What Sporting KC’s Peter Vermes saw when he scouted 17-year-old Lionel Messi

One of Peter Vermes’ (and my) favorite inspirational movies is “Vision Quest,” the 1985 cult classic and coming-of-age film revolving around wrestling. He frequently suggests the movie to people as “incredible motivation,” and on his playlist he has loaded multiple songs from the soundtrack that include “Only The Young” by Journey, “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider and “Change” by John Waite.

As he played the last of those on his phone on Tuesday afternoon in his office at the Compass Minerals National Performance Center, the Sporting KC coach added a footnote: “This is when (the main character, Matthew Modine’s Louden Swain) is in the weight room, and he climbs that pegboard.”

But there’s another reason Vermes loves the movie.

The same reason I wondered if he might have seen it or enjoyed it as Sporting prepares to play host on Saturday night to Inter Miami CF and Lionel Messi — the phenomenon Vermes first saw play in person nearly 20 years ago and considers the greatest soccer player in history.

“I couldn’t believe they talked about soccer,” he said. “Because back then nobody did.”

The particular scene, though, was about something more. It was about the sheer wonder of human possibilities.

Or, somehow, even beyond that. Something ethereal.

The moment is more elaborate and moving — it always makes me mist up — than just this thin summary. But it amounts to Louden’s otherwise curmudgeonly co-worker Elmo (played by J.C. Quinn) explaining why he was dressing up and willing to have his dishwasher pay docked.

All to watch his friend compete for what Louden called “six lousy minutes on a mat, if that.”

Prompted by that, Elmo tells Louden about the time he happened across the transcendent Pelé playing on television:

“I don’t know nothin’ about Pelé. … Next thing I know, he jumps up in the air and flips into a somersault and kicks the ball in. Upside down and backwards. ... Everybody’s screaming in Spanish. I’m here, sitting alone in my room, and I start crying. …

“Because another human being, a species which I happen to belong to, could kick a ball and lift himself and the rest of us (sad) human beings up to a better place to be. If only for a minute.”

So it “ain’t the six minutes,” he concludes. “It’s what happens in that six minutes.”

Considering that scene, Vermes thought about the parallel between Pelé and Messi and the contrast in perspective he might have from Elmo.

“I’m in the game; I know the game; I played the game,” said Vermes, a former U.S. National Team player who competed in the 1988 Seoul Olympics and 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. “That guy had none of that, and he was amazed.

“And I’m as amazed.”

With Inter Miami playing in Mexico on Wednesday night, it’s not clear how much Messi will play before what Sporting expects to be more than 70,000 people at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. Before he scored a goal as a substitute against Colorado on Saturday, Messi had missed nearly a month with a hamstring injury.

Vermes fully expects that he’ll play, though, perhaps even start, and that he certainly wouldn’t come out once he’s in.

But even if it’s, say, six minutes, it will be all about what happens in those six minutes.

That’s why Vermes called up a 2007 LaLiga/FC Barcelona highlight on his phone. It’s an astonishing play in which a 19-year-old Messi whirls and weaves around and through virtually the entire Getafe team.

“One guy, two … watch this, watch this,” Vermes said as the play unfolds. “These guys are trying to kill him. You see that goal?”

And it’s why Vermes said “there’s no team in the world, there’s no coach in the world, that has ever put a game plan in (that can) stop him. No one ever has. And I’m not going to be the first guy to figure it out.”

Something he’s long known because he was one of the first Americans, perhaps even the first, to formally scout Messi for a competition.

As an assistant coach for Team USA for the 2005 FIFA World Youth Championship (under 20 years old), Vermes was assigned to scout Argentina and the 17-year-old Messi.

Since his family moved to Barcelona when he was 13, Messi already had been making a name for himself up the ranks with FC Barcelona. Enough so that Vermes remembered there already was worldwide talk and plenty of tape on Messi. Even watching through that filter, he recalled a sense of awe and the feeling of “look at this guy, look at this guy, look at this guy.”

That was only amplified when he went to South America to see Argentina and Messi in person in the weeks leading up to the tournament in the Netherlands.

Perhaps it was in Chile; he wasn’t quite sure. But he had full recall of what he saw on the pitch and felt in the stadium — most intensely through the glass in the Spanish-language broadcast booth next to him.

While Vermes can speak Spanish, most of what he could hear was “Messi, Messi, Messi,” because of their animated inflections as he kept dribbling right by opponents.

Like others of that rare ilk, Vermes said, “there was something completely different” to Messi that he could see that day. Something that you couldn’t quite appreciate remotely without all the tactical angles that today’s technology can apply.

In person, though, it was evident that he could “destroy a team just by himself. Like, the impact he would have every time he had the ball was just something I’d never seen before.”

Or since, for that matter.

Which helps explain why he was astonished that Messi didn’t start their match to open the tournament.

Instead, Messi entered in the second half and proceeded to dominate. As Vermes told The Star’s Blair Kerkhoff in a 2022 podcast, Messi opened the second half immediately dribbling from midfield to about the USA 25 and blasted one off the crossbar.

The U.S. team clung to the lead and won. But the postscript, per what Vermes said he knows to be true, was that Argentina coach Francisco Ferraro was scolded by the president of the Argentinian Football Association and told he’d be fired if Messi didn’t play every minute going forward.

Ferraro later told Olé, an Argentinian sports newspaper, that Messi had a muscle ache and a doctor had advised him to play only the second half. Whatever the case, Messi went on to score six goals in the tournament to lead Argentina to the tournament title and be named its best player.

That label has been affixed to him globally almost ever since, including formally as the recipient of eight Ballon d’Or awards as the world’s best soccer player.

That’s three more than second-place Cristiano Ronaldo — and, for that matter, one more than even Pelé would have won if not for the rule overturned in 1995 that had prohibited non-European players from winning it.

Befitting of a player Vermes, who has witnessed the best of nearly the last two generations either in person or on television, believes is the best there ever was.

He sees it in the combination of speed, strength, vision, technical ability and endurance. In his ability to make everyone around him better and to single-handedly dictate a game in ways that one person simply shouldn’t be able to.

And in a certain creative genius that accents it all.

“If some of the best players are at like 150 to 170 (IQ),” Vermes said, “he’s at 300.”

The addition of such a marvel to the MLS, Vermes said, is like “10 feathers in the cap of our league” — and an addition that will give Saturday at Arrowhead at least some of the scale and flavor we might anticipate for games there during the FIFA 2026 World Cup.

And while Vermes stresses that Sporting will be ready and that the game itself is significant, he also understands that this moment is about something more, too.

About somebody who can lift himself and the rest of us up to a better place to be. If only for a minute.