Messi: Looming over MLS
Will his hunger for achievement ever be sated?
In the film adaptation of Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’, man turned god Jon Osterman, becomes a tool of the U.S. military. Within this alternate world history, he is used as a weapon of mass destruction in the Vietnam War. We see a loose group of Vietnam soldiers firing their machine guns and one by one they stop and look up in awe. Advancing on them is Osterman, now branded ‘Doctor Manhattan’ in an allusion to the Manhattan project. With his god-like powers he can assume any form at will and has appeared before them as a two hundred metre dissociated giant. As he slowly walks forward, his head bowed to take in the action around his feet, a formation of helicopters flank him at the shoulder. With one wave of his hand the soldiers on the ground erupt into blood spatters, their lives instantly ended as their guns fall. The sequence is set to ‘Flight of the Valkyries’ which lends a level of operatic drama to the already lunatic vision.
Watching a god-like figure loom over a battlefield with an air of detachment led me to thoughts of Lionel Messi orchestrating his way through MLS. Casting such a large shadow over proceedings, the play seems to happen at his say so. He’s putting things in motion, stopping others, setting the tempo with a flick of his foot. His influence is so profound that you feel if all the players on the pitch looked up they’d be met with his furrowed expression gazing downward, like a god fretting over his football board game. He commands the play, walking from A to B, back to A, hands on hips, a short jog, a narrowing of the eyes, a decoy gallop for a few feet - nothing occurs without his consent. Somehow in this closing segment of his career he’s still at the peak of his powers.
In ‘Watchmen’, Doctor Manhattan gradually loses all interest in human life. The relatability that connects a human being to day-to-day matters was severed when he ascended above the mortal plane. Drifting further into apathy, he eventually just moves to Mars and makes floating clockwork castles with his mind. Being endowed with god-like powers instantly removes any appetite he had for achievement of any kind. He is adrift, excised from the system that grounded him before.
Watching Messi lift the MLS Cup, something I had no expectations of him actually doing, I wondered if, in his own mind, he’s completed football now. What other frontiers are left? The apocryphal words about Alexander the Great weeping because there were no more lands left to conquer popped into my head. Would Messi now take his foot off the pedal, even slightly? His legacy is set in concrete, the GOAT debates ended with the World Cup win and to top it off he’s the most decorated player in the history of the sport. It’s only natural a person could be somewhat sated and regress to a less intense approach.
Encouragingly, the desire that fuels Messi does not seem to have diminished. He’s always been a spiky and distant character, silently glaring at anyone who rankles him, getting in people’s faces now and then. This side to him seemed to crystallise with his outbursts at the 2022 World Cup, which ended up endearing him to Argentina to such an extent that he now at least rivals Maradona as the country’s favourite son. This side of his personality is on full display in MLS.
The human drama of him operating at Miami is quite fun to observe. As he is the fulcrum of everything, with each play the ball is leaving his possession and returning to him instantly. His team mates are fulfilling the role of mobile walls whose sole purpose is to reflect the ball back to him. Most plays follow this pattern; Messi picks a pass and runs into space where the ball should be returned to his feet immediately. Now and then however, a team mate goes rogue and entertainingly decides to abandon the script. Their unsuccessful shot or dribble leads to them staring at the ground and running back to get in position. They’re avoiding the glare of Messi, who is usually stopped in his tracks with both hands frozen in a gesture that shows where the ball should have arrived. He’s stock still except for his head which tracks whoever has upset him, his eyes burning a hole in them.
The Messi stare is one of the elements of football you can really cordon off and dissect, like a Zlatan flick or a Ribéry turn. His narrowed dark eyes, staring with the combined weight of a pissed off team captain, manager, owner, league investor and broadcast partner. If Messi reacts to unreturned passes in this way, his will to win must be a roiling volcano beneath the surface. The darkness inherent to the glare communicates the intensity we only see now and then.
In Cormac McCarthy’s historical fiction novel ‘Blood Meridian’, the band of bloodthirsty mercenaries that the story follows, are led by John Glanton. As with all McCarthy characters we are not treated to any interiority, merely left with their actions to ponder over. Glanton is a taciturn murderer fuelled by some unnamed smouldering hatred. At one stage his intense glare is described thus
‘Glanton’s eyes in their dark sockets were burning centroids of murder’.
It says something of the intensity apparent in the glare of a pissed off Messi that I find a parallel. When he skewers someone with this look it feels like a vortex is in operation, sucking the subject of his attention to the pair of bottomless black voids beneath his brow. A competitiveness this demented will not bow down, the appetite merely grows in proportion to the amount it’s fed. Post MLS Cup win Messi must be lining up his next targets; retaining the World Cup, winning the CONCACAF Champions Cup, and if discussions on MLS team participation are to be believed, winning the Copa Libertadores.
There’s another version of the apocryphal quote about Alexander the Great, in this one he is told there are infinite worlds, and he weeps because he can’t conquer them all.