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.