A bit more on Messi
For those of us, . . . ahem, . . . who live and die by statistical analysis, 538 has penned an article on the premise that, although it is IMPOSSIBLE for one player to dominate as many aspects of the games as Messi does, the analysis establishes that he does and has for a good chunk of time. MoF, if Messi were two distinct players, each taking a share of his dominant traits, they'd be the two most dominant players in the world.
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Originally Posted by 538
I arrived at a conclusion that I wasn’t really expecting or prepared for: Lionel Messi is impossible.
It’s not possible to shoot more efficiently from outside the penalty area than many players shoot inside it. It’s not possible to lead the world in weak-kick goals and long-range goals. It’s not possible to score on unassisted plays as well as the best players in the world score on assisted ones. It’s not possible to lead the world’s forwards both in taking on defenders and in dishing the ball to others. And it’s certainly not possible to do most of these things by insanely wide margins.
But Messi does all of this and more.
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...is-impossible/
Second focuses on dribbling. It's a comparison of Messi to the dominant player of the prior generation, Maradona. Note;
How close he keeps the ball
How swift he remains while controlling the ball
The angle of his cuts
The abruptness of his cuts
His outlets when he's finally drawn max attention
Further, at 6:05 are, back to back, the consensus two greatest individual effort goals of the past 50 years. One by Messi, the other by Maradona.
Both of them have styles very distinct from the Ronaldos and Ronaldinhos of the world, who treasure a little more flash [think back to Ronaldo's 4-5 heel kick escape from caging at midfield against USMNT]
No embedding
http://youtu.be/vpjXpBLImyk