Lionel Messi’s training habits may have inadvertently harmed Barcelona’s young players, according to Kevin-Prince Boateng. The former Barcelona player claims that younger players tried to copy Messi’s relaxed approach, leading to injuries and poor performance.
Kevin-Prince Boateng has revealed that Lionel Messi‘s approach to training had an adverse impact on Barcelona’s young players. The former Ghanaian international played alongside the Argentine during his loan spell at the Spanish giants from Serie A team Sassuolo in the 2018/19 season.
While he only managed four appearances across all competitions for the Blaugrana, he did enough to secure a La Liga medal alongside Messi, who ended the season as the league’s top scorer with 36 goals.
Despite the Inter Miami superstar’s exceptional performance leading Barca to their eighth league victory in 11 years, Boateng shared some unexpected insights into the eight-time Ballon d’Or winner’s training habits.
On ‘Rio Ferdinand Presents’, the ex-Tottenham Hotspur player confessed that Messi’s minimal exertion in training influenced the club’s young players negatively. “So we come in the dressing room, he’s just sitting there on his phone [and] gets a massage sitting down,” he told the Manchester United icon.
“Two minutes before we go out, he just stands up, closes his boots, and goes out. The warm up for the Champions League game against Liverpool, [we did the] crossbar challenge and then he goes back inside. [The] coach made the last adjustment, [Messi] is on the phone face-timing [and] 30 seconds before we go out he just comes and puts his jacket on and BOOM, goal, goal, goal.”
The Messi effect: A double-edged sword
While Messi, 37, may be hailed as the ultimate soccer wizard, his effortless magic didn’t rub off on some of the younger players at Barcelona who tried to emulate his regime with less stellar results.
“That’s what the young players did in Barcelona: Malcom, Dembele, they looked at him and they didn’t train so then going to the game, they got injured,“ Boateng recounted. “He’s the only one in the world that can do that.”
Boateng reflects on his own past regrets
Now 38, the well-traveled pro, who has racked up appearances for an impressive 15 clubs across five nations, also spilled about his past reckless lifestyle during his stint at Tottenham, admitting to a wild spending spree due to a lack of professional discipline.
“I’ll go back and say: I didn’t treat soccer as a job,” he said in a La Repubblica interview. “I was an idiot. I had talent, but I trained the bare minimum, an hour on the field. I was the last to arrive and the first to leave,” he said in a brutally honest admission.
“I’d be out with friends. I had money, I lived like a king. I’d never been to the gym. That changes your later career. I bought three cars in one day when I was at Tottenham: a Lamborghini, a Hummer and a Cadillac.“
“To the youngsters, I tell them: ‘You cannot buy happiness’. I didn’t play, I had family problems, I was out of the squad. I was looking for happiness in material things: a car makes you happy for a week. I bought three to be happy for three weeks.”
