The Seven Deadly Sins of Sport

SLOTH

Lionel Messi

Sloth can sometimes be hard to pick. Take Lionel Messi, for example.

The greatest soccer player who ever lived* can look like the laziest player who ever walked god’s green pitch. And ‘walk’ is the right word. Messi walks all the time during a game. So much so that, if you watch him instead of the ball, you mainly see a man ambling about like the boyfriend who’s been dragged along for a day of shopping.

He could not appear less interested in proceedings. There could be 80,000 people watching, and the person they are there to see seems bored. It’s strange.

The stats back it up, too. Messi walks more than any other outfield player. In 2017, playing in El Clásico, Barcelona versus Real Madrid, Messi covered eight kilometres in the game, and he walked 83 per cent of that.

That’s not extreme for him. In the 2022 World Cup, he walked more than any other player. It would be enough to drive anyone mad. Players are watching their teammate saunter around like he’s on a smoke break while they spend ninety minutes running their hearts out. Commentators and columnists over the years have occasionally accused him of being lazy, pointing out his body language and lack of running.

Yet Messi is the Godzilla of world football. He is a monster. He doesn’t destroy defenders; he destroys entire defences.

That game against Real Madrid, where he walked 83 per cent of the time? Barcelona won 3–0, and Messi scored one goal and set up another.

You’d think defending against someone who walks most of the time would be easy. I mean, he’s not going to tire you out by sprinting everywhere all game. If you stick with him as a defender, then you should also only be running about 20 per cent of the time.

Yet Honduras midfielder Héctor Castellanos doesn’t remember it that way at all. When he was told to mark Messi, he remembers Messi approaching him early in the game.

‘Very calmly and nicely, he came up to me and asked, “Are you really going to follow me all game?”’

‘I told him, “Honestly, yes.” He smiled and didn’t say anything else.’

Messi then went and scored twice, set up another goal, and after the game came over to Castellanos and gave him his shirt.

What Messi does is use the appearance of sloth to disguise what he is really up to, lulling opponents into a false sense of security. Because as Messi is moseying around, he is looking for weakness.

Pep Guardiola coached Messi at Barcelona for four seasons. His view is that Messi puts the opposition through a gruelling test, even though it looks like he’s off to the shops for a carton of milk.

‘He is not out of the game. He’s involved. He’s moving his head – left, right, right, left. He knows exactly what is going to happen and his head is always moving,’ Guardiola said in the documentary This is Football. ‘He’s not running, but he is always watching what happens. He smells who is the weak point. After five or ten minutes, he has a map in his eyes and his brain. He knows exactly what space there is and the panorama. Just like being in a jungle where you have to survive, he knows, “If I move here or here, I will have more space to attack.”’

His teammate at Barcelona, Marc Cucurella, agrees. ‘The most incredible thing, when you watch the games or play with him, is that he is walking a lot. But he is watching the space. Then, when he receives the ball, he has the information on the gaps in his mind and he is ready to kill.’

All this wandering around is important, because Messi is moving the defenders around by doing it. It’s like he’s saying, ‘Okay, if I stand in this bit of the field, who comes to cover me? That guy, or that guy, or both, or neither?’

He’s working out the defensive structure, where the seams are between the areas of responsibility between defenders, and that’s easier to do walking – he doesn’t have to work that out at speed.

MESSING AROUND

Here’s what Messi is up to behind the slothful façade: he is working out where the valuable bits of territory are. And the difficult thing is, the valuable bits of territory in a football game change all the time. They are dynamic, from moment to moment, team to team, game to game.

Luke Bornn, vice-president of strategy and analytics for the Sacramento Kings, and Javier Fernández, a data scientist at FC Barcelona, uncovered this phenomenon. They identified that in every game there are ‘high-value locations’, which change depending on the position of the ball and all the other players.

High-value locations are areas where goals or assists can come from, and they are the places defences work on closing off. The better the defence, the better they are at stopping the ball getting into those areas or marking attackers who move into them.

‘We can see at every instant the location of each player and the ball, and from this deduce how players’ movements create space for themselves and others,’ Bornn said of their work. ‘We can also see whether they do that actively, by running into open spaces, or passively, by staying in high-value locations while the play shifts away.’

This is what Messi does. He identifies where the high-value locations are, based on the opposition and what his teammates are doing. Bornn and Fernández found that, when Messi controls these spots on the pitch, 66 per cent of the time he is walking. It means he is mapping out these key areas in real-time, and basically just strolls into them while everyone else is running off elsewhere, usually chasing the ball.

‘Can we say Messi gets a lot of his space by not chasing the play? Yes, that’s precisely what our research shows,’ Bornn said. ‘Is he doing it deliberately? To answer that, you’d probably have to ask the man himself.’

It certainly seems likely he is doing it deliberately.

England right-back Kieran Trippier has played against Messi. ‘You play against Sadio Mané,* for instance, and if you take your eye off him for a second, he’ll just dart in behind you. But with Messi, you look four times and he’s still there. It’s weird. A lot of the time he just walks and walks – and then, before you know it, it’s a goal. I’ve played against him a few times now and he’s so good at just picking up those little pockets of space. Before Barcelona have made three passes, he already knows where the ball’s going.’

It’s all about positioning. Sometimes Messi will even make sure the referee is in between him and his defender so he’s harder to spot. As Guardiola said, he’s like an old tiger who has hunted in the same jungle so long, he knows all the best places to wait in ambush.

The walking also works on a psychological level. Messi’s opponents start to get lulled into a false sense of security, or they feel they need to get involved in the game, so they move off him. They sense a run from another player, and with Messi not even moving, they decide to go towards the more pressing threat, and then, Messi is completely free.

It’s also just slightly unnerving.* Manchester United and England defender Rio Ferdinand explains: ‘He’s almost pretending that he’s not interested. Then he comes alive.’

I once chatted to Graham Arnold, who coached against Messi at the World Cup, in a game Australia lost to Argentina 2–1, Messi scoring one of the goals. Arnold said Messi often seemed to be paying no attention.

At one stage of the game, Messi kept looking up into stands like something was going on. Eventually, Arnold turned around and looked up too, but nothing was happening. ‘He was just messing around,’ Arnold told me.

Messi adopts the trappings of sloth to hide his killer instinct. That World Cup where he walked more than any other player? He captained his Argentina side to the trophy and was voted player of the tournament. But there have been plenty of players who have adopted the trappings of sloth purely because they were slothful.

* With possible apologies to Pelé and Diego Maradona.

* Mané is one of the top players of his era, starring at Liverpool from 2016 to 2022 and scoring 196 goals.

* I tried it once in the office – just walking around and standing behind people while they were at their desks. People did not like it. After about half an hour, I was asked to leave. Partly because I don’t work in an office.