🚨 Lionel Scaloni on Lionel Messi’s farewell performance: “I have a theory about passes from Leo. They are not normal passes. A normal pass gives you the ball. Leo gives you the ball and somehow also gives you an idea. I noticed this years ago in training. A player would receive the ball from someone else, control it, look around and decide what to do. Then Leo would pass to the same player and suddenly he was playing one-touch football. I once stopped training. ‘Why did you do that?’ The player looked confused. ‘Do what?’ ‘Leo passed to you and suddenly you became a better footballer.’ Everyone laughed. Leo said, ‘Maybe my pass was better.’ I looked at him. ‘This is exactly the arrogance I’m investigating.’ He smiled. But there is something strange about it. Leo gives you a pass and you feel obligated to complete the move properly. You think, ‘Lionel Messi has just found me. I cannot embarrass this pass.’ Today was supposed to be his farewell. Emotional day. Tributes. The stadium stopping in the tenth minute. And Leo apparently decided his final responsibility was improving everybody around him one last time. We get a corner. Leo takes it. Otamendi scores. I just looked towards the bench. Of course. Even his corners have this annoying habit of becoming somebody else’s goal. Then Nico Paz comes on. Before he went on, I told him, ‘Enjoy this. You may never play another Argentina match with Leo, so remember everything.’ Nico nodded. A few minutes later Leo gives him the ball outside the area. Nico could recycle possession. Apparently receiving the ball from Messi makes young players forget sensible options exist. He shoots. Beautiful goal. I turned to my staff. ‘You see?’ ‘See what?’ ‘The disease.’ ‘What disease?’ ‘Messi passed to him and now Nico thinks he can score from anywhere.’ Then I saw Nico celebrating and Leo pointing and walking towards him smiling. I thought, ‘This poor boy is finished.’ Because now every time Nico receives the ball there, he’ll remember that one time Messi gave it to him and everything worked. That is the problem with Leo. He doesn’t only make difficult things look easy himself. He convinces the player beside him that difficult things are easy too. You can spend all week coaching movements. Then Leo gets the ball and the tactical instruction becomes very simple. ‘Everybody be ready.’ Because something is probably about to happen. I remember once telling him, ‘Do you realise how many assists you get because somebody produces an incredible finish?’ He said, ‘Then maybe I choose good people to pass to.’ ‘No. I think you hypnotise them.’ He laughed. Today didn’t help his defence. Otamendi scores from his delivery. Nico receives his pass and hits one from outside the box. Then Leo decides assisting everybody else is becoming repetitive, so he scores himself. Two assists and a goal in his farewell. That is such a Messi way to leave. Even on the day football is supposed to celebrate him, he spends half the match making everybody around him look good. Maybe that is the part Argentina will miss that statistics cannot explain. We can find goals. We can find assists. But I don’t know where you find another player who gives a teammate the ball and somehow makes him feel ten times better for the next five seconds. After Nico scored, I told one of my assistants, ‘We have a serious problem.’ ‘What?’ I pointed at Leo. ‘Soon these boys are going to have to do all this without him.’ He laughed. I didn’t. Because that might be the hardest part of replacing Lionel Messi. It isn’t finding somebody who knows what to do when he gets the ball. It’s finding somebody who makes everyone else know what to do when they get it.”

🚨 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.”