Messi's thoughts on PR

For someone as great and popular as Messi, it would be common to see a lot of PR made about him by his team, but as it turns out, that's not the case, which is today's entry topic.

On Twitter, although he doesn't have an official Twitter page, there's his PR team, Messi Team. But upon further inspection, it seems more marketed towards Adidas than Messi. This has been noted since there's q strong belief that Team Messi could do much more when it comes to Messi's PR (only 1 main tweet since December 2019 which was his 6th Ballon d'Or). This is because it's managed by Adidas, but Messi still has control over the account's PR.

Which leads to the questions, what's his stance on Messi Team's PR for him? Well, he prefers his PR team not boast his stature, being very strict on this manner. More bluntly, as and ex freelance graphic designer from Team Messi, said: "He is of the opinion that PR is for the weak and that it just falsifies what a player does or doesn't do on the pitch.". Even Messi Team's lets us know of this, with one of the last advertisements saying "Let your feet do the talking" after he won the 2019 The Best.

It's logical to assume this extends to his other branches of PR other than Twitter. In conclusion, his own humbleness doesn't let him get much help from PR, since he'd rather do his magic on the pitch and let the world be the witness.

Who has Messi voted for in the Ballon d'Or and The Best?

Since September 2011, Messi has worn Argentina's captain armband consistently and therefore has voted for his top 3 best players of the year since then both in the Ballon d'Or and The Best. Who has he voted for in the past years? That will be the topic of today's entry.

In 2011, the first time he made a vote in the Ballon d'Or, he voted Xavi 1st, Iniesta 2nd, and Agüero 3rd. In 2012, the same 3 people appeared, but it was now Iniesta 1st, Xavi 2nd, and Agüero 3rd. The following year, 2013, he voted for Iniesta and Xavi once again, 1st and 2nd place respectively, but he put his new team-mate Neymar in 3rd place. In 2014, he put Di María 1st, Iniesta 2nd, and Mascherano 3rd, showing he appreciated his team-mates' efforts in the 2014 World Cup. The last year he voted on the Ballon d'Or was in 2015, voting for Suárez 1st, Neymar 2nd, and Iniesta 3rd. The pattern seen here is that he always voted for his team-mates, showing his appreciation for their efforts.

Going now to The Best, in the 2016 edition he voted Suárez 1st, Neymar 2nd, and Iniesta 3rd, following his trend from previous years to vote his team-mates. In 2017, he voted Suárez 1st, Iniesta 2nd, and Neymar 3rd, and in 2018 he changed things up and voted Modric 1st, Mbappé 2nd, and Ronaldo 3rd, neither of them being a team-mate of Messi, although realistically there was no team-mate of his that made a top-3 performance. In 2019, he voted Mané 1st, Ronaldo 2nd, and De Jong 3rd, once again voting for his bitter rival. Finally, in 2020, he voted Neymar 1st, Mbappé 2nd, and Lewandowski 3rd.

From this, we can take that he tends to vote for his team-mates, maybe as a sign of gratitude to their work (he is humble after all). To end the entry, here is a picture that shows who Messi has voted for in the last years (including Ronaldo as well).

Messi's performance in 2018

One of the biggest examples of Messi being underrated, or perhaps normalizing the impossible so much that it didn't become as impressive from him, is him finishing 5th in the 2018 Ballon d'Or, a disgrace as I will show shortly. Without further ado, let's look at what Messi did in 2018.

First comes the 2018 World Cup, which I already talked about earlier. In summary, he deserved to be in the ToTT (if Ronaldo deserved it so did Messi) and overall did a great performance.

In the 2017/18 UCL knockout stages, he generated all 4 goals against Chelsea in the Round of 16, and after being MoTM in the first leg against Roma, the team crumbled in the second leg and got eliminated. Despite that, Messi was still Barcelona's best player and overall probably the 5th best player in the game (better than half of Roma's team). He was also the best player in the tournament until Barcelona got kicked out.

In La Liga, he was both the champion and the best player by quite a distance. He also won the Golden Boot. Some minor achievements include being the MoTM in the Copa del Rey final (and paving Barcelona's way into that final) and being the MoTM in the Supercopa de España against Sevilla as well, assisting Dembélé's winning goal.

To get a better picture of just how dominant Messi was, let's take a look at this:

As we can see, Messi made a lot of achievements in 2018, but even then, he only got 5th in the Ballon d'Or and The Best, probably the biggest injustice in its history.

Too high standards

The "The Best" award was awarded yesterday, and Messi finished third despite clearly being better than his opponent Ronaldo in the 2019/20 season. This just goes to show how high the standards are for Messi, and I'll show it below.

As it can be seen here, comparing them in their respective leagues and in reference to the other players in the other 4 top leagues, Messi clearly surpasses CR7 in everything except goals (and even then he beats him non-penalty wise), which leaves us with doubts as to how he got ahead in the award.

Let's not forget that Messi is doing it in a considerably more defensively intense league as well, according to the UtdArena's metric, in addition to data not posted such as passes to the last third of the pitch, passes to the penalty area, progressive passes, touches, nutmegs, progressive carrying distance, fouls received, among many others, and Messi wins in all of those categories of course.

There's also the Champions League, where Messi was easily clear of Ronaldo, with one less goal but with more assists, goals generated, key passes, throughballs, dribbles, MoTM per game and an average rating of 8.37 to 7.26, having played against considerably harder opponents in the tournament as well.

Despite all this, despite being clearly better, Ronaldo came out second instead of Messi, which is a disgrace, but it only shows the greatness of Messi, who despite having everything going for him, he was defeated because Ronaldo scored more goals and won more trophies, a shame, but that's what happens when you're so good that the standards for you are unreasonably high.