By Simon Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times, from lectures delivered in April at Occidental and Pitzer Colleges. Kuper’s books on soccer include Soccernomics, which he co-wrote with Stefan Szymanski.

When Lionel Messi was thirteen years old, he and his family left their hometown of Rosario, Argentina, and moved to Barcelona, a city about which they knew so little that they were surprised to discover it was on the sea. FC Barcelona, the wealthy local soccer club, had agreed to pay for the hormone treatments that the tiny soccer prodigy needed to reach a normal height. Messi — now…