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Lionel Messi is 39 years old. He is 1.70 metres tall – shorter than almost every defender he plays against. He was never astoundingly quick, and he is slower now.
And yet, watching this World Cup, you would be hard pressed to name a player doing more damage: he has scored the equal most goals so far (six), alongside France’s Kylian Mbappé.
How can someone with so little of what we might call athleticism (relative to his peers, at least) still be the best player on the pitch?
Maybe the puzzle is the wrong way round. Many are surprised by Messi only because we have been told a story about what makes an athlete great, and the story is mostly about the body: speed, height, strength, fitness.
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The day that Lionel Messi made his World Cup début, on June 16, 2006, I was in elementary school. I had never set foot in Argentina, and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. The game was against a then unified Serbia and Montenegro. Argentina wore dark blue. I knew very little about the country that my grandparents had left behind, in 1964, for the United States—only that on that day, at home in the New York suburbs, I somehow belonged to it.
Messi’s first World Cup was my first World Cup—not the first one I had lived through but the first one that I remember. He was almost nineteen (the number he wore on his back), and I was nine. I like to tell people the story of how, a few months earlier, my dad had gone up onto the roof of our house in Pelham and dismantled our old TV antenna, installing in its place a cable package of Spanish-language channels, so that we could hear announcers marvel at Barcelona’s teen-age phenom in his native tongue. But nothing could have prepared us for Messi’s greatness. Against Serbia and Montenegro, in the group stage, Messi came on as a sub in the seventy-fourth minute, with Argentina up 3–0. The press had already anointed him the heir apparent to Diego Maradona; an emotional Maradona was filmed in the stands, with his arms in the air, as Messi entered the game. Ten minutes later, Messi assisted Carlos Tévez on a fifth goal, and then he scored the sixth himself. He played in each of the next two games in the tournament—a goalless draw against the Netherlands and an overtime win against Mexico in the round of sixteen—only to be left on the bench by then coach José Pékerman in Argentina’s quarterfinal loss against Germany. Pékerman’s decision is now considered by some to have been a historic mistake, and, for the next twenty years, Messi played every minute of every Argentina World Cup game, until this summer.
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