Lionel Messi and the Art of Walking

This weekend a 38-year-old man who barely runs, became the most prolific scorer in the history of the FIFA World Cup. 

Lionel Messi opened Argentina’s campaign last week with a hat-trick against Algeria, drawing level with Miroslav Klose’s all-time record of 16. Six days later, against Austria in Dallas, he missed a penalty in the fifth minute. He then quietly corrected the record himself - a first-time finish in the thirty-eighth minute, and a scrambling injury-time poke from six yards that nobody in an Austrian shirt could clear in time. 18 World Cup goals. Nobody, man or woman, has more. Argentina are through to the knockouts with a game still to spare.

The interesting story isn’t the goals. It’s how little he ran to get them

For two decades, data analysts have tracked Messi’s most peculiar habit. He walks. A lot. In a 2017 El Clásico, tracking data showed him walking for over 80% of the match and sprinting for barely 1% of it, and he still produced a goal and an assist. At the last World Cup, he ranked among the tournament’s least mobile outfield players by distance covered. Commentators called it conservation. Fans called it laziness. For years, the assumption was that Messi was managing a deficit, saving fuel in the tank for the moments that mattered.

That assumption was half right and half lazy, as unfounded assumptions usually are.

The deficit is real. Messi was diagnosed with a growth hormone disorder at ten. He was so small for his age that Barcelona effectively bet his career on a treatment plan, paying for the injections that helped him grow. Away from the health issue, he has also admitted, without much ceremony, that running without the ball “was never my thing”. Even as a boy, he’d hide behind a tree to dodge training laps. So yes, there’s the smaller frame, a body that never had energy to burn carelessly, and a mind that automatically triggered the defense mechanism of hiding behind trees.

But Messi’s walking isn’t just fatigue management. He has said as much. When he walks, he’s also reading the opponents’ defensive shape, working out where the gap will open before it opens. So the walking is not him surviving the game, it’s him watching it. The sprint, when it comes, isn’t compensation for thirty seconds of rest. It’s the output of thirty seconds of calculation.

Messi’s first goal against Austria was almost a diagram of the idea. Thiago Almada let the ball run untouched through his own legs rather than control it. This is a decision that only makes sense if you’ve already clocked, the way Messi had, that the run behind him was about to leave the goal empty. Messi didn’t have to outsprint anyone to arrive there. He’d already worked out, well before the ball did, exactly where “there” was going to be.

This is a story not about overcoming a weakness, but one that teaches us how to convert a constraint into a method, then drill the method until it becomes a ritual indistinguishable from instinct. It is purely about finding ways to reach peak high performance.

Cricket has its own version, and a more dramatic one

B.S. Chandrasekhar (fondly called ‘Chandra’ by generations of fans), part of India’s great spin quartet of the 1970s, had his right arm withered by polio at the age of six. He took 242 Test wickets with that arm. For decades he held the record for taking more wickets in Test cricket than the runs he ever scored in the format. Chandra turned his deformity into an instrument of success. The thinness of the arm gave it a strange, whip-like flexibility.

The pace of his deliveries, with ability to turn the ball in either direction at that speed, once prompted the great Sir Viv Richards to quip to Syed Kirmani behind the stumps: “Is he a spinner or is he Thommo (the feared Aussie pace bowler)?” 

“I could not flight the ball even if I wanted to,” the amiable and incredibly humble Chandra once told me, sounding apologetic that he wasn’t a ‘normal’ spinner. 

Neither Messi nor Chandra are ‘normal’ in that neither man hid their constraint. Neither pretended it away or “overcame” it in the inspirational-poster sense. Each built an entire method on top of it, until the constraint became the method’s signature.

It is the opposite of how most organisations handle limitations

The instinct in business, when a leader or a team discovers a real constraint - a thin balance sheet, no sales force, a founder who can’t do small talk to save his life, is to manage it quietly, then apologise for it loudly. To hire around it. To train it away. To talk about it only in the past tense, as something “we used to struggle with.” The constraint gets treated as a confession rather than a design parameter.

Messi and Chandrasekhar suggest a different pathway. Name the constraint precisely. Build a deliberate, repeatable routine around it. There are no short cuts in life, so it cannot be a one-off hack, but something rehearsed until it looks effortless. And then stop apologising for the routine, because the routine is now the edge, not the deficit.

A founder with no sales instinct who builds an obsessively documented, almost mechanical content and inbound process isn’t “overcoming” a weakness in charisma. He’s doing what Messi does when he walks - trading a costly, depletable resource for a cheaper, durable one. He is doing it on purpose, every time. A small team that can’t afford to chase every opportunity and instead builds a near-religious discipline around saying no - that’s Chandra’s withered arm. The discipline of the refusal becomes the indistinguishable leg break and googly, the thing ‘normal’ competitors with more resources can’t quite replicate, because they’ve never had to.

“Turn your weakness into a strength,” is a leadership cliche, and like most cliches it’s been worn so smooth that it means nothing. What Messi and Chandrasekhar offer is the unsentimental version. A constraint doesn’t disappear and doesn’t need to be loved. It needs to be studied closely enough that a routine can be built on its exact shape and then practised until the routine looks, to everyone watching, like genius.

Messi is playing, by his own admission, his last World Cup this summer. He will probably keep walking through most of it. Next time you see him at the edge of your television screen, watch him read the field with his unblinking eyes. Then take a deep breath and join him in the exhilarating sprint as the calculations throw up a pathway to the goal.