SPANISH FOOTBALL EXPERT Guillem Balague has seen countless exceptional players in all his years covering La Liga for media outlets such as Sky Sports — Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and Cristiano Ronaldo included — but as he far as he is concerned, there’s no doubt about the greatest footballer he has ever witnessed.
“For me, Lionel Messi is the best player in history, which I said before I wrote the book,” he tells TheScore.ie.
“What he does consistently is unparalleled. Never mind Maradonna, never mind Pele. I know a World Cup is needed to convince a lot of other people, but I’ve discussed this with Pep Guardiola, I’ve discussed this with a lot of other managers and they all agree that what they see this guy doing week in week out, they’ve never seen before.”
Balague has written a book on the Argentinian superstar who, despite being one of the greatest footballers in the world, remains somewhat of an enigma.
“Despite how popular he is in the world, there were a lot of questions that had no answers. Not many people know about him. What motivates him? Why wasn’t he liked by Argentina until about a year and a half ago?
“What happened when the family split up? How does a 12-year-old leave his country and make those kind of sacrifices? And there’s a lot of questions, which I’ve tried to understand.”
With that in mind, was there much that surprised Balague when researching Messi?
“It surprised me how you get to have the mentality you have when you’re in the first team. Why he does what he does and why the people around him do what they do?
“You have to understand that he’s been protected since he was a kid — by his grandmother, by the kids in the school, because he was the best with the ball.
“Then he was protected by his teammates at Newell’s Old Boys — by the coaches and referees, because he was so special. That kind of thing helps you to progress, there’s no doubt about it. But also, I need to know, what made him want to be the best. What kind of mentality made him say, at 12, that he was going to win the Ballon D’Or.
“It is a genetic thing. And I’m not talking about being born with a talent to play football. I’m talking about the compulsion to try to improve yourself. We all have that to a level. But he has that to an amazing level to keep improving, to keep playing, to keep having the ball constantly. That compulsion is certainly one of the things that’s taken him to the top.”
Throughout the book, Balague emphasises the sacrifices that Messi had to make. As a 12-year-old, the Argentinian superstar was asked whether he wanted to move with his family to Barcelona and when they didn’t settle there, and he was again asked if he wanted to stay in Spain, he made the decision that resulted in him being separated from his family (save for his father, who remained with him at Barca).
Balague explains that the separation of his family had a significant emotional impact on a young Messi — and his father, Jorge, has admitted he now regrets the decision that was made at the time.
“This is an Italian family, the Messis, and in an Italian family, the mother is the centre of the world. She had to go back to Argentina and Leo and his Dad stayed back. Writing about it is one thing, dealing with that every single day is another. So he cried in his room and he didn’t want his Dad to see it, because he knew his Dad was making the sacrifice too.
“The feeling was that he better make sure that it works because if it doesn’t work, that’s what you’ve done for your family. So, as many footballers do at that age, he denied the possibility of failure, because it was an alternative that was too difficult to contemplate.”
The image of Messi crying — even in later years — is a recurring theme throughout the book. So, given that he has been cossetted for most of his life, is there part of him that’s still a kid?
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“What happens with footballers is that they develop a very complex personality. And this is not just Leo Messi, this is the case with almost every player that gets to the top.
“What you get is somebody who’s 26, who has had to deal with the responsibility of a 40 or 50-year-old man, who’ll get to 40 or 50 and won’t have to deal with that responsibility.
“As well as that, you haven’t allowed him to develop as a normal kid. So the kid has stayed there. He has a complex mentality that the coaches have to understand. I think [Frank] Rijkaard understood that very well and Pep Guardiola, at first, didn’t. He had to get close to him so Leo Messi would open up. Because if he [treated him] the wrong way, as he had been doing in the first few days, then Leo Messi wouldn’t respond to that.
“When he first met Guardiola, he wanted to go to the Olympic Games and that’s all he wanted, and Pep Guardiola had to understand how to deal with his silences and his wishes to get the best out of him. And yes, sometimes it meant dealing with a [metaphorically speaking] 14-year-old and sometimes, dealing with a mature man.
“And that’s what football does to you to a point. So when I have a kid, I’ll make sure that he’s not a footballer,” Balague laughs.
Messi’s relationship with his father, in particular, is quite complex. The book describes how Jorge — who is also Messi’s manager — seldom praises his son, despite his numerous extraordinary on-field exploits.
(A young Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho pictured during a Barcelona training session — Adam Davy/EMPICS Sport)
Balague had the rare privilege of being granted access to Messi’s notoriously publicity-shy family while writing the book, and he acknowledges that the relationship between Leo and Jorge is unusual.
“One of the fascinating things in my eyes [is that] some of the pages that I would call the heart of the book explores the relationship between the Dad and Leo, because Leo sees his Dad as the one who sacrifices everything for him, but at the same time, he’s his manager as well.
“Psychologists say that when that takes place, the son feels a little bit off and as a result, he feels resented and unhappy because Daddy’s there, you can see him but you cannot touch him, because he is also the manager. You don’t know when he’s talking to you as a manager and when he’s talking to you as a Dad. It blurs the normal borders of family.
“Sometimes his older brother becomes his Dad, his Dad is his manager, Mummy’s not around. That again creates a very complex personality. And it happens a lot in football. To pursue the dreams of a kid, the family not just splits up, but it places itself to a very unbalanced outlook to the point where it affects the developing and the personality of the kid, so I think we find that in football a lot, where players are confused and they have a complex personality.”
On 16 October 2004, Messi became the third-youngest player ever to play for Barca at senior level, and the youngest club player to play in La Liga, when he made his debut aged 17. In the game in question (highlights of which can be seen above), though Messi did not look out of place, the precocious star — perhaps unsurprisingly given how young he was — did little to suggest he would eventually become the world’s greatest player.
At this point, did Balague and those around Messi realise he was destined for greatness?
“You cannot see a 13 or 14-year-old and think he’s going to be the best in the world. At the point where he was close to the B team and started going up the ranks, there were one or two players that people would say ‘yeah, they’re going to make it to the first team’ and that he would as well. But that’s it. You couldn’t go any further.
“For him to become the best in the world, he has to go through those ranks, go into the first team and make an impact. And people do make an impact in the first team sometimes when they arrive, but to do it consistently, to a point where when you are 21, the new coach decides that you’re going to be the centre of the team, that player is more difficult to find.
“But Pep Guardiola knew how good he was when he first arrived, but again, he didn’t think he was going to be the best in the world. But once he saw him in training, he realised: ‘Yep, we haven’t made a mistake by getting rid of Deco and Ronaldinho, he is going to be special, he is going to be the player we’ll play through and the one who can help us win.’ He suddenly realised: ‘My God, he’s got something here that’s going to make him special.’ You have to go to that level — already 21, 22, to help him realise he’s going to be the best in the world, so nobody could envisage what would come having seen him as a kid.”
(Messi scores against Man United in the Champions League final — Mike Egerton/EMPICS Sport)
For all his greatness though, Messi has still at times famously received a somewhat lukewarm reception from his fellow countrymen back in Argentina. There is antipathy over the fact that Messi chose to leave the country at a very early stage in his career, among other issues. However, a couple of fine recent performances appear to have finally fully endeared the star to the country’s sporting public.
“In 2012, the hat-trick against Brazil, that famous victory against Colombia where he needed to be at his best, qualifying for the World Cup with a team that plays to his strengths, there are a lot of reasons now for everybody to love him in Argentina,” Balague explains. “It is more the rest of the world [that he needs to convince] — to finish the debate.”
Balague believes that Messi still deserves to be considered as the greatest player ever, irrespective of whether or not he wins the World Cup, but the journalist admits that there are those that will doubt him until he achieves this feat.
“If he wins the World Cup, nobody will be able to say that he wasn’t the best ever, but if he doesn’t, people like Pep Guardiola will still insist he’s been the best player ever because of his consistency and there’ll be others that will say: ‘Ah no, but he hasn’t won the World Cup.’ I don’t think there’s as much emphasis on the World Cup as there was 20 years ago, I think it is important to win it and if he wins it, it will certainly help, but he plays in competitions like the Champions League that are harder to win and in the league, against a top Real Madrid side.”
And how much of a chance do Argentina actually have this summer in Brazil?
“I think they’re definitely one of the four or five favourites. You need the talent, good organisation and a good defence. But you need the luck — Casillas had to save a penalty in the second half against Paraguay [in 2010] and Spain had to beat Italy in a penalty shoot-out. It is not a matter of — because they’ve got the best team, they’re going to win.
“Certainly, they’ve got one of the best teams, and my dream is to see an Argentina-Brazil final. That would be amazing and that would be a real test to the level of Neymar and Messi and to the level of both national teams. I just hope it happens and I hope that, having dreamed his whole life about it, he does have a good World Cup. He needs to be fit and ready for it — I think he will be. That’s the maximum you can ask for, the rest comes on its own, so I just hope he gets to the final.”
(Lionel Messi finds himself surrounded by five Inter Milan defenders during a Champions League game — Mike Egerton/EMPICS Sport)
However, Balague is not quite so optimistic about Messi’s other team — Barcelona, who he believes are “going through a transition”.
“It’s one that they should have started three years ago, but they haven’t done it yet. It’s a team that needs a new version of what they were doing. They showed against Celtic that they could get to that level, but it was Celtic. They need to show it against other teams. It’s quite clear that [Gerardo] Martino doesn’t really understand what Barcelona are about, with his demands to make them play a little bit too direct and that means you don’t get the best of the midfielders you’ve got.
“If the players’ idea and Martino’s idea gets mixed, you may see a better Barcelona and of course, when Messi comes for the last months of the season from January onwards and he’s fit and ready, you have to count on them for absolutely everything. I just think that Martino has to give in a little bit and follow more what the players have always done and I think he’s abandoned that a little bit.”
The Spanish journalist feels Barcelona need a central defender and a number nine, and they’ll attempt to find one in the January transfer window, but Liverpool fans can relax — Balague says Luis Suarez won’t be going anywhere until the summer at the very least.
Amid reported recent interest from Man United, Balague is adamant that Messi won’t leave Barcelona until towards the end of his career to go back to the club at which he started out as a youngster — Newell’s Old Boys.
And while at 26, he is already one of the most decorated players ever to have played the game, there is one prize that looks set to elude his grasp. Having tipped Messi to complete a Ballon D’Or hat-trick by winning the prize for the third consecutive time this year back in November, Balague now feels Ronaldo is set to win the honour.
“After the four goals against Sweden, they changed the rules, so now you have to count that and say that it was a very impressive performance by Ronaldo and he’s finished the year much stronger. Before the rules change, I would have given it to Messi, after the rules change… The last goal just eats everything up, you have to give it to Ronaldo.”
Moreover, for all he’s achieved, Balague feels Messi has never had the perfect year, in which his situation with both Argentina and Barca is impeccable.
“It’s interesting that when it goes well with Argentina, the demise of Barcelona starts a little bit — the defeat against Bayern Munich, for instance. And we’re still seeing a Barcelona where things are not completely happy, so he hasn’t coincided a good Argentina period with a good Barcelona one. It may happen in the future, but it shows that no matter how hard you work, it sometimes just doesn’t go according to plan.”
Guillem Balague: 'For me, Lionel Messi is the best player in history'
SPANISH FOOTBALL EXPERT Guillem Balague has seen countless exceptional players in all his years covering La Liga for media outlets such as Sky Sports — Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and Cristiano Ronaldo included — but as he far as he is concerned, there’s no doubt about the greatest footballer he has ever witnessed.
“For me, Lionel Messi is the best player in history, which I said before I wrote the book,” he tells TheScore.ie.
“What he does consistently is unparalleled. Never mind Maradonna, never mind Pele. I know a World Cup is needed to convince a lot of other people, but I’ve discussed this with Pep Guardiola, I’ve discussed this with a lot of other managers and they all agree that what they see this guy doing week in week out, they’ve never seen before.”
Balague has written a book on the Argentinian superstar who, despite being one of the greatest footballers in the world, remains somewhat of an enigma.
“Despite how popular he is in the world, there were a lot of questions that had no answers. Not many people know about him. What motivates him? Why wasn’t he liked by Argentina until about a year and a half ago?
“What happened when the family split up? How does a 12-year-old leave his country and make those kind of sacrifices? And there’s a lot of questions, which I’ve tried to understand.”
With that in mind, was there much that surprised Balague when researching Messi?
“It surprised me how you get to have the mentality you have when you’re in the first team. Why he does what he does and why the people around him do what they do?
“It is a genetic thing. And I’m not talking about being born with a talent to play football. I’m talking about the compulsion to try to improve yourself. We all have that to a level. But he has that to an amazing level to keep improving, to keep playing, to keep having the ball constantly. That compulsion is certainly one of the things that’s taken him to the top.”
Throughout the book, Balague emphasises the sacrifices that Messi had to make. As a 12-year-old, the Argentinian superstar was asked whether he wanted to move with his family to Barcelona and when they didn’t settle there, and he was again asked if he wanted to stay in Spain, he made the decision that resulted in him being separated from his family (save for his father, who remained with him at Barca).
YouTube credit: TheHauSeS
Balague explains that the separation of his family had a significant emotional impact on a young Messi — and his father, Jorge, has admitted he now regrets the decision that was made at the time.
“This is an Italian family, the Messis, and in an Italian family, the mother is the centre of the world. She had to go back to Argentina and Leo and his Dad stayed back. Writing about it is one thing, dealing with that every single day is another. So he cried in his room and he didn’t want his Dad to see it, because he knew his Dad was making the sacrifice too.
“The feeling was that he better make sure that it works because if it doesn’t work, that’s what you’ve done for your family. So, as many footballers do at that age, he denied the possibility of failure, because it was an alternative that was too difficult to contemplate.”
The image of Messi crying — even in later years — is a recurring theme throughout the book. So, given that he has been cossetted for most of his life, is there part of him that’s still a kid?
“What happens with footballers is that they develop a very complex personality. And this is not just Leo Messi, this is the case with almost every player that gets to the top.
“When he first met Guardiola, he wanted to go to the Olympic Games and that’s all he wanted, and Pep Guardiola had to understand how to deal with his silences and his wishes to get the best out of him. And yes, sometimes it meant dealing with a [metaphorically speaking] 14-year-old and sometimes, dealing with a mature man.
“And that’s what football does to you to a point. So when I have a kid, I’ll make sure that he’s not a footballer,” Balague laughs.
Messi’s relationship with his father, in particular, is quite complex. The book describes how Jorge — who is also Messi’s manager — seldom praises his son, despite his numerous extraordinary on-field exploits.
Balague had the rare privilege of being granted access to Messi’s notoriously publicity-shy family while writing the book, and he acknowledges that the relationship between Leo and Jorge is unusual.
“One of the fascinating things in my eyes [is that] some of the pages that I would call the heart of the book explores the relationship between the Dad and Leo, because Leo sees his Dad as the one who sacrifices everything for him, but at the same time, he’s his manager as well.
“Psychologists say that when that takes place, the son feels a little bit off and as a result, he feels resented and unhappy because Daddy’s there, you can see him but you cannot touch him, because he is also the manager. You don’t know when he’s talking to you as a manager and when he’s talking to you as a Dad. It blurs the normal borders of family.
“Sometimes his older brother becomes his Dad, his Dad is his manager, Mummy’s not around. That again creates a very complex personality. And it happens a lot in football. To pursue the dreams of a kid, the family not just splits up, but it places itself to a very unbalanced outlook to the point where it affects the developing and the personality of the kid, so I think we find that in football a lot, where players are confused and they have a complex personality.”
On 16 October 2004, Messi became the third-youngest player ever to play for Barca at senior level, and the youngest club player to play in La Liga, when he made his debut aged 17. In the game in question (highlights of which can be seen above), though Messi did not look out of place, the precocious star — perhaps unsurprisingly given how young he was — did little to suggest he would eventually become the world’s greatest player.
At this point, did Balague and those around Messi realise he was destined for greatness?
“But Pep Guardiola knew how good he was when he first arrived, but again, he didn’t think he was going to be the best in the world. But once he saw him in training, he realised: ‘Yep, we haven’t made a mistake by getting rid of Deco and Ronaldinho, he is going to be special, he is going to be the player we’ll play through and the one who can help us win.’ He suddenly realised: ‘My God, he’s got something here that’s going to make him special.’ You have to go to that level — already 21, 22, to help him realise he’s going to be the best in the world, so nobody could envisage what would come having seen him as a kid.”
For all his greatness though, Messi has still at times famously received a somewhat lukewarm reception from his fellow countrymen back in Argentina. There is antipathy over the fact that Messi chose to leave the country at a very early stage in his career, among other issues. However, a couple of fine recent performances appear to have finally fully endeared the star to the country’s sporting public.
“In 2012, the hat-trick against Brazil, that famous victory against Colombia where he needed to be at his best, qualifying for the World Cup with a team that plays to his strengths, there are a lot of reasons now for everybody to love him in Argentina,” Balague explains. “It is more the rest of the world [that he needs to convince] — to finish the debate.”
Balague believes that Messi still deserves to be considered as the greatest player ever, irrespective of whether or not he wins the World Cup, but the journalist admits that there are those that will doubt him until he achieves this feat.
And how much of a chance do Argentina actually have this summer in Brazil?
“I think they’re definitely one of the four or five favourites. You need the talent, good organisation and a good defence. But you need the luck — Casillas had to save a penalty in the second half against Paraguay [in 2010] and Spain had to beat Italy in a penalty shoot-out. It is not a matter of — because they’ve got the best team, they’re going to win.
“Certainly, they’ve got one of the best teams, and my dream is to see an Argentina-Brazil final. That would be amazing and that would be a real test to the level of Neymar and Messi and to the level of both national teams. I just hope it happens and I hope that, having dreamed his whole life about it, he does have a good World Cup. He needs to be fit and ready for it — I think he will be. That’s the maximum you can ask for, the rest comes on its own, so I just hope he gets to the final.”
However, Balague is not quite so optimistic about Messi’s other team — Barcelona, who he believes are “going through a transition”.
“It’s one that they should have started three years ago, but they haven’t done it yet. It’s a team that needs a new version of what they were doing. They showed against Celtic that they could get to that level, but it was Celtic. They need to show it against other teams. It’s quite clear that [Gerardo] Martino doesn’t really understand what Barcelona are about, with his demands to make them play a little bit too direct and that means you don’t get the best of the midfielders you’ve got.
“If the players’ idea and Martino’s idea gets mixed, you may see a better Barcelona and of course, when Messi comes for the last months of the season from January onwards and he’s fit and ready, you have to count on them for absolutely everything. I just think that Martino has to give in a little bit and follow more what the players have always done and I think he’s abandoned that a little bit.”
The Spanish journalist feels Barcelona need a central defender and a number nine, and they’ll attempt to find one in the January transfer window, but Liverpool fans can relax — Balague says Luis Suarez won’t be going anywhere until the summer at the very least.
Amid reported recent interest from Man United, Balague is adamant that Messi won’t leave Barcelona until towards the end of his career to go back to the club at which he started out as a youngster — Newell’s Old Boys.
And while at 26, he is already one of the most decorated players ever to have played the game, there is one prize that looks set to elude his grasp. Having tipped Messi to complete a Ballon D’Or hat-trick by winning the prize for the third consecutive time this year back in November, Balague now feels Ronaldo is set to win the honour.
The Portuguese star’s goals against Sweden to qualify his country for the World Cup appear to have tilted the balance in his favour, with FIFA re-opening the voting, following this astonishing display.
Moreover, for all he’s achieved, Balague feels Messi has never had the perfect year, in which his situation with both Argentina and Barca is impeccable.
“It’s interesting that when it goes well with Argentina, the demise of Barcelona starts a little bit — the defeat against Bayern Munich, for instance. And we’re still seeing a Barcelona where things are not completely happy, so he hasn’t coincided a good Argentina period with a good Barcelona one. It may happen in the future, but it shows that no matter how hard you work, it sometimes just doesn’t go according to plan.”
YouTube credit: HeilRJ03
‘Messi’ by Guillem Balague is published by Orion. More details here.
Balague will be giving a talk about the book in Twisted Pepper on Middle Abbey St, Dublin on 18 and 19 December from 7pm.
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