If You Want To Play Like Messi, Then Think Like An Accordion

There’s a key to developing a deeper appreciation of the football of Barcelona. All you have to do is ask the experts; the men who’ve spent years studying – not just watching – how Barcelona got to where we see them today.

Guillem Balagué is the author Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography, which was published in 2012. He’s a man in the know. Here’s a clue: it’s not all about Lionel Messi. Please, nobody freak out.

The truth is, Messi’s an anomaly. He’s the best player there’s ever been. In Guardiola’s own words, the Argentine is the best player he’ll ever coach.

Messi’s the diamond cog in an otherwise highly-functioning machine, a system designed to make the most of his talents in a squad that was overhauled specifically for him to flourish.

The point is that the Barcelona football brain was able to create and execute this system. Pep Guardiola, who learned from Johan Cruyff, who learned from Rinus Michels, knew exactly how to get the best from Messi.

Let Guillem explain.

I LOVE these words:

With Pep’s help and his own intuition, Messi started playing football with an accordion-like movement: the further the ball was away from him, the more distance he would put between himself and the ball. The closer it was to him, the closer he would move to get involved. Messi always wants the ball and in order for him to receive it in the best circumstances, Pep has made him understand that looking for the opposition’s weaker side, where there are fewer opponents, behind the line demarcated by the deep-lying midfielders (pivotes) and distancing himself from the centre backs, the ball will find him. Furthermore, in those areas, he will have a bit of extra space to rev his engine, to work his way up through the gears, before hitting the opposition in full flow. And all this with very little effort: he only needed to work up through the gears when he received the ball. Without it he was allowed to take time to recover, to rest while he played. It sounds simple enough, but in mastering that positioning and timing, Messi has shown a thorough understanding of the game and an ability to learn in record time what many players take years to understand.

Guardiola recognised that as an extremely explosive player, Messi needed to find pockets of time within games to recharge his batteries. He has a high amount of fast-twitch muscle fibres, which require more recovery time between explosive actions.

A good way to think about this is an animal running to catch its prey. He has 30 seconds to do so. If he fails, he needs a rest before he has another go. This is why explosive players such as Messi, Arjen Robben, Sergio Agüero, Eden Hazard and Raheem Sterling don’t run as much as midfielders in total, yet perform more sprints.

So what we’re talking about here is education. We’re talking about the sharing of knowledge and insight and conviction, the wills of independent men from different countries coming together to forge several lifetimes of experience into one distinct and evolving philosophy.

That’s why Barcelona aren’t too bothered if people come to watch them train in the hope of learning their secrets. As Carles Rexach, a former player and manager of the club says, “Other teams can try to copy us, of course, but we’ve got 30 years of a head start.”