Messi (54 page)

‘What?!’ adds the Manchester City defender Martín Demichelis. ‘He’s competitive even in the Friends of Messi against the Rest of the World! In one of the games he said to us, “come on now, let’s play seriously, I’m getting bored”.’

This highly competitive nature, this winning mentality, this search for all-conquering new achievements creates such an excitement in him that on occasions he has vomited minutes before the start. It’s almost like filling a car with petrol before the start of a race. Or like the singer who, before going on stage, before the applause, feels his temperature rising, his nerves jangling. But after that brief moment, as soon as he walks onto the pitch, he resets his body to neutral, his objectives become crystal clear.

His focus, the sports psychologists say, is absolute, centred. It is neither wide nor diffuse, but, rather, reduced. Many of those who stand out in science, culture or sport have the same vision. They say that Archimedes remained focused on an experiment, while Syracuse, the city he lived in, was being invaded. The order had been given that the inventor and astronomer should not be harmed, but he sat concentrating on what he was doing until he noticed the soldier. ‘
Noli turbare circulos meos
!’ – ‘Don’t mess up my circles,’ he told him, as he sat drawing in the sand. The Roman killed him with a single blow.

Those who live in the rarefied realms of the elite, create and dwell in their own world, which, by its very nature, cannot be shared with lesser mortals. Every now and then they emerge from their cocoon and share our world with us. Like actors they need to learn how to come out of character, something that Leo does in private. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about an actor who played the part of William Shakespeare for 15 years, and at a given moment, when he wanted to date
a girl, he wooed her as if he was actually the real Shakespeare. He’d forgotten how to be himself. The elite footballer runs the risk of finishing up locked away in his own private world. Leo tries to ensure that his contact with his nephews, his wife and son, Thiago, his dogs, help him to open up the windows of his life and remind him that there are other worlds beside the rectangle of the football pitch.

But to conclude, as ex-footballer Romario has recently, that his reduced vision and world is proof that Messi has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, is very simplistic. In fact it’s false – not only is it extremely complicated to diagnose Asperger’s, the fact is that it has never been diagnosed. The superficial use of medical terminology is dangerous.

It’s a fact, though, that Messi can become so focused, so centred on his own affairs, that his reactions can appear strange. At the end of the Peru vs Argentina game in the quarter-finals of the Copa América in 2007, and just before entering the tunnel to go to the dressing room, a female fan leapt from high up in the stands so that she could get a hug from the star. In the television footage you see Messi looking up, urging the girl not to jump, while he carries on walking. Suddenly a body falls to the ground from at least four metres up, bends double before getting up and embracing the footballer who waits there briefly before carrying on towards the dressing room. Someone asks him for his shirt and you see him debating whether or not to give it. Almost as if nothing had happened seconds earlier.

That’s how it appeared from the outside. And Messi explains what he felt inside: ‘Wow, it was incredible. I was making signs to her not to jump, but she jumped anyway. I swear to you, I didn’t know what to do. It was from at least four metres up. She nearly killed herself, and what’s worse they just got the poor kid out of the way as quickly as possible without making sure whether she was okay or not.’

And when he cries after a game? How can you explain both extremes in the same person, the coolness before taking a penalty and the tears? A football match is not for crying, they say in Argentina. If someone does, it’s because it is more than just a game of football. What has he played in 90 minutes that has made him cry? A defeat for Leo is not just anything: until he calms down, say the psychologists,
immersed in his own world, focused to the extreme, he feels as if he has lost his life. Viewed like that, crying would seem appropriate.

‘Leo is very special,’ says Piqué. ‘When he loses a game, you think, whoa, I wouldn’t like to be his wife, or girlfriend. You can imagine that he goes home and spends the rest of the day without saying a word. And that is what happens – he doesn’t talk to anyone, he locks himself in his room and he might even arrive late for training the next day, or not even appear. Not winning, not scoring, hurts him that badly. It will take him a day or two or three to get over this wall of silence, but he can’t help it. And the next time he loses, the same thing again.’

Winning is something he has to do. After a victory Leo is left with the feeling of a job well done. They say that the great wins are accompanied minutes afterwards by a type of depression, a drop in physical and mental wellbeing caused by the great effort. ‘Is that it? All that effort for this?’ top sportsmen ask at that point. Normally it lasts only a few minutes. Leo feels satisfaction from having achieved his objective, and he knows how to celebrate. But before he has a chance to suffer any kind of attack of ‘champion’s depression’, he has already found new challenges. ‘The great geniuses are different from the rest of us,’ says Silvinho. ‘Sometimes they don’t seem human. They want more and more … I love this, because if I see a person, a player, who can do more, who has the talent to do better, but doesn’t do it … yuk. It’s painful. Leo doesn’t need money, he doesn’t want beautiful things … he’s just looking for more successes, to win more.’

Attaining this level of focus is key to advancement. ‘Publicity very often confuses a player,’ writes
El País
journalist Santiago Segurola. ‘It obliges him to be the best in the world in every move. And that cannot be. I don’t believe players are prepared for the extreme pressure that journalism, critics, success, fame, celebrity, travel, continual sponsorship demands, put on them. They are things that can distract, that can slow you down.’

But nothing distracts Leo. Ex-Real Madrid and Rosario-born Santi Solari told his pupils during his first experience as a coach with a
blancos
youth team not to waste their time, to make the most of their football education, and not to be distracted by adolescent things, by going out and partying. He was saying this to 15-year-old
boys, who were at an age when wasting their time was precisely what they should be thinking about. Those who understood what Solari was talking about, those who were mad enough to recognise and follow what he was saying, those are the ones that have the footballing gene. Nothing will distract them.

While Leo was with Tito Vilanova’s youth team, Barcelona received an offer from Juventus for him. Messi did not want to go: he had marked out his road and his ambition was to triumph at Barcelona. ‘Leo lives, thinks, enjoys, or is saddened by, or whatever, with football,’ points out Ferran Soriano, the former vice-president of Barcelona and now executive director at Manchester City. ‘It is clear that he thinks that to be the best in the world he has to have a special type of focus: he plays football, trains, even plays football on PlayStation. I remember dining with Fernando Alonso a few years ago. I left with the same impression that I have of Messi: all he talks about is races and cars, nothing else. What will occupy them when they finish their careers?’

SKILLS NECESSARY TO ‘KNOW HOW TO LEARN’

4. Constancy

There are no short cuts on the path to the summit. You have to learn by trial and error. When it looks like you can’t make it, you have to think that you still can. And when you get there, you have to be clear that you haven’t arrived, you have merely advanced. A graphic and imaginative example of this is the advertisement in which Cristiano Ronaldo is tormented by his alter ego. ‘He appears at the end of every game,’ Ronaldo says. ‘He follows me. He stalks me. Even if I have scored and had a great game. He always has something to say. He’s a pain. I should have got to that pass, I should have controlled that ball, every free-kick should be a goal. His favourite expression? If you think you’re already perfect, then you never will be. And he goes on, and on, and on … every flaming day. Seven days a week. But you know what? I love the bloke.’

We have already seen that is how the greats think. Without this mentality they would not achieve their great objectives. But what else makes them achieve such heights? What path do they take? Can it be taught? Can it be repeated?

For centuries we have believed that success is linked with talent and genetics. ‘I became the British table tennis champion, and the number one in 1995,’ explains Matthew Syed, Commonwealth table tennis champion and journalist with
The Times
who explores the subject of success in his extraordinary book
Bounce
. ‘It was a huge surprise for the sports community in Great Britain. I was very young and not many people thought I would get to the top
so quickly. I grew up in Silverdale Road in Reading, in a pretty yet unremarkable street except for one thing: this little community produced more great players of table tennis in the 1980s than the rest of the country put together. Now if you think this is all created because of genetics, then why was just one specific street affected?’

Syed adds another fact: Spartak Moscow, a poor tennis club on the outskirts of the Russian capital, produces more top tennis players than the whole of the United States. Our inclination to think of success purely in genetic terms needs to be revised.

Matthew Syed rejects the use of words like ‘genius’, ‘prodigy’ or ‘natural talent’ when referring to Leo Messi because he believes that excellence is due principally (though not totally) to continual and deliberate practice. The author challenges the cultural belief that a genius is born and not made: with effort comes excellence and, through that, often comes success. So what needs to be applauded is hard work, not talent.

Leo has certainly always played with a ball and at all times. Remember the four games in one day with Quique Domínguez as his coach? Or those extra hours he used to put in at La Masía when the other boys had gone home? There are many more examples.

In a scientific attempt to explain just how those like Messi, Ronaldo and Maradona manage to perform the way they do, various studies have explored the possibility that perhaps they have a wider picture of the field of play than a normal footballer, and that this allows them to see more areas of the pitch, more team-mates and more rivals. But, no, there is no evidence whatsoever to back that theory.

What happens is that the best footballers collect more information in a single look. Syed says that the best chess players remember a board not as 32 individual pieces but in groups of five or six pieces. They already have in their heads between ten and a hundred times more combinations for these groups than lesser players. What’s more, the grand masters access this long-term memory in a much faster and more reliable way.

When Messi runs or receives the ball he sees patterns where everyone else sees just players or a ball, in a similar way to the film
The Matrix
. In the film Neo sees ones and twos in place of bullets and this allows him to dodge them. It isn’t that Leo spots anything
before anyone else; it’s that he sees what others don’t. When Roger Federer plays tennis, explains Syed in his book, he doesn’t pick his best shot from a sensorial information warehouse selected at that moment, but, rather, he sees and hears the world ‘in a completely different way’, the same way, in fact, that the Eskimos are able to see more variations of white than the rest of us, because of their experiences in Arctic conditions.

‘You’d be surprised at the level of information he can gather with one 360-degree look around,’ adds Juanjo Brau. ‘He’s able to tell you where everything is, he’s a person with a visual recall that captures everything.’ So the extraordinary sportsmen develop an expert intuition, an instinctive subconscious method of solving problems. The creation of these patterns allow them to anticipate and resolve complex problems in the best way possible.

‘Leo has a perceptive intelligence, in that he knows at all times what he has to do, his natural habitat is the field of play,’ explains Juanjo Brau. ‘He is an enormously intelligent player in his profession, as all the maestros are. He is able to see what no one else can. He shoots for goal, not at the target – it’s very different. There are other players who get to the goal area, they see three pieces of wood and shoot. He sees the three pieces of wood, the goalkeeper and calculates the right time to get around him … all in tenths of seconds.’