World Cup winner. Two-time Copa America winner. Two-time World Cup golden ball winner. 125 goals and 65 assists in 207 appearances. As Lionel Messi starts life on Tuesday as an ex-international footballer, his place in the pantheon of football greats is safe and secure.
We know the greatness; we witnessed World Cups 2022 and 2026. It seems silly that there even was a question mark attached to anything he did wearing Albiceleste. As his farewell note suggested, however, that wasn't always the case. For too long titles eluded him, the Argentina #10 shirt gathering weight with each passing year, this being the ultimate argument against him, Barcelona's unprecedented successes standing in stark contrast to Argentina's utter lack of silverware. Until one day, it didn't.
So, what suddenly led Messi from being one the greatest nearly-men of international football to its greatest ever exponent? To understand that success, though, we must first understand the failure.
"He has no personality"
When Diego Maradona discussed Lionel Messi with Pele, back in June 2016, his assessment mirrored the vast majority of the football world's when it came to Messi in an Argentina shirt: "He is a great person, but he has no personality. He doesn't have the personality to be a leader."
The weight of those words rang loud as Argentina's wait for an international title in the post-Maradona era continued into its 23rd year (1993, Copa America). Messi had been there for ten of those years, but it had been a decade of deep close-but-no-cigar-(except for the one in Maradona's mouth) pain.
At three World Cups until then, Messi and Argentina had been kicked out by Germany. In 2006, a dominant Argentina had lost on penalties in the quarterfinals, Messi an unused sub in that match. In 2010, a chaotic Argentina had been spanked silly in the quarters, when Messi (now under the coaching of Maradona himself) was inexplicably made to play as a central midfielder (for all practical purposes), being asked to fetch and carry for Carlos Tevez. In 2014, and captain for three years now, Messi (and Ángel Di María) had carried a tired, defensively minded and otherwise blunt Argentina to the final but alone in the glare of the Maracana (Di Maria was out injured by then), Messi fell narrowly short. Right after that, he took Argentina to two Copa America finals, back-to-back in 2015 and 2016, and lost both to Chile, both on penalties.
It broke him. In tears, he had announced: "For me, the national team is over. I've done all I can. It hurts not to be a champion." Coming just a few weeks after Maradona's proclamation to Pele about his would-be successor, the whisper grew louder and louder... "He has no personality."
He reversed that decision a couple of months later, but his barren run with Argentina continued. In the 2018 World Cup -- a tournament Argentina only reached because of a marvellous Messi hat trick in Quito in the last qualifier -- he tried to do everything all at once and that worked till an Argentina team that was never really a team withered under the stress test of playing eventual champions France and their lightning prodigy Kylian Mbappé.
If in 2014 Messi had been asked to do all the creative play, to spark things out of nothing with only the running of Di Maria in support and everyone else hanging around waiting for whatever Messi could give them, in 2018 he had been left to hang dry. The team was all over the place, the lines between defence-midfield-attack entirely disconnected, and that meant it was easier for opponents to cut out supply to Messi, and from there isolate and suffocate the #10.
For 12 years they had wanted Lionel Messi to be Diego Maradona, and it hadn't worked. Then came late 2018, and Lionel Scaloni.
"That's not what football is about"
Messi's perceived passiveness irritated the player himself; in a rare outspoken public burst in 2015 he had told TyC "I hear they say things like 'he doesn't feel the shirt,' or 'he doesn't give it his all, or 'he doesn't run,' but football isn't about just 'giving it your all'. You hear everyone shouting, 'show some balls! show some balls!' but that's not football is about." The more he spoke, the more the meaning became evident: football is football, why don't we just talk about that?
It took till Scaloni was appointed -- first as a caretaker, then as the permanent boss -- and a bruising 2019 Copa America semifinal loss to Brazil, for Argentina to realise this. The decisions Scaloni took after that, on and off the pitch, changed Messi's legacy forever.
At the centre of it all was the simple message, unspoken but made abundantly clear with every move: 'you're not Diego Maradona and you don't need to be. You're Lionel Messi and we are here for you.' Scaloni shaped and tweaked the national team to a degree no one else, not even Pep Guardiola, had ever tweaked a football team for Messi. Out went most of Messi's peers, with only Nicolás Otamendi, Alejandro 'Papu' Gomez and the inimitable Di Maria remaining in the '22 squad. In came a mix of battle-hardened footballers entering their peak and youngsters wanting to make their mark, the two groups having one thing in common: they all idolised Leo Messi.
Just take Enzo Fernández's note on hearing of Messi's retirement - "Leo, when you said you were leaving the national team [in 2016] it made me very sad. I was just a kid, and I used to do the maths, comparing your age to mine to see if one day I might get to play with you. It sounds silly, but I really did -- thinking about how many years you had left, how many it would take me to reach the first team and I dreamed that, even if it were just once, we could play for Argentina together." Only those who haven't seen Fernandez and Rodrigo De Paul and Leandro Paredes and Julián Álvarez (among others) run those extra miles, put in those extra challenges, rough people up when need be, will tell you those are words of empty platitude, or that's it too corny to be true.
Scaloni built a team that worshipped Messi off the pitch and played to his strengths on it. Instead of making Messi produce something out of nothing every single time, he worked on the team retaining possession and allowing Messi to walk for large swathes in that curious manner of his, allowing the midfield to take the ball to Messi, making the runs Messi needed to open up space, ensuring that in the moments that matter most, Messi had the ball at his feet.
The walking, especially, was by design. Argentina still ran as much as any of the big teams, but nine of them were covering the distance normally covered by ten. That allowed a now older, slightly slower Messi to conserve his energy for those unstoppable short bursts in the final third, and even occasionally throw it back for a sprint from the halfway line (remember Messi vs Gvardiol, 2022?). It also meant that by the time Messi got the ball to feet, in the pockets of space he had wandered into casually, he had the time and movement around him to pick the kind of passes only he could have even seen. It unlocked not just Messi the finisher but Messi the playmaker as well.
At no point through all that was Messi ever assigned a fixed position on the pitch; it was all his to choose, everyone else adjusted accordingly. If he started centrally and moved to the right, for instance, the coach (and the players) changed it up to stretch the left flank, overload the right and ensure he wasn't isolated down there. Like Scaloni said after Messi's shift to the right broke England's resistance in the 2026 semifinal, "There's no need for me to tell him to change positions. Messi knows what needs to be done on the pitch. He moved to the right, and we simply adapted to what he was doing."
What Scaloni did was to take away the muddled confusion of Maradona's reign (2010), the over-reliance on one man of Alejandro Sabella's time (2014), the half-baked pressing, continued over-dependence and absurd inability to get Messi on the ball in the final third of Jorge Sampaoli's spell (2018) and replace it with a tactical dynamism designed entirely around getting the best out of Messi.
Instead of shoehorning every available Argentine attacking talent into the XI, Scaloni remodeled the way the national team functioned. The midfield was revamped to get legs in it but also inject passing ability -- all of Fernandez, Paredes, De Paul and Alexis Mac Allister can pick a pass between the lines or set a passing tempo -- and a cleverness on-the-ball to it. This meant it became much harder for international teams to stop the supply line to Messi than ever before. In attack Argentina lined up Lautaro Martínez or Julian Alvarez up top: willing runners who could finish as well as they could open up space. Di Maria's minutes were managed to ease the load on his ageing muscles. Giovanni Lo Celso and Paolo Dybala were used to relieve the creative burden on their #10. In Nahuel Molina, Gonzalo Montiel, Nicolás Tagliafico, Marcos Acuña (and Facundo Medina), fullbacks were picked as much for their defensive ability as their willingness to run all day, covering the flanks for a narrow midfield that controlled possession in a way that Messi has always loved.
While the core philosophy remained, Scaloni rarely stuck to a single formation or a settled XI, instead twisting and turning as the course demanded, using the full depth of his squad to great effect. Just in the 2022 World Cup for instance, he lined Argentina up in 4-4-2, 4-2-2-2, 3-5-2 and 4-3-3 formations depending on their opponents, depending on where he felt Messi would get the most space, be the most Messi he could be.
Messi changed too, becoming more outgoing and friendly, quick to praise teammates who craved nothing but, embracing the captain's armband like never before, speaking with fierce determination in the team huddle, revelling in the unvarnished love of every single member of the squad. "I like this Messi," Di Maria had quipped en-route Argentina's drought-breaking 2021 Copa America triumph.
With the ego clashes and the dressing room tension of years gone by stripped away, with vocal public criticism dying down (in the 2011 Copa America he was booed in Buenos Aires by the home fans!), Messi embraced how his national team had gotten back to the basics, to what he thought football was all about: the football. He didn't need to 'show some balls!' anymore. The ball at his feet did all the talking... and it talked its way to the resplendent international trophy cabinet we see now.
In the end it had been rather simple: Lionel Scaloni and Argentina stopped demanding him to be the next Diego Maradona, and instead simply asked Leo Messi to be Leo Messi. And he did just that to cement his place as the greatest of all time.
