🚨 Pep Guardiola on Lionel Messi saying his legs could no longer give him more: “The problem with Lionel Messi getting older is that he has declined into still being the best player on the pitch. So people don’t believe him. I watched his farewell game. One goal. Two assists. At 39 years old. Afterwards somebody showed me the clip where Leo ran chasing a ball and people were saying, ‘This is the same man who says his legs cannot give him anymore?’ I said, ‘Yes. That is exactly what he means.’ Because you are comparing Messi with the other players on the pitch. Leo is comparing Messi with Messi. Those are two completely different standards. I remember once at Barcelona, after training, one of my staff said to me, ‘Pep, he was unbelievable today.’ I asked, ‘Who?’ He looked at me like I was stupid. ‘Leo.’ I said, ‘No. Today was normal.’ He laughed. I wasn’t joking. That was one of the strangest things about coaching Messi. Something would happen in training that would stop everybody else, and after a while we stopped reacting. Three players around him? Normal. Four? Normal. He receives the ball, turns and suddenly everybody is running towards their own goal? Normal. One day I remember telling Xavi, ‘We have a problem.’ He asked, ‘What?’ ‘He is making us think these things are normal.’ Xavi smiled. ‘Then wait until he leaves.’ That sentence stayed with me. Because I think a generation is experiencing the same problem now, just backwards. They are meeting Lionel Messi at the end and thinking this is Lionel Messi. They watch him at 39, see him create two goals and score another and say, ‘What legs has he lost?’ My friend, you arrived at the cinema during the final ten minutes. You have no idea what happened before you sat down. Imagine a boy watching this game with his father. He asks, ‘Dad, I don’t understand. Messi is still the best player. Why is he retiring?’ His father should not show him another match from 2026. Show him 2011. Show him 2012. Show him 2015. Then tell the boy, ‘The man you are watching now used to do all of this with legs that could do whatever his brain requested.’ That is the difference. Today Leo sees the pass before you. Back then he saw the pass before you, played it, then arrived somewhere else before you understood what had happened. Today he can still beat you with his mind. At his peak, unfortunately, the mind had the body with it. That was unfair. I remember defenders looking towards our bench sometimes after Leo did something as though I could help them. What did they want me to do? Substitute him? I was trying to win too. And this is why I believe Leo when he says his legs cannot give him what they once did. Of course they cannot. He knows because he remembers what they used to give him. We see a 39-year-old man and think, ‘Still magnificent.’ He feels something different. A ball rolls towards the touchline and his mind says, ‘Go.’ For twenty years, his legs answered immediately. Now sometimes they say, ‘No, Leo. Not this one.’ For us, that is one lost ball. For him, maybe that is thirty years of football speaking to him. That must be a very strange conversation for a genius to have with his own body. But perhaps that is also the perfect explanation of Lionel Messi. Even now, with the legs he says can no longer give him everything, he can play his farewell game, score once, create two more and leave people asking: ‘If this is Messi declining, what exactly was Messi at his best?’ I can answer that. We spent four years at Barcelona trying to find the correct word. We never did.”