"Dios me eligió a mí": Messi, faith, and the psychology of staying grounded

Midway through his 2024 interview with journalist Juan Pablo Varsky, Lionel Messi paused to explain how he understood his own talent: 'Pienso que nací así porque Dios me eligió a mí, y me dio un don que traté de aprovechar' ('I think I was born this way because God chose me, and he gave me a gift which I tried to take advantage of').[^1] He said it plainly, without performance. It was not a press-conference platitude. It was an account of agency; specifically, of agency received rather than constructed.

What the gift frame actually does

In Thomistic anthropology, the virtues are acquired through repeated acts but ordered toward a good that exceeds the agent's own making.[^2] Aquinas distinguishes between what a person produces through industry and what they receive as a participation in a higher order. Messi's spontaneous language brushes this distinction. He told Varsky: 'Even though I worked a lot for it, I don't think I did anything specific to be the player that I was already at a young age.' The talent preceded the effort. The effort was a form of stewardship.

This framing has a specific psychological function: it insulates identity from performance. When a gift is understood as received rather than self-generated, its withdrawal — through age, injury, or defeat — does not destroy the self that received it. Messi was 37 at the time of the interview, aware that 'these are my last years due to my age,' and yet he described himself as enjoying football 'like a kid.' The enjoyment was not contingent on remaining elite; the gift remained even as its outward expression changed.

Messi's self-accounting is notably unguarded. He does not aestheticize his success. He is precise about his failures: losing the ball in the 2022 World Cup final, cursing at himself on the pitch, spending days in silence after defeats. He names these not to perform humility but because they are part of the record he is giving.

Fatherhood as a structural shift

The most psychologically specific moment in the interview is Messi's account of how becoming a father changed his relationship to defeat. Before his son Thiago was born, he told Varsky: 'If I lost a match I would spend days not seeing or talking to anybody. I didn't wanna talk, and I'd be upset at trainings. All I could think about was that we lost, why we lost, what could've been and the what if's.'

After Thiago: 'When Thiago arrived, everything changed. Now, I was able to go home and see him and forget about what had happened.'

This is an account of a reordering of loves. Augustine used the term ordo amoris to name the rightly ordered hierarchy of affections — the proper ranking of goods according to their actual weight and dignity.[^3] When football occupied the top of that hierarchy, its loss was catastrophic. When a person displaced the sport there, football became what it actually is: something serious, worth pursuing excellently, but not a metaphysical anchor.

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, in their Catholic Christian meta-model of the person, describe this same alignment of a person's loves with their actual weight and dignity as central to psychological health.[^4] Disordered attachment — orienting oneself toward a finite good as though it were ultimate — produces the suffering Messi describes from his pre-fatherhood years: paralysis, isolation, an inability to metabolize loss. The birth of his son did not make him less competitive. He notes that he still cannot let his kids win at cards. What changed was the object bearing the full weight of his identity.

Fame without self-dissolution

The interview also captures something rarer: a superstar who is genuinely difficult to approach. When Messi joined Lionel Scaloni's reconstituted Argentina squad in 2019, he was, by his own account, the one struggling to integrate. The younger players were starstruck; Messi was isolated. 'It was hard,' he told Varsky. 'Even though I was among the oldest and I had been in the national team for a long time, it was difficult to integrate into that group, due to my personality.' Messi is saying that his characteristic interiority — the same quality visible in his famous 'strolls' across the pitch while teammates sprint — creates genuine social friction. It was a teammate's warmth, not Messi's own gregariousness, that broke the ice.

This is a coherent portrait of a particular temperament: deeply interior, highly self-critical, relationally functional but not naturally initiating. His self-criticism is not neurotic rumination; it is task-focused. During matches, he told Varsky, he talks to himself internally, corrects his positioning, looks for the ball to re-enter the game. The criticism is ordered toward action.

Competitive joy as a form of gratitude

The theological thread running through Messi's self-presentation is not piety in any formal sense. There are no references to specific devotional practice in this portion of the interview. What there is, instead, is a consistent orientation toward the gift as prior to the work, and toward joy as the appropriate response to having received it.

'Today, having fulfilled all my objectives, I'm enjoying it like a kid,' he told Varsky, 'because I'm aware of the time I have left before this ends.' Awareness of finitude and gratitude for the present are not opposed. The approaching end of his career makes the present more vivid, not more anxious.

This is the structure the Carmelite tradition calls detachment: not indifference to the good one possesses, but freedom from compulsive clinging to it. John of the Cross argues that fixing the will on a finite good as though it were ultimate exhausts the soul and blocks it from receiving goods of greater weight.[^5] Messi's account of his career trajectory — from anxious, title-obsessed competitor to someone who enjoys 'the daily life around it as well' — follows this arc without having been formally constructed around it.

Grounded at 39

On July 15th, 2026, Messi delivered a second assist that sent Argentina to the World Cup final. He is 39. The question every commentator circles is the one the Varsky interview answered two years earlier: what keeps a player of this age not merely functional but generative?

The answer Messi gives is not dietary discipline, though he acknowledges Guardiola taught him that. It is not tactical intelligence, though he can discuss the false 9 system with precision. It is that the relationship between his identity and his performance was restructured, over years, through the ordinary pressures of fatherhood, defeat, and the slow recognition that the gift preceded him.

The Catholic Christian account of the person holds that a good received is not diminished by being acknowledged as received. Messi's public self-presentation — 'Dios me eligió a mí, y me dio un don que traté de aprovechar' — describes a person who has remained inside his vocation rather than being consumed by his reputation. He holds the gift loosely enough to still enjoy it. That is rarer than the gift itself.

References

[^1]Juan Pablo Varsky, interview with Lionel Messi, "Clank! Game #35," YouTube, June 24, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHzR40MLFBI. ↩

[^2]Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 63, aa. 1–3 (on the cause of virtues, distinguishing acquired virtues from infused virtues ordered to a good exceeding human industry). ↩

[^3]Augustine, The City of God, Book XV, ch. 22 (defining virtue as "the order of love," ordo amoris). ↩

[^4]Paul Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, "The Methodology and Presuppositions of the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person," in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration of Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Divine Mercy University, 2020). ↩

[^5]John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, ch. 6–7 (on how disordered attachment to a finite good torments and exhausts the soul, blocking it from receiving greater goods). ↩