Great players such as Wayne Rooney and Lionel Messi reveal a truth we often miss in the frenzy of top-class football: It's much less spontaneous than it looks. Getty Images

One freezing night this January, I was sitting in the Camp Nou with a Barcelona official, watching Barca-Atletico Madrid in the Spanish Cup. When the game kicked off, the official said, "Watch Messi."

It was a puzzling sight. The little man was wandering around, apparently ignoring the ball. The official explained: "In the first few minutes he just walks across the field. He is looking at each opponent, where the guy positions himself, and how their defense fits together. Only after doing that does he start to play."

The stats tell the story. Messi has never scored in the first two minutes of a match. All his 442 goals for club and country came after that. Moreover, his career haul for the third and fourth minutes combined is a meager three strikes. Admittedly the opening minutes of most matches are pretty closed. However, Messi in this period is scoring at less than one-sixth of his normal rate. Instead, he spends the time doing an on-field analysis.

This points to a truth that we often miss amid the frenzy of top-class soccer: It's a thinking game, much less spontaneous than it looks. Even apparently instinctive creators and goal scorers like Messi are forever making calculations, often very conscious ones. To understand today's soccer, you need to grasp these conscious thought processes.

We are getting used to the idea that defensive players tend to move around in patterns dictated by their coaches, almost like in American gridiron football. This is becoming truer as soccer clubs employ growing tribes of video and match analysts to study opponents.

The consequence is that players for big teams now enter matches thoroughly briefed on what to do. Months before the World Cup in Brazil began, every man in the German squad had access to an app on which the team's many analysts would post useful videos. Before the France-Germany quarterfinal, the analysts emphasized one video in particular: an apparently unremarkable scene of the Dutchman Daley Blind tracking his opponent in a Holland-Germany under-21s match in 2013.

You watch the video and forget it almost instantly: The German attack peters out, with the Dutch keeper easily picking up a low pass. But that's because Blind was doing something crucial: After two German players attempted a one-two pass, he didn't follow the ball but kept running with the German who had started the move, staying with him until the attack was dead.

Messi rarely scores, or even looks interested early in matches. That's because he's assessing opponents and making his calculations before he eventually launches an attack. Albert Llop/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

It was exactly the right thing to do. The German analysts expected Blind's defensive ploy to be especially important against the French, whose soccer culture traditionally favors one-twos. The German players studied Blind, and then did as he did. They shut out the previously impressive French 1-0.

Before the semifinal against Brazil and the final against Argentina -- two other countries that like one-twos -- the players watched the Blind video again. When the German FA's chief data analyst Chris Clemens told this story to the Dutch journalist Michiel de Hoog, he even suggested a headline for his article: "How Daley Blind saved Germany's World Cup."

That's the pre-planned nature of modern defending. But for creative players, planning and thinking work rather differently. You can't tell them how to beat a man. However, the best ones, like Messi, do the thinking for themselves. Even when surrounded by opponents in high-speed situations when a normal person would have to rely entirely on instinct, they think fast enough to process data in their minds.

In 2004, Carlos Queiroz, then coach of Real Madrid's Galacticos, told the author John Carlin how great players see on-field situations. "Imagine two cars colliding. For us it happens at normal speed," Queiroz said. "They see it in slow motion. They catch a lot more details in the same time as us. They can compute in their minds more details than you and I can see.

"Therefore they have more time than others. The great ones see the game in slow motion, but really it is in normal time."

If you can see the field, you can see the openings. The longtime director of AC Milan's "Milan Lab," the Belgian doctor Jean Paul Meersseman, told me that this quality of "sensory perception," "interpreting detail inside the brain," may be the most important in soccer. It matters more than any physical gifts. When I asked Meersseman who had it, he named the Brazilian Ronaldo: "He can perceive situations so fast and react to it, it's just amazing."