize that you cannot let yourself be lured into the danger zone. Because when Messi advances with the ball, the real danger is often the runners on the other side. Everyone gravitates toward Messi, and he simply slides the ball across. Panic ensues. And just when you least expect it, they feed the ball right back to Messi.”
What happens, however, when the tables turn and you feel Messi’s eyes fixed intently upon you?
In 2017, ahead of a Champions League encounter against Paris Saint-Germain, Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers shared an anecdote at a press conference about a chat he had with his Croatian center-back Jozo Šimunović after a defeat to Barcelona the previous season.
Rodgers recalled: “I remember speaking with Jozo last year. I asked him, ‘Tell me, what was it like facing Messi?'”
“He said to me, ‘Every time I turned around, I saw him staring right at me!'”
“Jozo said, ‘He was just watching me, and it made me nervous.'”
Rodgers smiled: “That is the hallmark of players of that caliber. Messi and Suárez don’t chase the ball; the ball comes to them. They simply search for space. The moment they see someone flinch, they make their move.”
Reminded of that quote nearly a decade later, Šimunović laughed.
“During a match you can’t just fixate on the ball; you have to scan your surroundings, especially when the ball is on the opposite flank,” he says. “As defenders, we have to stay acutely aware of players and pockets of space around us. So over a span of a few minutes, I turned my head several times, and every single time I noticed that he was strolling, watching my position while the ball moved elsewhere.”
“It was eerie that while his team had possession, he wasn’t even watching the play. He was just watching us. Now I realize he was analyzing our positioning, calculating where to make a run into space to punish you.”
At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Messi was 35 years old. He remained a genius—only a different kind of genius.
Australia’s assistant coach at the time, René Meulensteen, remarks: “If you look at the Messi of 2009, when he hadn’t even peaked, he could grab the ball in midfield and leave everyone in his wake. By 2022, he could no longer do that. In our match, he spent 80 percent of the time simply walking, only to ignite in the final third where he knew he could produce a moment to decide the fate of the game.”
“Yet even as he walks, you can never ignore him. He is still reading the game, predicting where the ball will arrive. And he already has a contingency plan prepared in his head.”
Australia met Argentina in the round of 16. Meulensteen’s account is fascinating as he details how they attempted to exploit the fact that Messi—who walked more than any other player in the group stage—would display zero urgency to press or win the ball back.
“We knew that because of him, we could build up from the back,” Meulensteen says. “Our midfielder Aaron Mooy would consistently drop behind Messi, and Aaron is very composed on the ball. Whoever sat behind Messi, we had tactical build-up patterns designed to find him.”
“We knew he wouldn’t defend. For the most part, Argentina didn’t press, and if they did, Messi was the trigger. We had to stay alert to that. In that scenario, our approach was to play direct and fight for the first and second balls.”
“Our mistake came when the ball was played back to our keeper; he took a split-second too long, and we conceded that second goal.”
“But if you rewatch the match, we were comfortable building out from deep solely because we knew Messi wasn’t going to track back. It was an entirely different setup compared to what we faced against Barcelona in the 2009 and 2011 Champions League finals with Manchester United.”
That a Messi in his mid-30s would not scurry frantically to regain possession like a teenager is hardly surprising. Yet with the ball at his feet, his capacity to turn a match on its head through moments of sheer individual sorcery feels ageless, as if he were turning back the hands of time.
Midway through the second half of the semi-final against Croatia, Messi found himself isolated against Joško Gvardiol. Gvardiol was fifteen years Messi’s junior, six inches taller, visibly more athletic, and physically formidable. In truth, it was a mismatch. Yet Messi dismantled him.
By halting Gvardiol and accelerating again—a stutter-step ploy that lulls defenders into a false sense of security—and then faking one way before bursting the other, Messi engineered space where none appeared to exist. From that impossible sliver, he squared for Julián Álvarez to notch Argentina’s third goal.
Former track-and-field sprint coach Jonas Dodoo, who has consulted for elite clubs across the Premier League, Bundesliga, NFL, and MLB, observed days later in The Athletic: “He was engineered to change direction. It’s written into his physiology. A longer torso paired with shorter legs means he is biomechanically built for agility.”
Atlanta United’s Tristan Muyumba wholeheartedly agrees. Since Messi joined MLS from PSG in 2023, Muyumba has squared off against the Argentine more than half a dozen times.
“It all comes down to how he leverages his body,” Muyumba says. “He is extraordinarily intelligent and understands how to position himself at every single micro-moment. His lower body is remarkably athletic. You often hear that Messi is small, but he is stocky and rock-solid on his feet. He possesses incredible core stability and uses his frame masterfully.”
Growing up as a Manchester United supporter, Muyumba admits he used to prefer Ronaldo until he “woke up to reality.” Muyumba shares an insight that speaks more to Messi the human being than Messi the footballer.
“He doesn’t talk much. And I don’t speak Spanish. But he might offer you a warm smile or shake your hand,” says Muyumba, who has a framed Messi shirt at home.
“I always relished playing against him because he carries no vanity or arrogance. He is approachable, and there is a genuine gentleness and humility about him.”
And it is precisely that humility that destroys you—the moment a football finds its way to Lionel Messi’s feet.
Translated and adapted from The Athletic. Certain details were omitted due to space constraints.
