BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil // Shortly after coming on as a second-half sub in Argentina’s last World Cup warm-up, Lionel Messi doubled over and appeared to vomit on the pitch.
He has done it at least a half-dozen times with Argentina and club team Barcelona, mystifying doctors and fans alike.
“Nerves,” said Argentina coach Alejandro Sabella, which is a diagnosis as good as any.
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The Argentina captain and four-time World Player of the Year is under huge pressure to lead the Albiceleste to their first World Cup trophy since 1986.
"I reckon that in these moments there is anxiety more than anything," Sabella said before the team departed for Brazil, where they open their World Cup campaign against Bosnia-Herzegovina on Sunday. "It's difficult to remain calm."
Top athletes throwing up before, during or after a competition is not unusual. Sometimes it is because of physical stress on their bodies, sometimes because of performance anxiety.
What is unusual about Messi is that it seems to happen randomly, not when the pressure would seem the greatest or when he has exhausted himself to the limit.
After Messi threw up less than 10 minutes into a friendly match between Argentina and Romania in March, his coach at Barcelona, Gerardo Martino, said “something is not right”, though he added that it was not affecting Messi’s play.
Messi made that point clear against Slovenia on Saturday, scoring Argentina’s second goal just four minutes after TV cameras showed him dry-heaving and receiving a tablet from the bench.
Similarly, in 2011, he scored for Barcelona after throwing up in the Spanish Super Cup Final against Real Madrid.
Barcelona’s medical staff has not been able to find the cause. Neither have Argentina’s team doctors, nor Messi himself. The decorated forward tends to not make a big deal of it, saying it is just something that happens to him in training, during matches and even when he is at home.
“I don’t know what it is. But I had a thousand exams,” Messi told Argentine broadcaster TyC Sports. “I start to feel nauseous to the point where I almost vomit, and then it goes away.”
The pressure on Messi is huge. Even though he is just 26, his impressive record with Barcelona, including six Spanish league and three Uefa Champions League titles, has already brought comparisons with all-time greats like Pele and Diego Maradona.
His detractors like to point out that, unlike those two, Messi has not won a World Cup. He has only scored one goal and never been past the quarter-finals in his two attempts on football’s biggest stage.
Adding to the pressure is the view among many Argentines that Messi, who left the country at 13, does not play his heart out for the national team.
That is something Messi said affected him deeply.
“Argentina is my country, my family, my way of expressing myself,” he recently told Spanish sports paper Marca. “I would change all my record to make the people in my country happy.”
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