The rise and fall of the False Nine with Lionel Messi
Zlatan Ibrahimovic was always an individualist that coaches found difficult to manage. So when Barcelona announced his arrival, there was a bit of a surprise among the fans in the football fraternity. After all, how can a square peg fit in a round hole?
It doesn’t. Pep Guardiola knew that. So he tried to transform the square peg into a round one. It seemed to work, Ibra was scoring, but the Swede didn’t like it, not in the least bit. As he wrote in his autobiography, he was scoring but the fun of playing was totally sucked out by the Spanish manager.
But, it didn’t matter; he was scoring.
However, one day, Lionel Messi decided that he no longer wanted to play on the right and try his luck in the center. Now Lionel Messi was, and perhaps still is, the apple of Guardiola’s eye—and so he agreed, a decision which gave birth to the greatest false 9 in the history of the game.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic might be upset at Guardiola’s decision even now, but one little move became the source of giant waves that washed over the world of football.
Messi’s rise as false 9
Lionel Messi made his name playing on the right as an inside-forward. One could go to youtube and check out the goals he scored when he was younger. Receiving the ball deep on the right, he dribbled in and shot while cutting inside, and the ball almost always found its way into the top corners.
He was devastating before, but he became a God now.
Counting the seasons from Ibrahimovic’s departure to Luis Suarez’s arrival, Messi scored 227 in 211 games; most of them coming from a false 9 position. David Villa was signed to replace Ibrahimovic, but he was never really a replacement in the like-for-like sense.
In his 3 years at Barcelona, Villa featured on the left-wing in a lot of games. This helped the Argentine a great deal because Villa’s cunning movements dragged many a defenders out and gave Lionel Messi the space he needed.
However, his best season came when he was the only true scorer in the starting XI. David Villa injured his tibia in the Club World Championship by the end of 2011. With him out injured and only Pedro Rodriguez making sparse runs towards the goal, Leo scored a record 73 goals that season.
The word ‘sparse’ has a subtle meaning here. David Villa attacked the goal a lot more than Pedro Rodriguez did. Sometimes, with the former Valencia man making so many inward runs, it clustered the space for Lionel Messi rather than free up—something which hindered him more than we could usually interpret.
With Pedro, however, it rarely happened if not never
The Chelsea winger is not among the most talented players in the world, but what made him so dangerous—and still is his strongest asset—is his ability to know when exactly to make a run. While the striker’s instinct took over Villa and he made runs to score, even when there wasn’t much of a chance, the Canary Islander only made run when he was absolutely sure that there was enough space to be exploited.
A look at the goals compilation video of Pedro Rodriguez would instantly reveal this. When defenders were occupied with the nuisance Messi and co. were creating, Pedro, who had a great ability to go ‘invisible’, made a diagonal run from the wings out of nowhere.
Since Barca’s players’ creativity level was visionary, they almost always spotted him and fed him the ball.
The reason for this long digression from the topic is to underline the fact that Pedro always made sure Messi had the space to perform at his brilliant best. Barca might not have won the Champions League or La Liga that season, but it was Messi’s best ever in terms of goals.
Others’ imitation which failed eventually
Messi’s success gave rise to the trend of other managers playing with a false 9. For a while, it actually worked. Cesc Fabregas was perhaps the best exponent of the position after the Argentine, but he too faded away after a bright start.
There were more. Mario Gotze was tried as the false 9 by Pep Guardiola. Even the likes of Kevin Nolan and Angel di Maria (at United) were tried there at one point, but were nowhere as nearly effective as the Argentine.