What its like to play with and against Lionel Messi: A privilege and a nightmare

“Having Lionel Messi in your team was a guarantee,” says Marc Muniesa, who had the privilege of sharing a dressing room with the footballer many consider the greatest of all time during his, and Barcelona’s, peak years. 

“You knew the team were going to create chances, and that the opposition were going to be on top of him, sometimes two, three players. And that meant that the other players on our team were free. They couldn’t stop us.”

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Few players have tried to stop Inter Miami’s new No 10 more often than Raul Garcia, who faced Messi 33 times between 2004 and 2021 while playing for Spanish clubs Osasuna, Atletico Madrid and Athletic Bilbao.

“The games against Messi were always marked in the calendar,” Garcia tells The Athletic with a shake of the head. “There was a time when he dominated La Liga completely. My memory is that, never, in any moment, could you switch off. Even though there were games when it seemed he was not really plugged in, or involved in the play then, bang, he took the ball, dribbled past a couple of players, and created a chance. 

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“When you saw him up close, you realised just how great a player he was. He was the best midfielder, the best when he took the ball from the wing, and the best at finishing.”

The Athletic has spoken to a dozen players who have shared a pitch with Messi during his career — from the skinny 16-year-old who broke into the Barcelona B team in 2004, all the way through to the determined winner who drove Argentina on to lift the World Cup last December — to find out exactly what it’s like to play with, and against, an all-time great.

Messi has played more than 1,000 competitive games for club and country in two decades of senior football.

The very first of those was a Segunda B (third tier) fixture for Barcelona’s B team against Catalan semi-professional team CE Mataro on March 6, 2004. Arnau Riera was the B team’s captain that year.

“He was just 16, but you could see with him there was something different, how he understood football, his skill,” says Riera. “He knew what to do when he got the ball. He was very fast, and it was so impressive how he could put the brakes on, then immediately accelerate away again. Even back then it was like he always had the ball stuck to his feet. So it was very difficult to keep up with him, and even tougher to get the ball from him. I remember a game against (city rivals) Espanyol B — he scored a goal where he dribbled past almost their entire team.”

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The young Messi often trained during the week with Barcelona’s first team, then managed by former Netherlands international Frank Rijkaard. This meant rubbing shoulders with superstars including Ronaldinho, Andres Iniesta and Samuel Eto’o. The inhabitants of the B team dressing room weren’t quite so illustrious — a mix of teenage hopefuls and older players such as Riera, then 24, not quite good enough for La Liga.

“We didn’t have a great team then, not so much talent,” Riera says. “When Messi came in, he was obviously a bit frustrated. He didn’t have people around him who he could link up with and make things happen. In one game, against Zaragoza B, we lost 4-1 and I was in the dressing room, just a few of us left. I saw him crying with rage and frustration. That surprised me as I did not think that losing would hurt him so much.

“He was a winner, but in a very silent way. When he won, he felt it a lot. When he lost, he also felt it a lot.”

Messi may have been a teenager who hated losing, but he didn’t sulk when on the wrong end of full-blooded challenges.

“In training, I often tackled him hard,” Riera says. “But he never complained. I remember one of the coaches calling me out on it, he told me I was going too hard on him. And that was true. But I was also defending my place in the team. It was my profession, my job, my living. So when I trained, I took it very seriously. That day we had a few clashes between us, but I apologised to him in the dressing room. He never complained.”

Within 12 months, Messi had left the third tier behind and was playing regularly playing for Rijkaard’s first team, in both La Liga and the Champions League.

“The better the level, the easier it was for Leo,” Riera says. “He was always very fast in his head. And that makes the difference in modern football, at the top level — how quickly you can do things. So he found it easier when he had better players around him, like Iniesta, Xavi, Sergio Busquets — people who also thought very quickly when they had the ball.”

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By the time defender Muniesa started training with the first team as a teenager in the 2008-09 season, Pep Guardiola had taken over as coach and made Messi, then 21, central to his tactical plan.

“Leo was a good guy, very normal, very relaxed,” Muniesa tells The Athletic. “He did not speak much, was a bit shy, introverted, but was always very good with me. I was very young, 17. He maybe identified with me, when, in my first game for the senior side, I was sent off. He came over to give me his hand, tell me it was OK, that in his first game for Argentina (a friendly away to Hungary in August 2005) he had been sent off too, and that I would have a long career to enjoy. We had a very good, very respectful relationship.

“At training, he was a ‘crack’. We all know the type of player he is, what he can do. He would usually be pretty calm, but when he really wanted to win one of the small-sided games, he came alive and there was nobody who could stop him.”

At the end of that 2008-09 season, Messi played in his first Champions League final, scoring the decisive goal in the second half of a 2-0 win over Manchester United (he had missed the 2-1 victory over Arsenal in Paris in the 2006 version through injury). But even when it was obvious Messi was on another level to mere mortals as a footballer, you wouldn’t have known it after the final whistle had gone.

“In those big celebrations, he was just another one of the guys,” says Muniesa, an unused substitute that night in Rome. “When we had the parades through Barcelona, at team meals, nights out. He was a normal guy.”

Another graduate of Barca’s La Masia graduate, playmaker Denis Suarez, played in the same team as Messi 58 times between 2016 and 2019, helping the club win six trophies including two La Liga titles.

“Playing with Leo was a privilege,” Suarez tells The Athletic. “When he was on your team, everything was much easier. In fact, in many games, he decided the result himself. He was so far above everyone else. With Leo at Barca, practically every season, we were sure to win at least one trophy, whether La Liga, a Copa (del Rey), or the Champions League.”

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There is a lot of interest now among Messi’s former team-mates about his move to MLS at the age of 36.

“I believe he would have always wanted to finish his career at Barcelona, but sometimes football takes you in another direction,” Riera says. “Your ambition is maybe different when you are 16 or 17, to when you are 36 or 37 and have already won everything. But at the base of everything, Leo is a winner; when he starts to play, he only understands winning.”

“Leo does condition how the team plays — for good and maybe for bad, but above all for good,” says Muniesa. “When Leo is plugged in, he is the best player, he will always create chances for you. Of course, you cannot ask him to do everything on a defensive level, because he won’t do it. But in attack, he is just the best — even at 35, 36. He can be walking for the whole game, but when he picks up the ball, different things happen that no other player has the quality to do.”

“It will take MLS to another dimension,” adds Suarez. “In the end, you have the best player in history playing there. He is still the best in the world, he has just won the World Cup. So for MLS, it is an incredible leap.”

If playing with Messi is a privilege, lining up against him is presumably a nightmare. But is there any way you can plan to stop him?

Xabier Etxeita took on Messi’s Barcelona nine times as a defender for Athletic Bilbao between 2014 and 2020, with their most high-profile encounter coming in the 2015 Copa del Rey final.

“I suffered Messi many times, but my memory is the 2015 final at the Camp Nou,” Etxeita tells The Athletic. “It was one of the best Barca teams in history; not just Messi, they had Neymar too… so many great players. We were most worried about Messi, we knew he was the only player who could put us out of shape. So we had decided before the game in a meeting with (coach) Ernesto Valverde that our left-back (Mikel Balenziaga) would man-mark him for the whole game, and we practised all week how to stop him.”

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That plan worked pretty well — for almost 20 minutes. Then Messi dropped deep and wide to receive the ball, right by the benches near the halfway line…

“The game was the same as always — Barcelona controlled the ball, but we were doing very good defensive work,” Etxeita says. “Until Messi picked up the ball, went away from three of our players, (and) with such ease. Our defensive midfielders tried to stop Leo, even trying to foul him, but it was impossible to knock him to the ground. I came over to try and block, thinking he would go for the far post. And I did it well, I had that shot covered. But he had the ability, right at the last second, to decide to shoot at the near post, and hit it so hard.

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“It was a golazo. It left us all with that feeling that we had done everything a football team could do to stop him, but even still we were unable to. There was just nothing more we could have done.”

On This Day in 2015…

Messi did this 😍 pic.twitter.com/bVS6R8GFxj

Sebastian Driussi, now also in MLS with Austin FC, knows that sense of hopelessness.

He played for Argentina’s River Plate as they were beaten 3-0 by Barcelona in the Club World Cup final in the December of the same year, with Messi scoring the opening goal in Yokohama, Japan.

“It was insane,” midfielder Driussi tells The Athletic. “Every move. Every touch. His control was incredible. That’s why he is who he is. That Barcelona team had Iniesta, Busquets, Neymar, Luis Suarez. We played against one of the best Barcelona teams ever. It was amazing.”

The good news for Driussi is that Austin FC and Inter Miami only play each other once in the 2023 season, and that match happened on July 1.

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Former Real Sociedad midfielder David Zurutuza, 37, played 14 times against Messi over his career — during a period when many of the world’s best players were in La Liga, including Real Madrid galactico Cristiano Ronaldo.

“I’ve played against lots of great players, but Messi has something unique,” Zurutuza says. “Not to say he was better — Cristiano was much more physical, more spectacular physically. Messi was much more pure talent. He could accelerate so quickly, but it was his intelligence. He could see things before anyone else.

“When you are down on the pitch with him, you realise how quickly he does things — it is spectacular. You can’t get that from the TV. It is brutal. As a player, you know how difficult it is to do what he does. And when you are watching it up close, it impacts even more on you, the speed of what he does.”

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During that time Messi scored multiple goals in many wins over La Real, who lost 5-0, 5-1, 4-1, 4-0 and 3-2 at the Camp Nou between 2010 and 2017. Zurutuza says the Argentinian has a particular ability to diagnose the weak spot in an opponent’s defence.

“Leo really liked a zone of the pitch where he could pick up a diagonal pass — in the triangle between the left-back, the left centre-back and the holding midfielder,” Zurutuza says. “He has this capacity to not focus too much on where the ball is, or what is going on with the play, but look for the best positions to do damage. That was one reason he was so good, that natural ability he had to find the space, the intelligence on the pitch, observing what was happening, and knowing where the rival’s weaknesses were.”

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Nevertheless, La Real had one of the best records of any team against that Barcelona side, including a run of seven home league games from 2010-11 to 2016-17 where Zurutuza and company won five and drew two.

“We had a pretty good record against Barca at that time,” he says. “We beat them when we were fighting against relegation. We were able to make it very difficult for them, especially in our stadium. 

“The way to do that was to keep the ball away from them. These teams who are used to winning, losing is not supposed to happen to them. There were some games with a lot of tension. Sometimes you would exchange words and that. Messi was not a player who talked much. So you did not really get into arguments with him. Just about whether you had fouled him or not (laughs).”

Former United States defender Jay Demerit faced Messi twice — a 4-1 win for Argentina at the 2007 Copa America in Venezuela and an international friendly in New Jersey almost four years later that finished 1-1.

“Elusiveness is actually quite a rare trait, that even the best defenders in the world can’t touch you,” Demerit says. “And that’s what I remember about him. We all try to get to him, to close the space, to use the guys around us, to help each other. But at the end of the day, he still seems to find that space, to be that one step ahead.

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“He leaves you confused. He leaves you in a place where (you are thinking), ‘Where did he go? And how did I get there? Where did he come from?’. With the ability to move without the ball. You’re in the presence of greatness. So it raises all of our games. You’re on the field with Wayne Gretzky and LeBron James.”

Jamaica defender Adrian Mariappa has played against Messi twice — the first at the 2015 Copa America in Chile. An Argentina side coached by Gerardo Martino (now reunited with Messi at Inter Miami) won with the only goal, scored by Gonzalo Higuain after a Messi run had cut open the Jamaican defence.

“You want to do well against him,” Mariappa tells The Athletic. “You want to be the person to stop Messi as well, to get tackles on him, but in the end, he only needs a moment. We all enjoyed the challenge to play against such players.”

Mariappa’s other meeting with Messi was a friendly in the U.S. ahead to last year’s World Cup, with the then 35-year-old entering the action as a second-half substitute with Argentina 1-0 ahead, and scoring twice in four minutes late on to ensure a comfortable victory.

“He came on after about 60 minutes,” Mariappa says, “and instantly the feel of the game is different. You could see the lift it gave the Argentina team.

“I remember him standing offside when he just came on, I could feel him just looking around and then he was looking at me — for when I turn my head, take my attention away. That’s when he’s making little movements and breaks. You don’t want to let him get into his rhythm because he will run past everyone.

“We managed to get a few tackles on him. I came up against him a few times. Towards the end of the game, he was running at the back four, getting towards me and he just chopped the other way. The only thing I could do was bring him down and I thought, ‘Well, at least he hasn’t gone past me and through to the keeper’. He scored from the free kick anyway.”

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Glasgow Rangers defender Leon Balogun played for Nigeria against Argentina at the 2018 World Cup — a 2-1 win for the South Americans, with Messi opening the scoring with a technically brilliant strike.

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“He scored an amazing goal,” Balogun says. “He took it down with his left thigh, and it was pretty much one move — left thigh, onto his right foot, bang, goal. Just a moment of brilliance. Other than that, he actually did not cause too much trouble. I would say we kept him at bay very, very well.”

Los Angeles FC forward Carlos Vela has faced Messi 18 times across his career so far — for Mexico and with La Liga sides Osasuna and Real Sociedad. Vela’s teams won four and drew four of those games, a decent record considering what they were up against.

“He’s at another level,” Vela tells The Athletic. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that there are tactics to stop him. The reality is that if Messi has a good day, it’s going to be very difficult. But in football, the best team wins. Not the best player. The key is to prevent the best player on the field from beating you. Together as a team, he can be beaten.

“That’s the only way to defeat Messi. Every player has to play well.”

Miami visit LAFC on September 3 for a potential 19th encounter between the pair.

One player who ended up relieved not to share a pitch with Messi is four-time MLS All-Star and Portland Timbers legend Diego Valeri, who was an unused substitute for Almeria the day in November 2010 when Barcelona came to town and beat them 8-0. Messi scored three of them, and assisted two more for Bojan Krkic.

“It was impossible to contain him,” Messi’s now-retired countryman tells The Athletic. “His first goal was incredible. The defender tried to anticipate Leo’s movement and Leo scored with a strong strike to the bottom corner.

“We were losing 7-0 and the coach Juanma Lillo (who was sacked by Almeria after the match) looked at us on the bench and said, ‘Guys, relax. I’m not going to put you on the field. You won’t have to take this beating’.”

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Additional reporting: Adam Leventhal, Felipe Cardenas, Jay Harris

(Top photo: Getty Images)

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