FC Barcelona icon Lionel Messi has revealed which player made him angriest across his career.
FC Barcelona icon Lionel Messi revealed which fellow player made him angriest in his storied career while appearing on the Youtube channel Listos a Todo.
Messi of course came through Barca’s famed La Masia academy and played regularly for the men’s first team from 2004 until his teary farewell in 2021 when the Catalans failed to navigate Financial Fair Play limits and offer him a new contract.
Across that time period, though, he played against the Blaugrana’s bitter rivals Real Madrid on a regular basis and was a protagonist in some of the best installments of El Clasico ever witnessed.
The matches were also fiery affairs, and it is no wonder that Messi chose one of Los Blancos’ lead stars of the time as a player that made his angriest in his career.
“With Sergio Ramos we fought a lot. He was the player I got the most angry with. Later we were teammates, but in the Clasicos we always grabbed on to each other. The classics were intense,” Messi explained.
Coincidentally, Ramos is also the player that Messi faced the most times as a professional with 44 encounters between the two.
As Messi touched on, however, the pair then became teammates at Paris Saint-Germain when they joined the Qatar-backed Ligue 1 giants on free transfers in the same summer of 2021.
It was also in that year that Messi became a continental champion with his beloved Argentina, when La Albiceleste beat Brazil at Marcana in Rio and snatched away the Copa America title.
World Cup glory followed in late 2022 and led to suggestions that Messi had “completed football”.
But there was plenty of heartbreak before that in the international game with the number 10 losing no fewer than four major finals in blue and white.
Unsurprisingly, Messi chose a 2011 failure at the Copa America in the United States – after which he temporarily retired from the Argentina fold – as his saddest moment.
“I remember that in the 2011 Copa America, in Santa Fe, they swore at me in all colors. For me and the entire national team, it was hard,” Messi confessed.
Though Argentina are continental champions thanks to their exploits in Brazil, they can erase bad memories of 2011 by winning the tournament again in the U.S. this summer.
