Lionel Messi on the soccer field takes the short, trotty steps of a dachshund in the park. Such diminutive, mincy movements are part of his mystique: He gives opponents absolutely no reason whatsoever to track his runty, 5-foot-7 figure, right up until he bolts away and suddenly tears open the grass in front of him. He becomes the most commanding man on the green expanse, and seems to grow a foot in stature as he charges the goal. Perhaps Messi’s greatest gift is this ability to control his opponent’s attention, to deflect and attract it at will.To appreciate Argentina’s captain in Sunday’s match against Spain—perhaps his last World Cup appearance—watch him without the ball. This allows for the eye to fully measure his exploitative changes of speed, and the dodgy shifts in direction that have made him the World Cup’s all-time leading goal scorer. Such close reading also reveals just how much he is the center and dictator of his team’s action, even when he doesn’t seem to do anything at all. In this year’s World Cup so far, he has accounted for a gape-worthy 12 of Argentina’s 18 goals; he has scored eight of them himself and has helped create four for others, as assists. Without Messi, Argentina would be a windless flag. “It’s just incredible—his campaign, this tournament, how he carries that team,” England’s coach, Thomas Tuchel, told reporters the day before Messi broke British hearts in the semifinals with two of those assists. Tuchel added, “There are no words left for this kind of achievement.”Observe Messi as he sidles into the middle of the field, blank-faced and unassuming, exuding quietude as he paces, disappearing in the action of men larger than him, sometimes even standing stock-still. According to various estimates, Messi walks or stands for anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of a game. But by no means is he inactive. While the attention of his opponents slides off him, Messi is paying close attention to them. Notice how often his head is swiveling, surveying the field over each shoulder. “When I walk, I analyze the opponent’s positioning,” the normally closed-mouthed Messi told an Argentine podcast in 2024. Slowly but surely, he finds space and distance, edges away from the thickets of legs, his focus on “getting out of the game, out of what’s happening,” he said, so that if his team recovers the ball, “I’m well positioned, alone, or have some time to start a counterattack or another play.”[Read: Soccer’s most magical performer]The value of Messi’s unobtrusive search-lighting of the field is hard to overstate. It’s why he remains such a factor at 39, leading the tournament in scoring over fleets of fresh-legged players in their teens and 20s who are supposed to be seizing his mantle. (He’ll encounter one of them on Sunday: Spain’s 19-year-old Lamine Yamal.) Messi is undeniably slower than he was as a teenage phenom nicknamed La Pulga—“the Flea”—who played with a creative spontaneity, so jumped-up on soda pop and chocolate that he sometimes vomited during matches. Slowing down over time is not unusual: A 2022 longitudinal study of elite Spanish players showed that the total distance they covered in a game fell by an average of 0.56 percent a year as they aged and that their high-intensity sprinting decreased by an average of 1.8 percent a year.But according to an essay this month by Gert-Jan Pepping and Thomas McGuckian, researchers who study movement science at Australian Catholic University, Messi’s great strength has never been speed, but heightened awareness. He has a good sense of where openings are liable to appear, which lets him continue to riff past opponents and split the field. Pepping and McGuckian were co-authors of a 2018 study that used player sensors to track how certain “visual exploration” techniques—particularly frequent head-turning and checks over both shoulders—lead to more effective passing and attacks on the goal. In an email, Pepping told me, “If you begin running slightly earlier than everyone else, you appear faster.” In their recent essay, Pepping and McGuckian wrote that Messi wins “by seeing sooner.” They cite the legendary Dutch player and manager Johan Cruyff, who once asked rhetorically, “What is speed?” In soccer, speed is more than just a fast-twitch sprint reflex. It’s an “insight,” Cruyff said.Messi’s stalking, pacing information-gathering may well be the reason behind a striking team statistic: Argentina has now scored 11 goals after the 75th minute. Amid all of the hectic, ever-shifting action, Messi seems to find just the right cognitive judgments late in games when a goal is most desperately needed.His insight was surely the chief factor at work in his most meaningful assist of the tournament, which clinched the 2–1 semifinal victory over England. With the score still tied at 1–1 in the 91st minute, he struck a curling cross that led his teammate Lautaro Martínez right to the mouth of the goal for a header. The play unfolded “like somebody very slowly and patiently explaining a maths problem,” per the delightful description of The Guardian’s Barney Ronay. As the ball rode the air, Ronay wrote, “everyone in the stadium became Messi, seeing the moment before it happened.”Watching Messi, at times, can be an exercise in watching him watch. Doing so affords a glimpse of the game through the eyes of the greatest to ever play it.