​Anyone who has ever spent a lonely night (or a hundred) playing Football Manager will be familiar with the former wonderkid who now plies his trade Sevilla. The Argentine is just 27 and has a few years left in him to make it to fulfill his early promise. Watch this space.

Despite being born in the same city, the careers of Ever Banega and Lionel Messi could not be more polarising.

From the fields of Rosario to the heights of La Liga, the two know each other well. “I was in a lower age category, but my father was the coach of the 1987 age group and he used to play me in that division,“ he told La Nacion recently. “He [Messi] was tiny…It was too good what he did.”

Banega’s international career also serves as a sharp contrast to that of Messi’s. The Sevilla midfielder has just shy of 50 caps for La Albiceleste, but it is only recently that he has become an important part of the team.

Meanwhile, Messi has been a central figure for Argentina since his emergence as a teenager. Currently serving as Argentina’s captain, the 29-year-old has made well over 100 appearances for his country, and played in 3 World Cups.

Banega should be closer to that total, with a lack of professionalism, rather than a lack of talent, proving his biggest stumbling block. As a teenager he won the Copa Libertadores with Boca Juniors, and the U20 World Cup in 2007. It was those displays that persuaded Valencia to pay €18million to Boca Juniors for his services.

By then though, the warning signs were already there. During the 2007 U20 World Cup, Banega and some teammates decided to smash up their hotel room and film it. The first major instance of his bad behaviour, at Valencia his rap sheet included, late night partying, driving drunk, and even throwing tantrums for being substituted.

Seemingly a serial troublemaker, it has dogged much of his professional career. A few years into his time at Valencia, before a crunch game against Barcelona, he turned up late for training amid reports in the Spanish press he was drunk, (something his coach vehemently denied).

For those that knew Banega in Argentina, the behaviour was not entirely surprising. The 27-year-old grew up desperately poor. One of 5 kids, the former Valencia midfielder claims his childhood was so impoverished that he shared a pair of football boots with his two brothers ,and ‘practically ate mud’ to survive.

To transport someone from that upbringing to the bright lights of Europe, with cars, girls, and lots of money, it was always likely to prove too strong a temptation.

Messi has never endured such problems. A quiet, unassuming character, his talking almost always seems confined to the pitch. “Then, when the game ends, the fire inexplicably goes out: vanishing eye contact, single-syllable answers – a flatline,” wrote ESPN’s Wright Thompson.

The 29-year-old was surrounded by structure in Barcelona’s youth system. He had guidance, and all of the tools required to nurture his special talent.

Banega has never attempted to mitigate his bad behaviour, nor did he play up to it in the way some do. "I’ve done nothing to warrant them keeping me,” he said after a dismal loan spell at Atletico Madrid, during which he broke a ‘no going out’ clause numerous times.

Yet, even those at Atletico did not feel he was an inherently bad person, rather he was a naive young man making a string of bad decisions.

In the summer of 2009, after his poor spell at the Vicente Calderon, Banega seemed to finally learn his lesson. He approached training with the commitment required, and it surprised even his teammates. ”This year, I’m starting from scratch,” he said at the time. “I arrived at 19 and made mistakes. I wasted two years and have thought about things. Now I hardly ever go out.”

Turning things around during that season, journalist Jose Luis Hurtado wrote in Marca that Banega, “has had a facelift – in his brain. Everything he didn’t need has been binned. There’s nothing left of that lad who was run over by the league and by life.”

Earning admiring glances from some of the game’s biggest names, his talent could not be questioned. “Banega is a fantastic player,” Pep Guardiola said in a press conference before Barcelona’s Copa del Rey semi-final second leg against Valencia in 2012. “We’ll have to be plugged into the game to render him ineffective.”

However, it can be hard for someone with a habit of making bad decisions to suddenly change. Banega was seen wearing a Real Madrid shirt while contracted to Valencia. Then he suffered a freak injury that cost him 6 months of his career. Occurring while he was filling up his car at a petrol station, Banega forgot to apply the handbrake and the vehicle rolled backwards, trapping the player’s ankle against the curb. That in turn caused a fractured tibia and fibula in his left foot which kept him out for half a year.

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