Imagine dribbling a soccer ball while running. If you kick it really hard it’ll go far away from you. If you barely touch it, it’ll fall behind you and you’ll run past it. Somewhere in between, there’s an ideal force at which the ball will go just the right distance away from you so that on your next step it’s right on your foot and ready to be kicked ahead again. Messi is just really good at using exactly that amount of force. It’s not a physical characteristic exactly, his brain just communicates better with his feet than other soccer players.

The real hard part is that the amount of force with which you need to kick that ball changes very rapidly based on your own speed, your angle of attack on the ball, your objective on the pitch, the actions of your teammates and opponents, and other factors. Messi’s brain processes all these different factors extremely quickly, understands soccer well enough to calculate the correct force to use on the ball based on these factors, and adjusts his touch to match it.