Goals, Trophies and Loyalty: Inside the World of Lionel Messi

After Argentina beat Brazil 4-1 in a World Cup qualifier in March 2025 without Lionel Messi, Rodrigo De Paul said, “The best of our teams is always when the No. 10 is playing, because he is the greatest of all time.” At the time, Argentina had just played well without their captain; but De Paul’s first instinct was still to bring the conversation back to him.

That tells you something about Messi. The trophies are well known: the Copa Americas, the World Cup, the eight Ballon d'Or awards, the Champions Leagues, the La Liga titles. What is less often examined is what the people closest to him, the teammates who train with him, room with him, and share dressing rooms across clubs and country, say.

And, as sportsbuzzfeed will take you, what they say has been consistent.

When Messi joined Inter Miami in the summer of 2023, Canadian defender Kamal Miller had a locker between him and Sergio Busquets on day one. “I was just sitting there, texting my friends and my parents and my wife, saying 'I can't believe it',” Miller told Goal. “I’m sitting in between these two legends.” Robert Taylor, another Miami teammate, described the locker room as “starstruck” when Messi first walked in.

These are professional footballers who play at a level most people watching football will never reach.

Messi’s response to that is part of what makes the reaction interesting. Miller noted that on his very first day, without a visa and unable to train, Messi said a few brief words to the group and then deferred to the existing captains.

“He didn't want to come in and make it seem like he was the centre of attention,” Miller said. “He gave respect to the captains at the time. So right away, we respected that a lot.”

Julian Gressel, another Miami teammate, described Messi as quiet in the dressing room but fierce in his standards. After a draw, Gressel recalled Messi being visibly angry: “It’s unacceptable to tie a game, as simple as that. We tied a game earlier in the year and I remember him being really, really upset.”

The picture here is that Messi leads through expectation. He sets a standard by how he prepares, how he trains, and how he reacts when things go wrong. Many teammates across different clubs have described him as entering what they call “a different mode” for big matches.

Argentina

The reverence inside the Argentina squad goes well beyond admiration. De Paul, across four years of being asked about his relationship with Messi, once said that a big part of his job during matches is to make Messi run less.

“A lot of the time, the analysis I do while I’m playing leads me to try to make him run less,” he told the Athletic. “To make less wear and tear and to have more space to play with. These are things that cross my mind during the match.”

Reports indicate he covered 32.4 miles during Argentina’s group stage at the 2022 World Cup. Messi covered 16.7. De Paul was effectively doing double the physical work so Messi could conserve energy for the moments that mattered.

That arrangement produced results. After Argentina lost their first 2022 group game to Saudi Arabia, De Paul revealed that he and Messi spent five to six hours talking alone before the Mexico game. “We told each other everything,” he said.

Argentina went on to beat Mexico, then Poland, then Australia, the Netherlands, Croatia and France, losing only to Saudi Arabia across the whole tournament.

Messi won the Golden Ball. The squad carried him to it, deliberately and willingly.

After winning the World Cup in Qatar, Messi gave every member of the Argentina squad and support staff a gold-plated iPhone 14. It was his way of marking the moment. His teammates had already made it clear how they felt. When the final whistle went in the penalty shootout against France, the players who ran to him first were not celebrating their own achievement. They were celebrating his.

The GOAT Debate

The GOAT debate in football almost always comes down to trophies, statistics and peak performance. Messi has eight Ballon d'Ors, the all-time record; he is a World Cup winner with Argentina in 2022 and now the leading goalscorer in the 2026 edition; more than 800 career club goals; the all-time record scorer for both Barcelona and Argentina. Those numbers are the foundation of the argument.

But what teammates say adds a different kind of evidence. The GOAT debate usually focuses on what a player does. What makes the Messi case different is what he makes other people do. De Paul reorganises his entire physical output around him during a match. Scaloni built a World Cup-winning squad whose primary purpose was to create conditions for Messi to be decisive.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s teammates have spoken about him in similarly glowing terms. Great players tend to inspire people around them. But the nature of what teammates describe around Messi, the physical sacrifice, the adjustments, the emotional investment, the way winning for him became a motivation equal to winning for themselves, is harder to find in quite the same form around anyone else.