Player Focus: Are Football Fans Now Witnessing Lionel Messi at his Peak?

For a man surrounded by so many frantic people on Monday night in the Zurich Kongresshaus mixed zone, Leo Messi was conspicuously serene. He looked every bit like an athlete content with his latest conquest, even if he immediately insisted he still wanted more. 

The last year was perhaps the perfect display of that desire. Because, it was at this exact point in 2015, at this exact venue, that the same player reflected on whether his career had reached something of a plateau. 

Messi had just finished second to Cristiano Ronaldo in the Ballon D’Or for the second successive occasion, and that after a year in which his Argentina side also finished second to Germany in the World Cup. The image of the Barcelona playmaker forlornly looking at a trophy he couldn’t touch was one of the most haunting of the year and, by the time 2014 became 2015, he still didn’t seem right. It was after the Ballon D’Or gala in Zurich that he let it be known he would consider a move, and that came amid well-publicised problems with manager Luis Enrique. 

Even worse, he didn’t seem physically right. The sonic blur of 2008-12 had apparently gone, replaced by someone who spent the majority of games walking, and then waiting to move in staccato bursts. He was still brilliant, but no longer unstoppable. In the World Cup, in particular, he was offering supreme individual moments rather than sensational entire matches. 

How times have changed. On Monday, Messi reflected on that remarkable transformation, and how he went from winning nothing to - in his own words - “winning almost everything”. 

“I came from a year where, for different reasons, I didn’t find myself in the best form,” the 28-year-old said. “With luck, and work, I was able to reverse that.” 

The details of that are relatively well known. Messi made it his mission to get back to optimum fitness, seeing a specialist over a persistent muscle injury, and losing over six kilograms. The relentless energy had returned. 

The real question, then, was not how he did it. It was whether that ensured 2015 was his best ever year? 

It undeniably marked another definitive juncture in his career, a sign-post year. 

To properly gauge that, you have to go back to 2010, which was perhaps the point when he really moved onto another level as a player; when all that talent and potential was accompanied by a new maturity. 

Newly released by Pep Guardiola moving him into the false-nine position in mid-2009, Messi also began to hit more than a goal per game for the first time, netting 54 in 47 league and Champions League games in 2010. He was probably perfect for that false-nine position because he had always been somewhere in between a playmaker and a scorer, but that strike rate marked the stage at which he started developing into - more than anything - a ruthless and relentless goal machine.  

By 2012, he had famously broken Gerd Muller’s record, and had a conversion rate of a remarkable 26.3%. 

It was frightening to think that what he could have become at that point, only for Messi to then suffer his first real injury scare since before Guardiola took over Barca. He infamously sat out Bayern Munich’s 7-0 aggregate thrashing of the Catalans in the 2013 Champions League semi-final and, just as that marked a change of the guard in Europe, it also marked another change in Messi’s career. 

From then, he just seemed that bit more physically constrained, as if there was a resistor on his electric force. We now know that he was effectively off full fitness for almost two years, and that could be seen in his game. 

He was just less mobile, less involved. He was dribbling less, at 3.8 per game compared to a high of 6 per game in 2011, and he was offering fewer key passes - at 1.5 per game, this was remarkably low for him. 

Debate genuinely grew about whether he had seen the absolute best of him… only for Messi’s 2015 transformation to spark that debate anew: have the last 12 months marked the absolute best of him? 

He may not be scoring as regularly - and that is also saying something given it is 39 in 43 games across the top two competitions - but that is because his game has again become about much more than goals. He has moved back on the pitch, and thereby taken a quantum leap forward in his overall play. He is just so much more involved. Messi is no longer stop-start. 

For one, he’s back running as much as ever, with 5.5 dribbles per game. He’s also playing 2.2 key passes per game, and supplied 19 assists in the league and Champions League in 2015 - the most since 2011. 

None of these are his best stats in these individual areas over the past few years, but the key point is that he’s so high in so many of them. It suggests this new completeness. 

Of course, there are aspects these stats can’t capture, such as the substance in everything he does. 

The jarring reality for opposition sides is this: if Messi is properly on it, he’s no longer as manageable as he was over 2013 and 2014. He is probably unstoppable. That was never more obvious than in his moments of absolute quality over 2015, such as the second strike against Bayern Munich in the Champions League semi-final, or the wonder-goal against Athletic Club in the Copa del Rey final. 

In these moments, if it was as if even he had reached another level, another plane of performance. 

So, on Monday, he was asked exactly that: whether this was his peak. 

He was typically serene about that too. 

“It’s a lot to think about.” 

When it comes to that question, 2015 has offered more food for thought than any other.

Was 2015 Lionel Messi's peak year in football? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below