The biggest misconception about Lionel Messi is that his loyalty to Barcelona makes him somehow a less adaptable player who stay in the comfort zone.
The argument states the fact that Leo always played for Barcelona and never faced other leagues or tried to fit in another team and then uses this fact to affirm that the Argentine has an easy life in the field playing always in the “same” amazing team with the same style of game.
This argument has two major problems.
The first problem is that the affirmation doesn't take in consideration that Barcelona had big changes over the years and that the style of the club was twisted drastically over time, the Guardiola’s Barca is very different from Luis Henrique’s Barca for example, one is based on extreme ball possession and the other is based on fast counter-attacks with deadly forwards. These changes made Messi played in various roles over the years, as a false nine, as a right-winger, even as CAM in recent times.
The second and bigger problem is that saying that a player who stays in just one club is less adaptable is contradictory to what adaptability really means. The term refers to the ability that humans have to change when the external is not controllable anymore and we have to adapt ourselves to stay functional. With this quick explanation it becomes crystal clear how the argument doesn't even make sense, a player who has the freedom to leave a team any time he wants is not adaptable, but someone who has the control of the external, if the team is not doing well, fine, he just go to another one who is in a more better shape, if he cannot fit in the style of the club, fine too, he just changes to one that suits his style better, he does not need to change himself, he just change his environment. A player who chooses to stay loyal to a club does not have the luxury of freedom and is in a much riskier and vulnerability situation, he cannot predict what is going to happen to the team and his only alternative is to change himself for the new situations and try to help them in whatever situation they are facing in the best way possible, that is what adaptability means.
