FIFA World Cup: Every plan to stop Messi has failed. Spain has one more shot

6 min readNew JerseyJul 19, 2026 06:30 AM Years later, it remains a regret for the legendary Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson. He couldn’t stop Lionel Messi in the Champions League finals, neither in 2009 nor in 2011. “You need centre-backs who are prepared to drop right on top of Messi and not worry about what is happening behind them,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “He’s less of a threat on the side than he is through the centre. When we play Barcelona next time in a Champions League final, I wasn’t going to let him torture us again,” he wrote.
The next time never came. But he is not the only manager or defender whose best-laid plans Messi has torn to shreds. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, as Mike Tyson wrote, until they get Messi-fied, until his un-receding, immeasurable genius hits them. In theory, there are several ways to stop Messi, but in practice, he has too many ways to beat you. Hro Stoichkov, a member of Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona Dream Team, got hype’s presses rolling. “Once they said they can only stop me with a pol, but today you need a machine gun to stop Messi,” he said. Fundamentally, it’s a tussle between sporting spontaneity and practised wisdom. Spain manager Luis de la Fuente has his Messi story too, it’s like survivors of a natural calamity reliving the trauma.
It was 2004, and Messi’s talents were a whisper rather than a full-blown manifestation. “We went to Barcelona to play them in the Spanish Cup and I’d heard great things about a lad called Messi,” he recalled in his press conference. “Obviously we put him under man-to-man marking from the start. And the 70th minute, the score was 0–0. And when the player marking him was shown a card, I brought him off. Within 15 minutes he (Messi) scored four goals!”
Bellingham, left, and Messi collide during the World Cup semifinal match between England and Argentina in Atlanta. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
He contextualises the situation: “What does this mean? That we’re going to mark him man-to-man? No. But that we’re going to keep a very close eye on him? Yes.” It has been 21 years since Messi arrived, Pau Cubarsi, among those now deputed to contain him, wasn’t even born yet. Yet a practical fix to stop Messi has eluded most managers and defenders. Unless Messi has a bad day, he is as much an everyday reality as the sun rising in the east.
Hypothetically, Ferguson’s plan that never materialised is a method teams have since adopted to minimise his invasions: isolate him to the extreme right, more so in the sunset of his career, and cramp him for space to fling in his long, pinpoint crosses and diagonal balls. His deliveries sting, especially evidenced in the back-from-the-dead games against England and Egypt. For much of the game, Egypt’s ploy worked; they crowded the middle and starved him of space between the lines. He was pushed out from the defensive block to the wings, away from the patch of ground where he is deadliest. Spain would clearly not set up a low block against him, but they would counter-press him, aggressively and doggedly, affording him little time on the ball.

Herein lies the complex beauty of the game, Messi is not press-immune, but he can beat the press with his immaculate manoeuvring in tight spaces. He can get nasty when protecting the ball, and with one svelte move, could skin two or three defenders on the move, releasing space for his teammates. But if defenders incessantly pressure him from behind when he receives the ball, he tends to choose the safer option of passing to his nearest teammate. The less time Messi has on the ball, the more reduced, though not entirely neutered, his threat becomes, both individually and for the team as a whole. Spain’s is not only the meanest defence in the tournament, but also the most mobile and quickest. They snatch and advance the ball like whippets.
The roles of the left-back (Marc Cucurella) and left-sided midfielder (Fabian Ruiz) are central in ensuring he isn’t given the liberty to skip around the defence, dragging the left-back inside and floating the ball to the overlapping fullback, Nicolas Tagliafico, or Julian Álvarez. Tracking Tagliafico’s runs is essential, as Argentina don’t have an orthodox winger, unlike Angel Di María in the last World Cup.Story continues below this ad
Some teams have tried to stop him with double man-marking, one man getting goal-side of him and the other coming around him, stifling his space to cut left. Messi could still spin around them, or nutmeg them, but there’s a high percentage that he’d instead retreat or find a teammate behind him.
Argentina’s Lionel Messi in action during the World Cup semifinal vs England. (AP)
Strangle his accomplices too, the men that make him work, like Rodrigo de Paul and Enzo Fernández. Use muscle or method. Create a cage, as Jose Mourinho forged in Milan in 2010, in Inter’s coup. His shifting triangular man-marking block of Javier Zanetti, Esteban Cambiasso, and Thiago Motta suffocated him in between the lines. They fiercely marked Dani Alves, the right-back, so his supplies remained deficient.

But just as defenders plot his downfall, he studies the men trying to stop him too. Spain’s setup would be familiar to Messi. They play with the lines close together and the players narrow, much like Barcelona did. He knows they would hound him with incessant pressing and try to drag him to the far right.

But how many tactics and ploys has he foiled! Managers have explored every route they could to limit him. Some have temporarily succeeded too. If anyone can stop him, Spain can, is how football will look at it. But all tournament it has been like trying to catch smoke in a butterfly net. Ferguson would agree.