• Coach believes star player is suffering from anxiety • Pressure on Messi to lead country to third World Cup

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

The Argentina head coach, Alejandro Sabella, has put Lionel Messi’s habit of throwing up on the pitch down to anxiety from his star player.

“Nerves. I reckon that in these moments there is anxiety more than anything,” Sabella said before the team departed for Brazil, where they open their World Cup campaign against Bosnia-Herzegovina on Sunday. “It’s difficult to remain calm.”

After Messi threw up less than 10 minutes into a friendly match between Argentina and Romania in March, his then coach at Barcelona, Gerardo Martino, said “something is not right”, though he added that it was not affecting Messi’s play.

Messi made that point clear against Slovenia on Saturday, scoring Argentina’s second goal just four minutes after TV cameras showed him dry-heaving and receiving a tablet from the bench.

Similarly, in 2011, he scored for Barcelona after throwing up in the Spanish Super Cup final against Real Madrid.

Barcelona’s medical staff have not been able to find the cause. Neither have Argentina’s team doctors, nor Messi himself. Messi says it is just something that happens to him in training, during matches and even when he’s at home.

“I don’t know what it is. But I had a thousand exams,” Messi told the Argentinian broadcaster TyC Sports earlier this year. “I start to feel nauseous to the point where I almost vomit, and then it goes away.”

Adding to the pressure is the view among many Argentinians that Messi, who left the country at 13, does not play his heart out for the national team. That is something Messi admits affects him deeply.

“Argentina is my country, my family, my way of expressing myself,” he recently told the Spanish sports paper Marca. “I would change all my record to make the people in my country happy.”