Messi's 17 seasons in one map: winger, false nine, playmaker
Where Lionel Messi received the ball in every La Liga season for Barcelona shows three roles: a right winger until 2009, a false nine who lived in the middle, and finally a playmaker who started more of his work in his own half.
Lionel Messi played 17 league seasons for Barcelona, from a teenage substitute in 2004/05 to captain in 2020/21. Most people can name the roles he played in that time: the right winger cutting inside, the false nine of Pep Guardiola’s side, the playmaker of his last years. The open question is how much the pitch actually changed under him, and when.
StatsBomb’s open data has his Barcelona league career almost match by match: 519 matches and 43,562 minutes. That is enough to draw a map of every season. The one used here is the simplest there is: where he received the ball.
519League matches for Barcelona in the data, 2004/05 to 2020/21
61% → 40%Receptions on the right, winger years v false-nine years
44 → 60Passes per 90 minutes, same comparison
11% → 17%Receptions in his own half, winger years v last five seasons
One map per season
Each small pitch below covers one season. Barcelona attack upwards, so the right wing is the right-hand edge of each pitch. The pitch is cut into 30 zones, and the darker a zone, the larger its share of Messi’s receptions that season. A reception is the point where a team-mate’s pass to him arrived.
Read across the rows and the career falls into four parts.
The winger, 2005/06 to 2008/09
In his first four full seasons Messi was a right winger, and the maps say so. The darkest zones sit against the right touchline, just inside the opponent’s half. Across those seasons 61% of his receptions came in the right third of the pitch and 27% in the central third. In 2007/08 the right-side share was 67%, the highest of his career.
The first two seasons need care. In 2004/05 the data has him in 7 matches for a total of 92 minutes, all of them off the bench. In 2005/06 it is 17 matches. Both are shown on the map, but neither is used for the trends below except where stated.
The false nine, 2009/10 to 2013/14
In the 6–2 at the Bernabéu, only 30% of Messi's receptions came on the right, his lowest share of the season.
Messi’s move into the middle is usually dated to Barcelona’s 6–2 win at Real Madrid on 2 May 2009. The data backs that up. StatsBomb still lists him as a right winger for most of that match, but only 30% of his receptions came in the right third. It was his lowest share in any of his 31 league matches that season. Almost half, 48%, came in the central third.
The next season his right-side share fell to 46%, and from 2010/11 he took more of the ball in the middle than on the right. Across 2009/10 to 2013/14, 48% of his receptions were central and 40% on the right. In 2012/13 the central share reached 56%, his highest. You can see it on the map: the dark zones move off the touchline and into the space in front of the centre circle, between the opponent’s midfield and defence.
He also got far more of the ball. As a winger he made 44 passes per 90 minutes. In the false-nine years it was 60, and in 2010/11 it was 71, the most of any season. A false nine drops off the centre-backs to link the midfield to the attack, and Messi’s passing volume shows how much of that linking he did.
Out to the right again, 2014/15 and 2015/16
The trend does not run in a straight line. When Luis Suárez arrived to play through the middle alongside Neymar on the left, Messi drifted back towards the right. His right-side share rose to 49% in both seasons, close to level with the centre. The maps for those two years show the darkest zone on the right of centre again, though not on the touchline as in his winger years. StatsBomb lists him as a right winger for most of his actions in both seasons.
The playmaker, 2016/17 to 2020/21
In his last five seasons Messi was central again: 48% of his receptions were in the middle third and 40% on the right, almost exactly his false-nine split. The difference is in depth. 17% of his receptions came in Barcelona’s own half, against 11% in his winger years and 12% in his false-nine years. In 2017/18 it was 19%, the highest share of his career.
So he was coming back further to collect the ball, and he did more with it. He set up 2.46 shots per 90 minutes for team-mates in those five seasons, more than in any earlier spell, and 2.87 per 90 in 2018/19, his highest single season. His passes per 90 stayed around 61, the same as in the false-nine years. The change was in where his passes started and what they led to, not in how many there were.
What the map does not show
One thing hardly moves at all: the typical height of his receptions. The midpoint of his receptions sat between 78 and 84 yards up StatsBomb’s 120-yard pitch in every season from 2005/06 on, roughly 20 yards inside the opponent’s half. Messi never became a deep-lying midfielder. In his last seasons more of his touches started deep, but most of them still came in the same band of the pitch as before. The “deep playmaker” is a change at the edges of his map, not a shift of the whole thing.
A reception map also leaves out what happened next. Messi was famous for carrying the ball from the right into the middle, so a winger’s reception on the touchline could still end in a central shot. And a map of a season mixes matches where he played in different roles: StatsBomb lists him at more than one position in every season.
| Season | Apps | Right / centre | Own half | Passes per 90 | Shots set up |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2004/05 | 7 | 60% / 27% | 13% | 30.4 | 0.98 |
| 2005/06 | 17 | 59% / 28% | 11% | 34.8 | 1.26 |
| 2006/07 | 26 | 60% / 22% | 12% | 41.2 | 1.62 |
| 2007/08 | 27 | 67% / 25% | 14% | 44.7 | 1.73 |
| 2008/09 | 31 | 57% / 32% | 8% | 50.0 | 2.35 |
| 2009/10 | 35 | 46% / 42% | 13% | 50.5 | 1.81 |
| 2010/11 | 33 | 39% / 46% | 14% | 70.8 | 2.04 |
| 2011/12 | 37 | 43% / 46% | 11% | 66.4 | 2.40 |
| 2012/13 | 32 | 33% / 56% | 12% | 60.2 | 1.55 |
| 2013/14 | 31 | 38% / 52% | 12% | 51.9 | 2.47 |
| 2014/15 | 38 | 49% / 43% | 12% | 63.4 | 2.19 |
| 2015/16 | 33 | 49% / 45% | 14% | 61.8 | 2.37 |
| 2016/17 | 34 | 38% / 53% | 15% | 53.4 | 2.34 |
| 2017/18 | 36 | 37% / 52% | 19% | 56.9 | 2.37 |
| 2018/19 | 34 | 42% / 48% | 17% | 61.7 | 2.87 |
| 2019/20 | 33 | 46% / 44% | 17% | 64.0 | 2.57 |
| 2020/21 | 35 | 37% / 46% | 16% | 68.8 | 2.19 |
What it means
The map tells a familiar story, but with dates and sizes attached. Messi was a touchline winger for four seasons, then a central player for most of the next twelve. The 6–2 at the Bernabéu really was the turning point: it brought his lowest right-side share of the season, and his right-side share never again went above 49%. The move to the right in the Suárez and Neymar years was real but partial. And his late-career role as a playmaker shows up less in where he stood across the pitch than in how often he came back over halfway to get the ball, and how often what he did with it ended in a shot.
Method and data
StatsBomb Open Data event data for every Barcelona La Liga match in the open data from 2004/05 to 2020/21 (competition 11; seasons 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 2, 1, 4, 42 and 90). Messi (player 5503) appears in 519 of them. Early seasons are thin: 7 matches and 92 minutes in 2004/05, 17 matches in 2005/06; from 2006/07 on the data has 26 to 38 of his league matches each season. The older seasons were collected by StatsBomb after the fact from match video, with the same event definitions as modern matches. Receptions are StatsBomb "Ball Receipt" events for Messi (36,193 in total), including those StatsBomb marks as incomplete. Coordinates are StatsBomb's 120 × 80 pitch with Barcelona attacking towards x = 120; the right third is y above 53.3, the central third y from 26.7 to 53.3, and the own half x below 60. The maps use 6 × 5 zones. Minutes come from each match's line-up, from the time he came on (or kick-off) to the time he went off (or the final whistle). Passes per 90 count every pass Messi attempted, set pieces included. Shots set up per 90 count his passes StatsBomb marks as a shot assist or goal assist. Era figures pool the seasons named in each section; the trends leave out 2004/05. Positions mentioned are StatsBomb's position for each event. All figures were computed in code (charts/fetch_messi.py, then charts/messi.py). Data: StatsBomb.