'Messi was seriously angry': Koeman reveals when ex-Barca star was 'tyrant' in training

Lionel Messi, while seen as passionate and fierce at times, as every great player has to be so that they can compete at the highest level, the one word that no one ever associated him with was 'tyrant'. That is the exact word that was used by his former coach and current Barcelona coach Ronaldo Koeman when describing what Messi was like after he failed a training drill back during his time at Camp Nou.

"Lionel Messi has obscured everything. He was so good and he won," he told Voetbal International as quoted by Goal.com. "Of course he had good players around him, but he made the difference. Everyone seems better than they are because of him. This is not a criticism, but an observation.

Koeman then continued that while he knew how good Messi was it would still be nice to see it up close every day. He said that he did not have the need to teach Messi anything as he was already perfect at it all.

"Everything you would like to teach a football player, in recognising situations, in taking the ball under pressure, in ball speed, in finishing; with Messi, everything is a 10. Not normal, not normal! When we did a finishing practice during training, there were sometimes players who started to hit easy balls, a bit of fooling around. But with Messi, everything was: boom, boom, boom, boom. Never frills, everything functional. And always wanted to win everything," Koeman added.

Messi 'a tyrant' says Koeman

He then gave an insight into the first and only time Messi failed at a training drill and what the six-time Ballon d'Or winner's reaction was to fail that drill, Koeman said:

We always play a rondo before training. If the ball goes around 20 times, then the players in the middle must have an extra turn. If that happens three times in a row, the players will form two lines, and the two who were in the middle then walk through and get taps on their heads and such. I asked Messi if it had happened to him once. ‘Yes, once,’ he said. In all those years. With him, the older players never lost an exercise against the young. It happened once and Messi was seriously angry about that for a week. Really, a tyrant.

(Image: AP)