Date: 2 May 2009. Venue: Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu. Occasion: a La Liga clash.
Guardiola made a bold call: he shifted Messi off the right flank to lead the line—though not as a classic centre-forward.
Samuel Eto’o took the right, Thierry Henry the left, and Messi’s instructions were clear: drop in, receive, decide. By the final whistle it was 6–2. The false nine was revitalised.
It wasn’t a novelty. In 1953, Gusztáv Sebes’s Hungary dismantled England 6–3 at Wembley, with Nándor Hidegkuti repeatedly retreating into midfield to draw out the centre-backs, freeing space for Ferenc Puskás and Sándor Kocsis.
Johan Cruyff, under Rinus Michels, also roamed as a forward within the Netherlands’ Total Football.
At first, Messi posed an unsolvable puzzle. When he dropped between the lines, Madrid’s centre-backs had a choice: follow and leave gaps, or hold and concede space.
Neither approach worked. He glided through the channels unchecked. With Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Yaya Touré behind him and Henry and Eto’o stretching the pitch, every defensive decision backfired.
Guardiola repeated the plan weeks later in the Champions League final against Manchester United. Messi scored with a header about 20 minutes from the end.
Between 2011 and 2013, Messi netted 96 goals in 69 La Liga games.
The Ballon d’Or he collected in 2009 soon felt ever-present—he won it again in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015 and 2019, eventually totaling eight. The first came at 22, the latest at 36.
“I didn’t used to pay much attention to tactics,” Messi told journalist Juan Pablo Varsky in 2024.
“But with Guardiola I learned an enormous amount. I started to understand spaces, ball retention, how the game really works.”