🚨 Lionel Scaloni on Lionel Messi’s farewell performance: “I have a theory about passes from Leo. They are not normal passes. A normal pass gives you the ball. Leo gives you the ball and somehow also gives you an idea. I noticed this years ago in training. A player would receive the ball from someone else, control it, look around and decide what to do. Then Leo would pass to the same player and suddenly he was playing one-touch football. I once stopped training. ‘Why did you do that?’ The player looked confused. ‘Do what?’ ‘Leo passed to you and suddenly you became a better footballer.’ Everyone laughed. Leo said, ‘Maybe my pass was better.’ I looked at him. ‘This is exactly the arrogance I’m investigating.’ He smiled. But there is something strange about it. Leo gives you a pass and you feel obligated to complete the move properly. You think, ‘Lionel Messi has just found me. I cannot embarrass this pass.’ Today was supposed to be his farewell. Emotional day. Tributes. The stadium stopping in the tenth minute. And Leo apparently decided his final responsibility was improving everybody around him one last time. We get a corner. Leo takes it. Otamendi scores. I just looked towards the bench. Of course. Even his corners have this annoying habit of becoming somebody else’s goal. Then Nico Paz comes on. Before he went on, I told him, ‘Enjoy this. You may never play another Argentina match with Leo, so remember everything.’ Nico nodded. A few minutes later Leo gives him the ball outside the area. Nico could recycle possession. Apparently receiving the ball from Messi makes young players forget sensible options exist. He shoots. Beautiful goal. I turned to my staff. ‘You see?’ ‘See what?’ ‘The disease.’ ‘What disease?’ ‘Messi passed to him and now Nico thinks he can score from anywhere.’ Then I saw Nico celebrating and Leo pointing and walking towards him smiling. I thought, ‘This poor boy is finished.’ Because now every time Nico receives the ball there, he’ll remember that one time Messi gave it to him and everything worked. That is the problem with Leo. He doesn’t only make difficult things look easy himself. He convinces the player beside him that difficult things are easy too. You can spend all week coaching movements. Then Leo gets the ball and the tactical instruction becomes very simple. ‘Everybody be ready.’ Because something is probably about to happen. I remember once telling him, ‘Do you realise how many assists you get because somebody produces an incredible finish?’ He said, ‘Then maybe I choose good people to pass to.’ ‘No. I think you hypnotise them.’ He laughed. Today didn’t help his defence. Otamendi scores from his delivery. Nico receives his pass and hits one from outside the box. Then Leo decides assisting everybody else is becoming repetitive, so he scores himself. Two assists and a goal in his farewell. That is such a Messi way to leave. Even on the day football is supposed to celebrate him, he spends half the match making everybody around him look good. Maybe that is the part Argentina will miss that statistics cannot explain. We can find goals. We can find assists. But I don’t know where you find another player who gives a teammate the ball and somehow makes him feel ten times better for the next five seconds. After Nico scored, I told one of my assistants, ‘We have a serious problem.’ ‘What?’ I pointed at Leo. ‘Soon these boys are going to have to do all this without him.’ He laughed. I didn’t. Because that might be the hardest part of replacing Lionel Messi. It isn’t finding somebody who knows what to do when he gets the ball. It’s finding somebody who makes everyone else know what to do when they get it.”