Lionel Messi’s favourite goal: How the Barcelona icon’s shock header sunk Man Utd in the Champions League final
With United trailing 2-0 and only 20 minutes remaining, a comeback was certainly beyond them, and Barcelona went on to claim the third Champions League title in the club’s history.
“There are several games when the team played in such a way that it was almost impossible for the opponents to do any damage to us,” Messi told The Sun in 2016. “And it almost always happened in big matches. The final of the Champions League in Rome was one of those games when the team played the perfect match.”
It was just the beginning, though. Now fully unleashed in Guardiola’s famous tiki-taka style, Messi helped fire Barca to three more trophies in that calendar year, culminating in the Club World Cup in December. Inevitably, Messi ran away with the Ballon d’Or vote for the first of four consecutive triumphs.
“We played against him before and we’d locked him down,” Ferdinand said of the improvement he noticed following his previous clash with Messi. “But this was a different Messi. This was Messi with more freedom to run around and be central.
“Whereas before he was really stuck wide, so you could pin him down a bit. Still great, but when he was allowed that freedom to be able to move and pop up anywhere and surprise you, like unplayable, like ridiculous, and he was actually better at Wembley [in 2011].
“I remember standing on the pitch with [Paul Scholes] and watching them go and lift the trophy and just going: ‘We just need to get off there [the pitch] because they just took our soul.’
“Messi was the main ingredient, he was the player that I was meant to be able to get up against, he just played away from you and then all sudden he would turn up, bang, he’s there. Just a wonderful footballer.”
Two years after the Rome showdown, Barcelona and United met in another Champions League final, both as winners of their respective divisions once again. This time, though, Messi, Xavi and Iniesta dominated at Wembley Stadium from beginning to end, taking the lead before Rooney’s controversial equaliser.
The Argentine was even more prominent this time and delivered another beauty to restore Barca’s lead with a shot from outside the box before David Villa made it 3-1.
“I am not ashamed to admit that in the games against Barcelona I spent a lot of the time just hoping he would take up positions as far away from me as possible,” Paul Scholes later said. “Elusive is the word that immediately springs to mind when I think about Messi’s style of play.”
