The End of Lionel Messi?

It's almost Thanksgiving, and the GOAT has zero assists and just a single non-penalty goal.

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When you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go. And what makes Lionel Messi, well, Lionel Messi is just how long he stayed still. Sure, you can maybe make a case for one or two Cristiano Ronaldo seasons being better than a Messi season, but forget what the Ballon d’Or results have said. Since 2010, Messi has been the best player in the world, every single season.

In the ten years since the World Cup in South Africa, Messi’s average La Liga season saw him score 0.96 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes and also add in 0.46 assists. In other words, he scored or assisted a non-penalty goal 1.42 times for every full match he played. If you watched any two random Barcelona games over the past decade, chances are you saw Messi create or score a goal three separate times. Put another way, over that same stretch of soccer history across Europe’s Big Five leagues, there were only six individual seasons that matched Messi’s average campaign of 1.42 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes, and none of the guys did it more than once. There’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic for PSG in 2015-16, Ronaldo for Real Madrid in 14-15, Gonzalo Higuain for Madrid in 11-12, Luis Suarez for Barcelona in 15-16, Gareth Bale for Madrid in 15-16, and Kylian Mbappe for PSG in 18-19.

In fact, there are only four other players who have averaged even north of 1.00 NPG+A/90 since 2010: Mbappe (1.24), Ronaldo (1.13), Jadon Sancho (1.06), and Luis Suarez (1.06). Two of those four are well on their way to superstardom -- if they’re not there already -- but they only have a handful of seasons on the board, and a third certainly benefited from playing with Messi for half a decade. 

The fourth is, of course, Ronaldo, Messi’s supposed rival and theoretical equal. Now, guess how many times since 2010 Messi has dipped below Ronaldo’s average season of 1.13 NPG+A/90 over the same stretch? Not once. His worst year was 13-14 with 1.16 NPG+A/90; otherwise he never dropped below 1.27. There are thousands -- hundreds of thousands? millions? -- of people who think Cristiano Ronaldo is the greatest soccer player to ever live, and yet, Messi’s worst season was better than the typical (and fantastic) Ronaldo campaign.

For 10 years, it’s been Messi, and then it’s been everyone else -- even as things like the passage of time and the standard decay of the human body seemed to suggest otherwise. In his first two full seasons after turning 30: Messi scored 32 non-penalty goals with 12 assists and 32 non-penalty goals with 13 assists. He only -- only -- scored 20 non-penalty goals last season but picked up his own slack with a career-best 21 assists.

It couldn’t last forever, but for a few years it really seemed like it might.

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Twenty-twenty: the year to end all years. The latest, loudest numerical shorthand-explanation for anything bad that happens, big, small, debatable, irrelevant or otherwise. 2020, right? No one stands a chance in the face of 2020’s sheer twenty-twenty-ness -- apparently, not even Lionel Messi.

Now, he’s not done playing at a high level, not even close, really. He still very well might be better than everyone else. But through seven games this season, Messi hasn’t been the best, and he hasn’t even been great. No, Messi is something Messi has never been before: just ... pretty good.

And even that’s debatable. You’ve already read all about how Messi is the most efficient goal-scorer and goal-creator of the modern era by something like a full standard deviation, yet he's barely done that at all this year. Through those seven matches, Messi has scored three goals and assisted none -- and two of those goals came from penalties. So, it’s mid-November and Lionel Messi has just a solitary non-penalty goal-involvement to his name thus far in La Liga. His most recent birthday was at the end of June; nobody likes you when you’re 33.

Goals and assists are noisy, and there’s plenty rattling around behind that paltry 0.15 NPG+A/90 figure that Messi has produced thus far. Per FBRef, he’s taken non-penalty shots worth exactly 3.0 expected goals and he’s created chances with 1.9 expected assists. That’s basically four goals worth of value not being captured, but it still only -- once again: only -- comes out to 0.76 non-penalty xG+xA per 90 minutes. He’s pretty much lived above or right on the edge of the 1.00 mark for his entire career. That current average ranks third in La Liga -- behind Luis Suarez and Real Sociedad’s Willian Jose -- but just 34th in the Big Five leagues, between Gianluca Lapadula and Bas Dost, a pair of 30-something journeymen who have now been mentioned in this same sentence as Lionel Messi for the first time in their respective lives.

Now, one of the things that made Messi a guy who could unironically pose for a magazine cover while holding a baby goat as if it were a loaf of sourdough bread is that 1) he got on the end of and created better chances than just about anyone else in the world, and 2) he finished those chances more often than everyone else. Expected goals: great descriptive and prescriptive stat for 99.9 percent of the elite soccer-playing public! Expected goals: almost useless when applied to Lionel Messi!

This season, Messi is both getting fewer chances than he used to -- shots are down, too -- and not converting them like he used to. In domestic play since 2008, Messi has scored 108.58 goals more than his expected total. The next biggest gap: cruelly, given a number of high-profile misses when he and Messi wore the same striped shirt, Gonzalo Higuain, with 58.11. In terms of converting raw chances into raw goals, there’s no one in the same universe as Messi. He’s especially deadly when it comes to the lowest-probability chances, too. This chart, via Stats Perform, buckets all of Messi’s shots by different xG values, with the misses blocked in blue and the makes blocked in red. (Miss a 0.05 xG chance and you get docked by 0.05, score it and you get awarded 0.95.) The number of goals he’s scored from less-than-10-percent chances over his career is absurd.

He has Stephen Curry shooting -- with the rest of LeBron’s game. Despite the physical differences, I always come back to LeBron when I think about Messi. On the offensive end, there might not be two other players in the history of both sports who were able to simultaneously dominate every single phase of the game. Since 2008, Messi has created 167 assists -- 41 more than second-best. He has completed 331 through balls -- 126 more than second-best. He has beaten 1824 players off the dribble -- 580 more than second-best. He’s completed 9,839 passes into the attacking-third -- 1,477 more than second-best. He’s completed 1,861 passes into the penalty area -- 440 more than second-best. And he’s taken 2,996 touches in the box -- 97 more than second-best. He’s the best scorer, creator, line-breaker, dribbler, facilitator, and outlet -- all at the same time.

This year, Messi is averaging more touches per game than his career average; same goes for passes into the final-third, and touches in the penalty area. But just a year after a career-high in assists, the more creative part of his game has fallen off. He’s creating two chances per game, his lowest since 2012-13, and he’s completing four passes into the penalty area, his lowest since 09-10. Although he should have more assists than he has, he’s averaging just 0.17 assists per 90, which would be a career low. But even starker than that: He hasn’t completed a single through ball so far this season. Take a look at his attempted through balls, via Stats Perform:

And now look at all of his through balls from last year:

The big difference: He’s playing the passes from much further away from the goal this season. Although he’s still getting on the ball a ton in the box, Messi’s spending more of the game in less dangerous areas than he ever has. He’s playing more than 11 passes per game in his own half; the first time he’s been in double digits since 2010-11. He’s below his career average of passes in the final third. And he’s also currently crossing the ball 4.31 times per match, which is more than double his career average. Given the general inefficiency of crossing the ball and what it means for the guy crossing it -- i.e. he’s by definition not near the goal -- you just don’t want him crossing the ball this much. It’s not the point of Lionel Messi.

Of course, he can still break the game from deep. Just ask Juventus:

But while this pass might be the highlight of Messi’s season so far, it’s also an encapsulation of his struggles: his incredible pieces of skill now require a lot more for work from his teammates for the play to turn into a goal. The number of uninterrupted possessions (“sequences”) that he’s involved in which lead to shots and goals are both at career-lows: 8.6 and 0.8 per 90 minutes. His direct influence has waned, and so has any hidden influence, too. There’s nothing obvious about it, either. He looks the same, still has the same impeccable, alien close-control, and is still constantly involved in play. He’s just farther away from goal than normal, the passes don’t come off quite as much, and the possessions peter out more often than they used to.

Barcelona’s worst-case scenario for Messi’s decline is what this season’s looked like so far: he still needs and gets the ball as much as he used to, but it just doesn’t turn into anything. Per 90 minutes, there have been 6.7 sequences that have involved only Messi-- meaning he got the ball and then lost the ball or shot the ball. His career average of solo-sequences is just 4.2. Perhaps that’s Ronald Koeman’s new tactics, which tend to move Messi more centrally. Maybe it’s due to the departure of attacking-third focal point Luis Suarez. It could be aging. It could be the short offseason and quick succession of games. It could just be a random stretch of sub-superstar play. And it could be a combination of all of the above. 

But Messi is supposed to be the constant -- all the other stuff flapped in the wind, swirled in circles, and changed around him. No matter who the other 21 players on the field were, there was Messi, scoring goals no one else could, stuttering opposition defenders into confusion, fluttering through balls over the backline, somehow progressing passes up the field and getting on the ball in the penalty area -- possession after possession after possession. I’m not confident that it’s over yet, but I’m sure we’re never gonna see anything like it ever again.