Lionel Messi proved he's not human by breaking FIFA tactics with 2021 Barcelona stunner

Lionel Messi became so fearsome from free-kicks at the peak of his powers that La Liga defences were terrified whenever he lined one up.

While the Paris Saint-Germain star might not have been scoring from set-pieces too often during the Pep Guardiola days, he was converting them with frightening regularity by the time we get to the mid-2010s.

In club football alone, Messi scored a dizzying eight free-kick goals in the 2018/19 season as well as finding the net with seven of them in the 2015/16 and 2017/18 campaigns respectively.

Messi’s lethality from a dead-ball situation became such that you really did feel as though teams had conceded a goal as soon as they gave away a foul anywhere near their own penalty area.

And as such, La Liga sides had to think outside of the box in order to thwart Messi’s attempts to score a free-kick pretty much every six weeks.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention and that certainly proved to be the case with Barcelona‘s opponents going to lengths never seen before in their mission to nullify Messi’s free-kicks.

Whether it was laying players behind the wall as draught excluders or straight up positioning a defender on the line, sides were no longer prepared to give Messi any advantages at all.

In fact, things got so silly at one point that Real Sociedad once lined up for a Messi free-kick in 2020 by essentially dropping their defensive formation back to the goal line to get as many players in front of a potential shot as possible.

This is how Real Sociedad defended Messi's free kick.Madness