Anatomy of a Genius: Leo Messi's tactical evolution at FC Barcelona

by Domagoj Kostanjsak

Overview

Anatomy of a Genius is a tactical breakdown of Lionel Messi's playing career at FC Barcelona.

Despite spending his whole career with the club, the Argentine genius had to adapt and improve his game to become the foundation of Barca's modern success. This book explores his journey - from emerging as a talented prodigy to becoming the best player on the planet - through an enthralling narrative, in-depth tactics and key statistics. A great deal has been written already about the famous boy from Rosario, as his story has been told time and again by journalists and renowned authors. Anatomy of a Genius digs deeper to uncover things we don't already know, delving into stats and tactics to reveal the how and why behind one of the world's greatest athletes and his phenomenal career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781801501811
Publisher:	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,045,399
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Domagoj Kostanjšak is a primary school teacher turned tactical analyst who now does opposition analysis and scouting professionally. His tactical work has featured on the BBC, in Total Football Analysis, the Liverpool Echo and Telesport among other outlets. He's also a co-author of The Football Legacy Magazine. He's been an avid Barcelona fan since his early childhood years.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
La Masia’s Finest
IT’S NO secret that Lionel Messi’s first steps at Barcelona
were rather difficult. Of course, signing for a club thousands
of miles away from his home and having to leave his family
behind was always going to impact the adaptation period.
Despite his glaringly obvious talent, there’s no denying that the
club was taking a big risk by investing so much in a boy that
was an unknown quantity back then. His medical condition
aside, Messi was a frail and timid child arriving at a club that
had global aspirations.
Times were still far from ideal in Catalonia and it would
take them some years to get back to the top with Frank
Rijkaard and Ronaldinho leading the modern revolution of
theAzulgranas. Messi, of course, would be a huge part of that
rallying charge too, but not many would have predicted that
when he first joined the academy. I asked Graham Hunter,
journalist, author, analyst and LaLiga expert, whether there
was an indication of greatness about Leo in the early stages of
his Barcelona career. He explained:
Greatness is too strong of a word because what it
definitely was right from the first instant was a realclarity that he was extraordinary. When he first
arrived [at Barcelona], he was timid and silent to the
extent that people worried about his personality. And
remember, he was tiny. While Messi always did things
that showed he had more skill, more technique than
any of the other players and always did things that
stunned people, the entire collection of things that
would make him truly great didn’t really become very
clear until 2004 or 2005.
His road from being a talented individual to La Masia’s finest
was rocky and long. Of course, as time went on, it became
increasingly more difficult to ignore his potential. As Hunter
points out, he always had more skill and more technique than
anyone else. Sometimes, however, that isn’t enough.
La Masia’s success became evident during Pep Guardiola’s
tenure at the club but their principles were well defined by that
point already. When scouting for players, Barcelona look at
several key aspects that a young player must show, including
how good their technique is and how well they understand
and see the game. There are more, of course, but generally
speaking, these two are traits you’ll find in almost every
academy graduate at the club. But this also doesn’t mean it’s
all they’re good at. Every player is unique so inevitably some
will come with a lot of speed, strength or with an incredible
eye for a pass or goal. Those traits are immediately identified
and then groomed.
However, young players are never finished products and
every single one comes with strengths and weaknesses together.
This is very important to understand because no one could
have predicted Messi’s unbelievable development into a total
player. Granted, a lot of it was innate talent and love for the
game but a lot also comes from proper development and
coaching in the early years of his career. ‘The way that we like
to develop them [young players at La Masia] is helping them
to grow the bottom level,’ said Albert Capellas, ex-coordinator
of Barcelona’s Academy, in an interview forInside the Academy.
The bottom level here means traits they’re not necessarily that
good at. Often, physical traits aside, La Masia graduates are
very well-rounded players; they’re players of great technique,
vision, reading and understanding of the game and positional
play. This is no coincidence either as the club works hard to
create such profiles in the first place. Barcelona scouts recognise
great talent and extraordinary skill in players but then coaches
at the club refine their basic skills, skills that ultimately help
them play simply. ‘Doing exceptional things is talent – that’s
scouting. But helping them to play simple – that’s coaching,’
explained Capellas in the same interview.
Barcelona never taught Messi to be extraordinary in that
sense. But they did help him harness the innate talent and
transform it into something more palpable and suitable to both
his personal player profile and also to serve the collective at a
higher level. La Masia does very well to improve on players’
flaws, or just tries to mould them into positions and roles that
cater to their strengths. Everything starts from there. Instead
of looking for players who immediately fit the philosophy,
it’s about identifying young and talented players and then
coaching them to maximise that.
We can apply the same process to Messi himself. When
Barcelona first scouted him, he was this scrawny kid who
could dribble past the entire opposition team without batting
an eyelid and then score. Clearly, the extraordinary talent
was already visible. But he was very raw, running at players
with his head down and beating them through sheer skill and
difference in individual quality. ‘Gradually he got taught the
ways of Barcelona in terms of completely understanding the
positional play, the triangles, pressing and moving,’ Hunter
explained. Coaching for young Messi wasn’t necessarily
extremely important. He didn’t watch a lot of football in the
early years of his career and didn’t really care for analysis. His
talent was so big that for the majority of his youth days it was
enough to make the difference. ‘While he was younger, people
were trying to coach him and change him and he just ignored
them,’ continued Hunter.
ButthatMessi is miles behind the one we would eventually
enjoy watching on the big screen or at the grandest of stages.
The difference, once again, is in doing the simple things well.
Of course, nothing Messi does is ever that simple. But his
basics are on an extremely high level: controlling the ball,
passing, vision and even shooting. All of those things are traits
every footballer should work on, regardless of their position
or style of play of the team. And they’re also traits that are
developed at La Masia. I was lucky enough to speak to Taher
Mortezaie, the current technical and project director at Barça
Academy Brisbane, who’s been working for the club for years,
even spending three years as a coach in their academy. While
he’s never trained Messi directly, he helped me understand
some key elements of coaching within Barcelona’s academy
and La Masia as well.
That’s actually the first big point we need to understand.
Barcelona’s academy and La Masia are not the same thing.
People often get it wrong and confuse one with the other.
However, while both can include players of similar age, the
main difference is in the level of competitiveness. Mortezaie
explained during our chat:
The main difference is that La Masia is 100 per cent
competitive from six or seven years old onward. Of
course, the academy is competitive as well, but this
period is more about education and trials because it’s
very difficult to get in [La Masia]. So the two will
regularly swap players between six and 12 years old.
In a way, the academy is La Masia for La Masia. Therefore, in
an ideal world, a player’s usual path of development will then
be the academy – La Masia – first team.
Interestingly, so much of what Mortezaie has told me
echoes Capellas’s words too. La Masia tries to mould players
in a certain way, prioritising some key traits of their player
profiles. But at the same time, as Mortezaie explains, two other
aspects are absolutely fundamental in their approach – freedom
and personal development:
In the beginning, we taught children different aspects
of the game in different blocks, each very deep and
detailed for a thing X, Y or Z. But this is not always
so. Barcelona are not very linear in their approach
to training because how can you specifically prepare
for scenarios A, B or C when football, just like life,
is such chaos most of the time? So we would still
go through blocks of training but give players more
freedom of how and when we want to implement it
into the training sessions.
It’s more about the freedom of choice here. Players are put in
different scenarios that are likely to occur on the pitch and then
observed as they take action in certain ways to find the best
possible solution to a given problem. That’s what develops their
understanding of the game while also building up their agency.
It’s not so much about telling them what’s the right or wrong way
to play, but rather helping them understand what benefits them
and the collective in specific scenarios, according to Mortezaie:
Instead of telling them what way is best, we tell them
to assess what options they have in any given scenario.
And that’s what we do – we create options for them
for every situation and foster awareness – not, you did
something wrong, but rather, understanding why you
did something and have you thought about whether
it helps you and your team-mates.
Of course, while he can’t tell me that was exactly what
Barcelona did with Messi, it’s fair to assume it did play a part
in fostering Leo’s development towards a more complete profile
that not only highlights his incredible talent, but also aims to
maximise it for the benefit of the collective.
The freedom of expression helps coaches understand what
the player is like and what their main traits are. With Messi,
it was quite clear he was a dribbler of exceptional technical
quality. But it came with a lot of caveats too, one of which
is being very individualistic in his approach. Mortezaie
actually indirectly talks about handling that very aspect in
young players:
To outsiders, it might seem very rigid – pass the
ball, one-touch football and such – but it’s more
about creating sessions where children can express
themselves. Rather than tell them ‘pass, dribble or
do that’, you create an environment where different
players can express themselves in different ways. So if
a player takes a lot of risk during sessions, instead of
calling him out for doing that, we try to see why he
does it and what benefits or attitudes it can give the
team. Also, is it something we have to work on or is
it a trait that can develop in the future so you’d want
him to feel that freedom and take the risk?
There’s absolutely no doubt that Barcelona recognised Leo’s
strengths very early on, and then it was all about building
on them, for both parties’ sake. But academy graduates are
people first, and children at that, players second, so how you
approach their development matters a lot. La Masia builds
the player by building the person behind that player first. We
all know how Messi, in particular, is an introvert, which was
even more obvious when he was a kid. External circumstances
such as leaving home at an early age and being far away from
his family definitely played a part in moulding his personality
too, but there’s no escaping the fact that he was genuinely a
silent and shy boy.
At the beginning, he didn’t even live in La Masia along
with the other children but instead in a nearby flat with his
father. When he was around other people from the club, he
was a mostly quiet and unassuming soul. However, in time, he
came out of his shell to eventually become one of the popular
ones. Hunter recalls:
As he slowly got accustomed to life in Barcelona, he
became a really well-liked kid. People in school would
do some of his homework for him or would just give
him answers for stuff. He was definitely popular for
his character more than just because he was a great
footballer at that age. He was very brave.
This is also something La Masia puts a lot of emphasis on –
developing the character, the person behind the scenes.
Needless to say, Messi needed a lot of that upon first
arriving at the club. The key is to help the children feel safe and
comfortable. So many of them come with all sorts of different
baggage or issues they’re trying to repress, sweep under the
rug or somehow overcome. The sooner the club realises that
and tends to the person first rather than the player, the better
for all of them.
Developing Messi’s character and personality, especially in
the early stages of his career, was as important as harnessing
his godly potential. Mortezaie explains:
Football can be played in many different ways, but it’s
not just about the football that’s played at a club, it’s
about seeing players as human beings with different
personalities and needs. Once you understand that
person, their dreams and fears, then you have a big
chance to both influence the player and the person.
This is the fundamental thing across all levels of football, from
grassroots all the way to an elite ‘farmhouse’ like La Masia. The
main idea is to let them express themselves in ways in which
they’re most comfortable and then the coaches will do their
best to nourish their strengths, improve on their weaknesses
and, above all, let them play – something important that
Mortezaie has been very vocal about in our discussion. Yes,
Barcelona have different training blocks and sessions that focus
on developing all sorts of different profile traits, but the key is
to ‘let them play’. They’re children, after all.
But there’s one more aspect we have to touch upon here
that’s unique to Lionel Messi the player and Lionel Messi the
person, and that’s special talent. Even though development
isn’t linear, the truth is that some children are inevitably more
talented than others. So how does one approach bigger talents?
Many young players with huge potential end up having average
careers and many are late bloomers, achieving their very peak
at later stages of their career. In that sense, it’s difficult to
successfully predict any youngster’s development line.
Mortezaie ponders:
If you tell a big talent they’re a very big talent and
you approach them differently, how much have you
actually helped them? There are so many things
that need to go right at the same time, so maybe by
approaching a big talent differently you’re not helping
them because you’re giving them special attention
they think they will get their whole life. And then
when they are 15, 16, 17 or 18, they go to a club
where everybody is like that. And all of a sudden they
don’t get that special attention anymore. So instead of
telling them they’re a big talent, rather focus on how
they can use that exceptional skill to get better and
ensure their team is better. It’s about creating mini
challenges for them all the time.
I absolutely love the last part regarding ‘mini challenges’. How
can you take your god-given talent and put it to even better
use to help the team? You’re obviously incredibly good at X so
why don’t you try to complement it with Y or Z? Remember
Messi’s challenge to score more headed goals when he was
really young?
Back in Argentina, his youth coach Carlos Marconi from
Rosario, knowing Leo’s love for chocolate cookies called
alfajores, struck a deal with the kid, saying that he would get a
cookie for every goal he scored. But since it wasn’t unusual for
Messi to score four or five goals per match, Marconi quickly
realised he was running out of cookies. So in a cheeky attempt
to turn the tide back in his favour, he altered the rules of the
game, saying Messi would now get two cookies per goal but the
trick was that only headers counted. Messi was obviously never
tall and powerful so scoring headers was very difficult. But he
was incredibly creative and used other skills in his arsenal to
beat the challenge. He would dribble to the goalkeeper, getting
past all the defenders on his way, beat the goalie too and then
juggle the ball in the air right in front of the goal before scoring
with his head. Along the way throughout his career, his talent
would be posed with different challenges all the time, the first
of which was the positional change.
Andy West recalled during our discussion on Leo:
When he was a kid – and obviously children’s football
is less rigorously organised tactically, so [he] will have
had the freedom then to do what he wanted – he
played as theenganche, the traditional No.10. That
was his role within the structure – to play the way he
wanted. But he was also very small and very slender
in his early Barcelona days.
No.10s are players that are granted positional freedom and
often decreased defensive responsibility – a perfect combination
for someone of Messi’s traits. But as he rose through the ranks,
football became more complex but also more structured and
rigid. One player deviating from the plan was putting the
whole collective at risk but, luckily, such is the extent of Leo’s
talent that it mattered very little.
The academy Messi is very similar to the one we saw in
the early stages of his first-team journey at Barcelona but he
was also very raw. Watching him play, even if only through
clips and limited footage, is dazzling. That version of Messi
was just unrestrained talent and raw skill. The way he changed
directions at full speed or swapped between controlling the ball
with his right or his left foot was simply outrageous. The young
Messi would break defenders’ ankles if they tried to mimic his
movement but he also over-relied on it, sometimes dribbling
when he should have passed and vice versa.
West explains:
By watching his early youth games, you can see it’s
Messi, but he doesn’t have the awareness he now has.
He runs with his head down, he runs into dead ends,
doesn’t have that pause to take a step, look up and
take a look at the game around him. That was the
thing that had to improve. And obviously it did, to a
ridiculous degree.
This is certainly true. Messi’s signature runs and control have
become a staple over the years but while they were always
present, they weren’t exactly refined. He would often play
either through the middle or, interestingly, down the left flank.
So to suddenly change to the right wing to accommodate
Ronaldinho, the star of Rijkaard’s Barça, wasn’t an easy task.
This would ultimately mould Messi’s profile even more.
As talented as he was, he still wasn’t familiar with all the
concepts that were key at Barcelona. As Samuel Marsden puts
it: ‘Messi was a mix of this Argentine street player who was able
to mould and grasp the style and demands of Barcelona, also
fairly early in his career.’ It wasn’t an instantaneous change,
far from it. But from the very start he was learning, taking it
all in and, most importantly, evolving.
From his very first game for the U14B team back in 2001,
climbing the ladder through Barça’s C and B teams, to his
debut in the first team under Rijkaard, Messi was constantly
improving and moulding his profile, both for his and the club’s
sake. Eventually, he became far too big to stay at the lower
levels, even becoming ‘a bit bored playing for the B team’, as
Sid Lowe told me. Everyone knew the time had come for him
to step up.
So step up he did. This is his story.

Table of Contents

Foreword7
Preface11
Introduction: The Many Faces of Leo17
1.La Masia’s Finest22
2.The Making of Lionel Messi33
Trial by Fire33
The Mazy Winger39
The drawing board55
Rijkaard’s Barça61
3.Rebirth & Reinvention77
A New Hope77
The False 983
The drawing board98
Pep’s Barça105
4.Total Player122
The Birth of MSN122
The Playmaker128
The drawing board143
Lucho’s Barça151
5.The Alpha & Omega169
A Club in Crisis169
The Metronome178
The drawing board192
Shattered Identities199
Epilogue: The Curtain Call217
Appendix: Pitch Grid224