Messi is scoreless in Copa América: Is he still the best, or has MLS made him worse? (2024)

It's been a weird year for me, or anyone else who covers European soccer for a living.

Over the past 15 years, we had one constant: Lionel Messi being better than everyone else. In the meantime, we've seen various teams and players rise and fall.

Manchester City weren't anything and now they're everything. Real Madrid couldn't win the Champions League and now they can't stop winning the Champions League. Liverpool were coached by Roy Hodgson and then they were coached by Jurgen Klopp. Juventus were relegated, promoted and dominated Serie A for a decade and now they can barely get back into the Champions League. Xavi played with Messi, then he coached Messi's former team and got fired by Messi's former team. Oh, and here's a sentence you would not have believed two years ago: Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema all play professional soccer in Saudi Arabia.

Amidst it all, though, there was the dependability of Messi's excellence. You'd watch Manchester City and Liverpool play, then you'd look up and see that Messi had just attempted 12 shots and created eight chances in a 90-minute soccer game where Barcelona had 20 total attempts on goal. Hmm, that Bayern-Dortmund game was fun -- oh wait, Messi is converting his free kicks like they're penalty shots? Wow, the Madrid derby was intense! And there's Messi, completing 20 passes into the penalty area without breaking a sweat.

Over a 15-year stretch, Messi led Europe in combined goals and assists in eight seasons, finished top two in 10 and top five in 14. He was the best, year after year after year.

Until this year: 2023-24 was the first season since 2004-05 when Messi didn't play at least 900 minutes in one of Europe's five top leagues. Ahead of each European season, there were lots of questions without answers, except one: "How good is Lionel Messi?"

Now, though, we don't actually know. Messi is dominating MLS with Inter Miami, but the league is far from what he used to face in Europe, and he's 37 years old. It's been a year since we've seen him play against the best players in the world and -- unlike in the past when he was with Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain -- the Copa América is actually a step up in difficulty from what he's facing week in and week out.

Now that Argentina are two matches into the tournament and Messi has yet to score, what can his performances tell us about the question we've never had to answer before: How good is Messi? Is he still the best? And has playing in MLS made him worse?

How Messi's game has changed in Miami

Before digging into Messi's matches with Argentina, let's take a look at what he's done in MLS.

At the top level of things, he's scored 11 non-penalty goals and generated 10 assists in a little over 1,000 minutes. The best season of Messi's career was 2012-13, when at age 25 he scored 42 non-penalty goals and added 11 assists in just over 2,500 minutes for Barcelona. With Miami, he's actually been more productive on a per-minute basis this season. That season with Barcelona is easily the most productive attacking season in modern soccer history -- 1.8 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes -- and, with Miami, Messi is currently up at 1.83 non-penalty goals+assists per 90. Add in his one penalty goal, and he's up to 1.91.

Here are all of the chances he's created from open play in 2024:

Of course, the way he's getting those goals and assists is quite different than it used to be -- in part because Messi is 12 years older and Inter Miami doesn't have the kind of talent advantage that Barcelona had against their average LaLiga opponent.

Compared to that peak year, Messi is dribbling much less often. If you've watched him play, you know he can still break players down with the ball at his feet -- just ask Josko Gvardiol about that -- but he used to be an absolute terror when running at defenders.

In 2013, it was a bunch of high-speed staccato steps that defenders could never quite get a handle on. They'd dive in or slow down at the wrong moment, and boom, Messi's gone. Now, it's much more subtle. He beats defenders by standing still, luring them toward the ball and turning the other way. Overall, he's completing 3.4 dribbles per 90 minutes in MLS this year compared to 4.2 for Barcelona in 2012-13.

He's also taking fewer touches overall: 74.8 per 90 compared to 83.9 in 2012-13. That applies to touches inside the box, too: 5.7 this season, compared to 7.1 in 2012-13. He's completing roughly the same number of passes into the penalty area that he always has: 4.7 this season, which is up from the 4.1 from 2012-13, but slightly down from his career average (dating to 2010) of 5.0.

The other major shift is just how much deeper he's dropping in possession. This has been a running theme of his career, and it's what's allowed him to maintain such an incredible influence on winning as he has gotten older.

With Barcelona's all-time-great midfield of Xavi, Sergio Busquets and Andres Iniesta, Messi was able to mostly stay high and do damage around the penalty area. As those guys got older or retired, Messi started to become Barcelona's main method of progressing the ball up the field -- and yet he still maintained his best-in-the-world goal scoring and goal creation, if at a slightly reduced clip. His move to PSG and his partnership with Kylian Mbappé expedited this process, and that general shape of influence has maintained in MLS.

To put a number on it: Messi played 7.4 passes into the attacking third in 2012-13. Despite taking fewer touches and playing for a team with a lot less possession in Miami, he's now playing 10 passes into the final third per 90 minutes. There are nine players in MLS playing more passes into the attacking third per 90 than Messi. They're averaging 0.39 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 -- nearly five times fewer than the 37-year-old's league-leading rate.

So, how good is Messi today?

For all the strides that MLS has made, it's not surprising that Messi is destroying the competition. That's what he has always done, but MLS' designated-player structure -- where teams essentially can sign a handful of players outside of the salary cap -- has incentivized clubs to create lopsided rosters. The most famous and expensive players in the world are attackers, so there's a mismatch of attacking and defensive talent in the league. The level of defensive quality does not match with MLS's overall spending power.

In other words, if you were going to design a competitive professional league that you wanted Messi to dominate from scratch, you'd probably land on something pretty close to MLS. Putting any nuance aside: Messi is the defending Ballon d'Or winner, and the consultancy Twenty First Group rates MLS as somewhere around the 30th-best league in the world. Who could've possibly seen this coming?!

Superficially, it seems like Messi's move to MLS has tanked his play with Argentina. Or maybe it's just his aging. Or in reality: likely a combination of both. But whatever explanation you prefer, he's now gone a four games without scoring for Argentina in a competitive match. That's his longest streak since 2019. He's washed, MLS isn't competitive -- hope you enjoyed my TED talk.

While there are probably certain people with anonymous social media accounts using another famous soccer player as their avatar who might earnestly claim the previous paragraph as profound analysis, that's not actually the case. Messi's game has changed since he joined MLS -- in some ways it could be worse, but in other ways it's just different -- and he continues to consistently be the best player on the field for club and country.

Interestingly, Messi's club and country performances have gone in opposite directions: both in terms of results and individual play. Once Messi had to do everything for Barcelona, they stopped winning as often. And once Messi stopped having to do everything for Argentina, they haven't been able to stop winning.

There have been three international tournaments where Messi averaged fewer than 70 touches per 90 minutes for Argentina: the 2014 World Cup, the 2021 Copa América and the 2022 World Cup. What do those three tournaments have in common? Argentina made the final in all of them and won the past two.

So far in 2024, that same trend has held true: Messi is averaging just 66 touches per 90 minutes, while Argentina are undefeated and held opponents scoreless. Although it took a while to find the net against Canada and Chile, they've been dominant, creating 5.7 expected goals and conceding 1.3. This team is at their best when Messi doesn't have to drop too deep to get the ball and instead concentrates the majority of his touches in the attacking third.

But what about Messi's actual performance? He's looked sloppy at times. There have been multiple open field opportunities that seem like they would've been goals in the past but a bad touch or slow decision has turned into a save from a goalkeeper or a block from a defender. And he's lost the ball around the box a few times in situations where we're used to seeing him effortlessly execute the ideal decision from a collection of near infinite possibilities.

While maybe some of that is down to the lack of competition he's faced over the past year in MLS, we also can't ignore the poor quality of the fields at some of these stadiums. It's harder to control the ball when you can't trust your footing or how the ball is going to roll.

And despite all of that, Messi's individual production has been absurd over the first two matches. He's completing eight passes into the penalty area per match -- more than double his career rate for Argentina in Copa América and World Cups. And he's creating 1.3 expected assists per game -- more than four times his career rate in those same matches. He only has one assist so far. But in another, nearly identical universe to the one we're currently living in, he has three or four.

Compared to the 2022 World Cup, it hasn't really been all that different except for these two things: Messi hasn't attempted a tackle or intercepted a pass once in Argentina's first two matches, and he's also not carrying the ball anywhere as much.

In Qatar, he completed 12.3 progressive carries per 90 (defined as carries in the attacking third that move the ball at least five meters toward the goal), and that's dropped to 5.5 in the Copa América. But as you get older, you basically have to shave off parts of your game while hanging onto whatever allows you to have the biggest impact. Messi's declining defensive performance, with a drop in ball carrying, makes sense at this point.

Without it, he's averaging more than twice as many passes into the penalty area as he did in Qatar, a full goal's worth extra of expected assists, and he's attempting roughly the same number of shots for almost exactly the same number of expected goals. The bigger the circle, the higher the xG value, or expected goals value, of the attempt:

Now, Chile and Canada haven't provided the stiffest competition: they're 39th and 33rd in the Elo ratings, respectively. But Canada is rated higher than Poland, and they're both rated higher than Saudi Arabia, two of Argentina's three group stage opponents in 2022 (ignoring the part where Saudi Arabia actually beat Argentina in the group stage).

Now, Argentina's final Copa América group stage opponent, Peru, is rated below both Chile and Canada -- although Argentina have already clinched a spot in the quarterfinals so the game doesn't necessary matter. Argentina's most likely quarterfinal opponent, per the odds at ESPN BET, is Venezuela, who are rated near the same level as Argentina's round of 16 opponent in 2022, Australia. After that, it seems likely to be one kind of repeat or another: a second game this tournament against Canada or another match against Mexico, who they beat in the group stage in 2022.

It won't be until the final that Argentina could conceivably play a top-10 team in the world: Colombia (5th in Elo), Brazil (6th), or Uruguay (7th).

The people at Barcelona like to tell the story of how Messi doesn't do anything at the beginning of a match. "In the first few minutes he just walks across the field," a club official once told journalist Simon Kuper. "He is looking at each opponent, where the guy positions himself, and how their defense fits together." Former Barcelona manager Ernesto Valverde said the same thing: that Messi uses the start of the game to figure out what the patterns of the game will be. "Then, as the game advances, he gets in little by little," he once said. "But he knows perfectly where the rivals' weaknesses are."

With Messi edging closer to 40 years old, and now more than a year removed from competing at the highest level of the sport, maybe he's applying this process on a much grander scale. Coming from MLS and not moving like he used to, Messi can take the first few games of the Copa América to figure out what's going on: what it's like to play under this kind of pressure again, how the ball is bouncing on these surfaces, where are opposing defenders positioning themselves against him.

Then, as the tournament advances, he'll know exactly how to apply what he's still able to do in order to hurt his opponents as much as he possibly can. It's not that MLS made Messi worse so much as it means he is needing to recalibrate and work his way into the tournament -- he was still the best player on the field in Argentina's first two games. And while Messi sometimes hasn't looked quite as sharp to start this tournament, he doesn't have to be. As long as he's ready to go on July 14, when Argentina face their toughest opponent, Argentina will remain favorites to lift this trophy for the second time in as many tries.

Messi might not always be what he used to be, but Argentina only need him to summon that level of dominance one more time. If you don't believe he can do that, then I don't know where you've been for the past 15 years.