Leo Messi: The Nation’s Playmaker
By David Smith
December 2022
Watching Leo Messi lead Argentina at the World Cup—and I mean the country not just its football team—well, for some of us it’s been like seeing a fundamentalist preacher lead the flock on a journey of revivalist faith. In the words of an Argentine friend, “The nation is devoted to him because he reminds us all of who we are and what we were meant to be.”
How so? Because Messi, like Diego Maradona before him, touches the raw, national nerve of failure and transforms it with his talents into the triumph that Argentina so desperately seeks. Yes, seeks precisely because of its many failings. The country that has everything, in terms of natural resources, land that can grow anything, oil and gas, minerals, yet a country can never get its act together politically and economically… well, Argentina sure does on the soccer pitch, with Leo conducting, right?
The man himself is an unlikely Messiah. Semi-introverted, shy by his own admission, Messi is happiest at home playing with his kids, and on the pitch such a small lightweight compared to the hulks who mark him. Indeed as a child he needed growth hormones to help him put on a few inches. Spiritually too, Leo Messi cuts such a contrast to Maradona, forever larger than life, Diego the enfant terrible wherever he played, and a destroyer not just of the opposing defence but of so many people around him, family and friends.
For many years Messi suffered from the comparison with Maradona, the widespread belief that he didn’t deliver for the national team as Diego had with the World cup victory of 1986, and that infamous Hand of God goal against England. Hard to believe it now, but Messi was crucified back home, held personally responsible for Argentina’s long drought in international tournaments, indeed made the villain of the national tragedy.
Reporting on the 2014 World cup final in Rio de Janeiro, when Messi missed a golden chance to put Argentina ahead against Germany and they lost, I could hear it among the Argentine faithful. “He never does it for us….he’s not one of us….he cares much more about his club Barcelona.” Shortly afterwards, Messi resigned from the national team, saying the pressure was too much.
“Maybe, just maybe, Leo Messi has been asking much bigger questions, unconsciously, of the people who love him so.”
Only then did the country wake up to the way they had abused the greatest soccer talent of his generation, potentially the best player ever. It took Messi to say ¡Basta! , for the nation to recognise what they had lost, and to beg the hero to return. ¡Basta! Enough already! Maybe there’s a lesson there for the many politicians who have so failed with Argentina’s extraordinary potential.
¡Somos Argentinos! Two words that are indelibly inscribed on the brain when you live among them (full disclosure: my wife is Argentine, even the family dog has had a Messi shirt in the World cup). Simple enough the words. Except that declaration of being Argentine is so often used hereabouts as an explanation of the country’s exceptionalism. We don’t do business that way because, well, we are Argentines. We don’t live by the rules, well, because, we are Argentines. And yes, we don’t pay our debts, well because ¡Somos Argentinos!
Somehow, Leo Messi speaks to that culture in one way, with his talent, with that dizzying ability to run past the opposition as if they don’t exist, with that shimmying skill that makes him look as if he’s never in a hurry. Exceptional yes, defying all the norms, yes. But hold on there, always, always, Messi is hellbent on delivering product, on being the best he can be, on making the absolute most of the talents he has. That’s not so Argentine. At all.
As someone who loves the country, warts and all, I’d like to think Leo Messi has now settled the crazy, infuriating debate among his countrymen and women: Who’s best? Maradona or Messi?
Hearing that, I always want to say, and on occasion I do: only you Argentines could have the two best players ever, and argue about that. Just as only you folks could argue about what to do with some of the richest land on the planet. Please shut up, and just celebrate them both! And please, make the most of this land, go feed a billion people, one-eighth of humanity now, and sell them your oil and gas, your lithium, your meat, your wine, and so on.
I’m not sure it will happen. Yet somehow, to my eye, so much more has been at work here in the twilight of the career of a great, virtuoso talent. Maybe, just maybe, Leo Messi has been asking not just questions of the poor opponents who try to defend against him. But asking much bigger questions, unconsciously, of the people who love him so, and the country that has never mastered the playing field, the land of opportunity, that could be theirs.
