At this point in his illustrious career, seeing Lionel Messi making international headlines is a rather routine affair. The four time Ballon d’Or winner is widely regarded as the world’s best soccer player, helping his team to lift three trophies last season; La Liga, the Copa Del Rey, and perhaps most coveted of all, the Champions League crown. But the headlines he grabbed this week were, for the Argentine superstar, unusual: “Lionel Messi head butts and grabs throat of Yanga-Mbiwa.” Yes, this is the same Lio Messi, and no, the headlines are not mere hyperbole: Messi really did throw a head butt, and then grab the throat of Roma’s Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa.
To be widely considered the very best in any walk of life is to live under constant pressure and scrutiny, but especially so in sports. Just ask Michael Jordan, Roger Federer, or, perhaps the greatest cautionary tale among them, ask Tiger Woods: being unanimously billed as ‘the best’ at what you compete in has certain demands, expectations that weigh on a man and sometimes, break him.
And to be the best in soccer, the best in world football, is to be asked for excellence twice over—not just for club, but also for country. Since 2004, for FC Barcelona, Messi has been the talismanic centerpiece for arguably the best decade of the club’s 115 year history, having hauled in seven La Liga titles, three Copa Del Reys, and four Champions League crowns. Fourteen trophies in ten years is absolutely astounding (if you count more ‘minor’ honors like the European Super Cup and the Club World Cup, it’s actually twenty), and while Barcelona still have a strong team without him, Messi has been the man at its heart.
But for Argentina, things have not gone so well. Or, the harshest critics might say, they haven’t gone well at all. In the same amount of time that he won more than a dozen major competitions with Barcelona, Lionel Messi has yet to lift a trophy with his national team. As the years have gone by, elation about Messi being, perhaps, ‘the next Maradona’ has begun to sour, and the diminutive superstar’s critics have grown both bolder and more numerous. All that pressure has come to a head in the past 14 months, as Argentina reached the final of both the 2014 World Cup, and the 2015 Copa America, losing the first to Germany on a Mario Götze goal in extra time, and then losing the second to Chile on penalties. Never mind that Messi was the only Argentine to score his penalty kick in that final, and disregard the fact that, for many nations, simply making it to a major international final in consecutive years would be an accomplishment. This is Argentina, and, for an increasing number of angry critics, if you’re the best footballer in the world, anything less than a trophy is failure.
With Messi’s outburst against Roma, one might wonder if all that pressure, all that criticism, has finally pushed Messi past the breaking point. And while few predicted that break would come in the form of a head butt and a chokehold, rumors have abounded that Messi might break with Argentina, retiring early from the national team amid the virulence and omnipresence of critique. Discussion of his retirement from Argentina may have been spurred on by the media, but it’s not without credence.
Recently, the head coach of the Argentine national team Gerardo Martino went on the record saying that he himself could not withstand the barrage of vitriol from his countrymen which Messi has endured. “If I were in Messi’s place I would have stopped playing with the national team a long time ago,” the Argentina manager said. Martino refused to address specific criticism’s of his team captain, claiming that “To speak about the criticism of Messi is to give strength to something that does not deserve any type of analysis.”
If the critiques themselves are not worthy of analysis, Messi’s reaction to them certainly is. For a player who is as famously gracious and mild-mannered on the pitch as Lionel Messi, his violent reaction against Yanga-Mbiwa sticks out as especially remarkable. To be fair, Messi was not unprovoked, as Yanga-Mbiwa had earlier thrown him a strong and probably needless shoulder-to-shoulder challenge. However, getting bullied by defensive midfielders is commonplace for the short-but-deadly goalscorer—headbutting players afterward is not. When the players were separated, Messi escaped getting a red card; perhaps the referee didn’t get a good look at the whole altercation, maybe he didn’t want to send off the world’s best player from a friendly exhibition match, or perhaps he simply couldn’t believe his own eyes.
Regardless of the fact that fans of both teams wanted to see him play, Messi should have absolutely been sent off against Roma. It may not be the best thing about the NBA, but it’s one thing to let a foul or two slide on LeBron James to keep the sport’s biggest superstar out on the court; it’s another to excuse violence. Messi should have been sent off, and should be getting more chastisement from his team than he’s received, as Barcelona VP Jordi Mestre was quick to dismiss the altercation as “normal,” merely “what happens in football games.” But beyond the friendly itself, the question is, will we continue to see this from Messi? Has all of the venom he’s faced from the Argentine press pushed him to a point where he must quit international football?
The human psyche is drawn to dichotomy. This is perhaps one reason why we love sports so much: us vs. them, Red Sox vs. Yankees, good guys vs. bad guys. In those camps, Lionel Messi is a player who is much beloved, respected, and admired, and is hardly ever—excluding Real Madrid supporters—vilified as a ‘bad guy’ in the world of international football. But at the end of the day, despite all of the hype about being supernaturally talented—even Tim Howard has called Messi’s skill “breathtaking” and seemingly “impossible—Lionel Messi is just a man. And all men are flawed.
Messi was not an imperturbable demigod before the friendly against Roma, and he is not a brilliantly talented super villain after. But what he may very well be, is this: a man, a human being, on the brink of a breakdown. I wonder who among us, if asked to live even one day ducking paparazzi, reading about how we’ve thrown our heritage and our countrymen in the mud, and being analyzed within an inch of our lives at work, could go home feeling comfortable, fully at peace. I know I couldn’t. Whether or not Messi must retire from international competitions is a decision he must make for himself. Selfishly, as a fan of ‘the beautiful game,’ and a believer that few in my generation can make it so beautiful as Lionel Messi, I would hate to see him step off the international stage. But as a man who is mortal, who feels the sting of slings and arrows as much as any, I must agree with Gerardo Martino: were I in Messi’s shoes, I, too, would be at my wit’s end.