Leo Messi Is a Human Being

Calling any superior athlete human scans as a joke. "Well, he's human," your constantly guffawing uncle might have said watching Tiger Woods overhit a gimme in his prime, but it is truly disarming when our best runners and jumpers and bat-swingers do something recognizably person-like. Because almost all of the time, they are strange and distant figures, legible only through commercials, contrived interviews, and spectacular on-field exploits that lead us to believe they may be of a different species. Our readings of them are based on insufficient evidence, but they are all we have. Roger Federer is disconcertingly serene. Kobe Bryant is a friendless freak. Manny Ramirez is so aloof and inscrutable his teammates invented a meaning-rich/meaningless catchphrase just so they didn't have to explain him to reporters. Cristiano Ronaldo is a horny 12-year-old boy's idea of a cool, handsome soccer player. Peyton Manning is a computer with just enough of a sense of humor to make you think it's not one.

Leo Messi is a good boy. Even Sepp Blatter saying so doesn't make it seem any less true. Messi, as he has left nearly every defense he's played against looking like a tornado-aftermath neighborhood, has carried himself with a calm blankness that most observers take to be a lack of ego, or even a saintliness. He doesn't appear to crave fame in any way. He has given zero interesting interviews and has never boiled over on the pitch for more than a moment. A Youtube compilation entitled "Lionel Messi - Craziest Moments & Fights" peaks with Leo getting into a five-second shoving match with Sergio Ramos, which, for anyone who plays Real Madrid upwards of twice a year, is akin to attending a Catholic mass and going home with a bit of wine and stale bread in your stomach. I couldn't describe his voice for you off the top of my head, which isn't a yo no hablo español thing, because I know Xavi sounds like a crackling fireplace without having to look him up. It is simply that nothing Leo has ever said has left an impression on me. The greatest soccer scribe of our time wrote an appreciation of Messi upon the 10th anniversary of his Barcelona debut, and the closest thing it had to a thesis statement was he seems to just really, really, really enjoy kicking a ball around. Sports-thinkers are free to direct the full force of their mental wattage at Messi, but he doesn't give anything away. He gleams, and doesn't do much else.

Perhaps this is why rumors of Leo's discontent are so loud and persistent. Let's not play dumb here: the scuttlebutt's amplitude is owed mostly to the prospect of the best player in the world moving to a new club in the near future, but it's also because Messi is finally (allegedly) a bit unhappy at Barcelona, after a decade of to-all-appearances utter contentment. He seems not to get along with manager Luis Enrique, the club is in mild decline, and Barҫa's international sporting director recently admitted that, if Paris Saint-Germain or Manchester City were to summon the funds to meet Messi's 285 million release clause, there's a real possibility the Argentine could leave what has been his home since age 13.

The sensible response to this is a dismissive whatever, we'll see. Messi probably isn't going anywhere. It's that he's even considering a switch that's intriguing, because it demonstrates that he can be difficult and fussy and come home from work complaining about his job. This is an unremarkable revelation in a vacuum. Of course he gets upset; of course he thinks about taking on a new challenge from time-to-time. But—perhaps it's the blinding effect of his brilliance, or his off-the-pitch soft-spokenness causing us to unconsciously conceive of him as a soccer-playing creature and nothing else—this realization that Messi is normal in some respects feels revelatory. He figured out how to move through defenses like a tap-dancer through a minefield; it follows (dubiously) logically that he might have figured some other, deeper, how-to-live stuff out, too.

This sounds stupid when you say it aloud, or when there are stories in the papers about his professional restlessness, but only then. The superior athlete's magnificence is hypnotic; it can make us believe otherwise obviously silly things. The Messi transfer rumors are about the novelty of him playing for PSG in some imagined future, but they are also about our newly upset expectations of what he is and how he acts when there's not a ball at his feet. He is human after all. This is something we knew, on some level or another, but we are coming to know it all over again.