Lionel Messi is a Shotgun Quarterback

A younger, faster Argentina is making Messi the deep-lying distributor everyone thought he'd become.

One of the most famous passes in the history of American sports happened on December 28, 1975. Down by four with less than a minute to go, the Dallas Cowboys needed a touchdown to stay alive in the playoffs, which meant they needed to get the ball from the halfway line all the way to the far end of the field, 50 yards away. If you’ve never watched American football, trust me, this is not a great situation to be in. As the clock ticked down and his receivers sprinted up the field, the quarterback, Roger Staubach, faked a throw to his left, turned back to his right, and just sort of lobbed the ball as high and far as he could. By some miracle a teammate beat two defenders to the catch and walked into the end zone for the win.

Great play, exciting game, yada yada, but that’s not why the pass is famous. We remember it half a century later because a reporter found Staubach in the locker room after the game. “They asked me, ‘What were you thinking about when you threw the ball?’” Staubach remembered, “And I said, ‘When I closed my eyes I said a Hail Mary.’”

I don’t know where you’re from, but maybe you’ve heard of a Hail Mary pass? It’s become a standard part of the American idiom to describe any kind of last-ditch desperation effort. That touchdown was a cultural moment. But there’s another, nerdier reason the pass deserves to be famous among NFL fans. When he got the ball to start the play, Staubach wasn’t crouched under a lineman’s butt for a handoff between the legs, the way American football plays traditionally begin. He took the snap from five yards deep, in something called the shotgun formation, where he had a good view of the field and a little extra time to throw. The Cowboys were early adopters of a major tactical feature of the modern game. “Nobody else was in the shotgun,” Staubach later recalled, “and they thought we were crazy.”

I’m telling you this not because you should care about the NFL, an organization that mostly exists to answer the question, “What if sports were run by the European Super League people, every play involved half a dozen red-card collisions with no concussion protocol, and also we replaced most of the game with VAR stoppages and erectile dysfunction ads?” It’s just that when I watch Lionel Messi at the Copa América, I keep picturing Roger Staubach. Time after time Messi will drop all the way to the center circle in open space, survey his choice of runners, and pick one out with a pinpoint 40-yard ball. And I can’t help but think: Messi is a shotgun quarterback now.

If you’ve followed Messi’s career even a little bit, you know he’s always had the ability to fire preposterous passes from deep if only he weren’t too busy scoring goals. That’s led to speculation that the greatest attacker of all time might one day become a great midfield distributor. “If he plays as a No. 9, No. 8, or No. 6, he's the best No. 9, No. 8, or No. 6 in the world. He can judge the perfect pass from 40 yards; he can put the ball wherever he wants,” Messi’s former coach Luis Enrique said. Dome Torrent, who helped mastermind Messi’s false nine phase, told the Argentine newspaper Olé: “Often, he drops deep to receive the ball. In a few years, he could play like Xavi if he wanted to. He doesn't lose the ball, he gives assists, he has taken care of his body throughout his career. If he plays in a deeper position when he logically starts losing pace, he could play as a central midfielder or wherever he wants to and he would do well."

But the man is 34 now, not a floppy-haired teenager but a bearded, tattooed dad who got very publicly burned out at his job last year, and even at this late stage in his career those predictions about Messi turning into some kind of regista haven’t really come true. His position at his club may wander a little bit from year to year, but he remains the quintessential attacking playmaker, coming deep only slightly more often these days than he always has. When he drops outside the defense in La Liga, it’s usually to break down a low block as a wide creator. We may have to accept that we'll never get to see full-on midfielder Messi at Barcelona.

For Argentina, though? Now that’s a different story. For most of his career, his national team has been pathologically dependent on Messi in every phase of possession, and it’s gotten worse since the rest of his golden generation started to decline around the time of the 2018 World Cup. I mean, people talk about Messidependencia at Barça, but the Albiceleste take it to a whole ‘nother level. Check out Messi’s share of the creative load for club and country, per FBref:

You get the gist. I bet if you just close your eyes and try to picture Argentina at the 2018 World Cup, you’ll see a bunch of blurry dudes standing around behind the ball or over by the sideline, waiting for Messi to part the defense like Moses and lead them to the promised land. It didn't work out.

In this tournament, though, it kind of has, thanks to recent reinforcements. At the World Cup, Argentina had the third-oldest squad after Iceland and Costa Rica, with a minutes-weighted average age of 29.6. In 2021, key vets like Ángel Di María and Sergio Agüero are still around, but now they rotate with guys in their prime like Rodrigo De Paul, Lautaro Martinez, and Giovani Lo Celso. Those fresh legs have helped. This Argentina isn’t on top of the world, but they tied Brazil for most points in group stage and seem to be coping pretty well with all their high-end talent aging out.

You might think it’s a problem for a team that’s trying to get younger to keep a middle-aged man front and center on every possession, but it’s actually worked out nicely. Like LeBron on the Lakers or Brady on the Bucs, whatever this version of Messi lacks physically he makes up for with veteran savvy and playmaking genius. And this time, crucially, he’s got runners.

Which is where I start to think of the shotgun formation. For an NFL team, the point of starting a play with the quarterback sitting deep is to help him pick a pass. “I see much better from it,” Staubach said of the shotgun. “I can scramble better. I don’t feel surrounded.” His coach, Tom Landry, agreed. “What it does,” he explained, “is enable the quarterback to have an extra second or second-and-a-half to read the defense.”

Messi’s version of the shotgun offense involves collecting the ball somewhere around the center circle in transition. As the right winger in Argentina’s 4-3-3 or the central attacking midfielder in a 4-2-3-1, Messi is one of the two forwards who stay on the front line when his team drops into a defensive block. This doesn’t really happen all that much, to be honest, because Copa América games consist mostly of transitions, fouls to stop the transitions, set pieces resulting from the fouls, and fights that break out during the set pieces. But whenever Argentina does go low, Messi stays high, and when they win the ball they’re ready to run in transition again.

Part of the reason Messi’s so good for this style, besides the fact that he’s, you know, Lionel Messi, is that he moves the wrong way. While the defense is scrambling backward, he doesn’t sprint forward to lead the line like forwards typically do on the counter. He drops into space to receive. There hasn’t been a whole lot of counterpressing following turnovers at this tournament, so Messi will often get the ball 10 yards from the nearest defender, in more space than he’s ever allowed in Barcelona games. That’s the shotgun part. But as soon as he starts dribbling forward, somebody’s got to stop retreating and step to him, because, again, this is Messi we're talking about. Just by gathering the ball when and where he does and possessing neutron-star levels of gravity, he pulls the opponent’s lines apart and creates spaces in front of him.

This has always been the deal with Messi’s strolls around the field. He knows how to wander out of defenders’ sight and when to flag their attention and drag them around. “Can we say Messi gets a lot of his space by not chasing the play?” the researcher Luke Bornn told FiveThirtyEight a few years ago. “Yes, that’s precisely what our research shows.” In Argentina’s transitions, Messi lets the play run right past him, then forces the opponent to turn back around and chase him.

A quarterback is nothing without receivers, and Messi’s shotgun plays wouldn’t work if his teammates didn’t hustle off the ball. That’s why Argentina’s youth movement has been important. Instead of squaring up against a set defense with limited forward passing options, Messi is catching the defense before it gets organized, with three or four runners to choose from. The areas where he takes his touches haven’t changed that much compared to the 2018 World Cup, but what he's done with them has. A larger share of his attempts in this Copa América have resulted in progressive passes outside the penalty area than at the World Cup or in any Barcelona season. In plain English: he’s passing the ball toward goal faster than ever.

Messi hasn’t been the most dangerous player around the box at the Copa América. That’s been his one-time protégé Neymar, who’s created nearly twice as many non-penalty expected goals and expected assists. (If Neymar can stay healthy for a full tournament, we might finally see the official passing of the World’s Best Player torch this year.) But if you look one pass further back in the chain, Messi’s 12 shot-creating actions from open play are level with Neymar, and his deep-lying creativity is the reason Argentina’s 23-year-old striker Lautaro Martínez is crushing all comers in xG. Messi takes the shotgun snap and tosses the Hail Mary; Martínez walks it into the end zone.

I’m not sure we’ll ever see shotgun Messi as a regular thing in club play. Defenses are too organized, counterpresses are too aggressive, and Barcelona — assuming that’s where he still plays come August — usually prefers slow, high possession to rolling the dice in transition. Then again, Messi’s throughball attempts have been trending upward over the course of his career as he's slowed down and his passing has improved. Getting Ansu Fati back from injury and Memphis Depay from Lyon this season will give him the runners he was so sorely lacking last year. If Ronald Koeman can find a structure to cover for his lack of defense, maybe a situational deep-lying playmaker role could suit Messi, who doesn’t get into the box nearly as much these days anyway.

But all those what-ifs are a month and an ocean away. Right now Messi is out of contract, out of Barcelona’s neverending soap opera, and largely out of the limelight for once thanks to the Euros. He’s just a guy playing soccer for the country he loves, and he looks like he’s actually having fun for the first time in years. Just watch him drop, scan the play, scramble a little to drag the defense out of shape, then take his pick of Nicolás González or Lo Celso or Martínez or De Paul, a full spread of fast young receivers in front of him. Watch the ball split the passing lane and curl perfectly into the path of a runner in space. Whisper it under your breath: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee ...

Maybe this time Messi will answer Argentina’s prayers. ❧

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Further reading:

• Joe Zagorski, The Rebirth of the Shotgun Offense (Pro Football Journal)
• Tom Worville and Michael Cox, Lionel Messi's Ten Stages of Greatness (The Athletic)
• Ryan O’Hanlon, Meet the Model That's Redefining Value and Plotting the Demise of Messi and Ronaldo (No Grass in the Clouds)
• Bobby Gardiner, Messi Walks Better Than Most Players Run (FiveThirtyEight)

Image: Henry Thomas Alken, Duck Shooting