And get into the Argentine national youth team. It was a long way away, but yes, of course, to get into the national side, a dream. He liked chicken. His favourite book? Errr … the Bible. The first thing that came into his head. He isn’t one for reading books. If he hadn’t been a footballer what other sport would he have chosen? Do I have to answer that? I don’t know, handball maybe. But, yes, he saw himself as a PE teacher. It was the only class at school that he enjoyed. He could be a PE teacher.
It was the newspaper supplement devoted to the rojinegros (the red and blacks, the colour of the NOB shirt). The text began: ‘Lionel Messi is a player from the tenth division and is the ‘enganche’ [player ‘in the hole’, playmaker] of the team. As a boy, not only is he one of the finest prospects from the Leprosa Academy, he also has a tremendous future ahead of him, because, despite his size, he manages to go past one, two players, dribble, score, but above all he enjoys himself on the ball’. Gambetear (to dribble), enganche, the words, the concepts, all very Argentinian. Leo was not the cover star of edition 97 of that supplement. That was left to Claudio Paris of the first team who had decided a few days earlier to stay with the club.
A black and white photocopy of the article made its way across the Atlantic.
Jorge and his son Leo, and the friend who was travelling with them to Ezeiza airport, discussed the article as they made their way from Rosario to Buenos Aires. The journey of three and a bit hours seemed longer than that as they travelled along a straight, boring road featuring little else but valleys and traffic signs. Leo gazed out of the window from the back seat.
It was 17 September 2000. A Sunday.
From Ezeiza, with the knowledge only of those closest to them and the school principal, they left for Barcelona.
A 24-hour journey lay ahead of them.
‘[The first journey] was good because it was a completely new experience for me. I’d never flown before, never undertaken such a long journey and I enjoyed it all, until the aeroplane started to move about a bit …’ (Leo Messi in Revista Barça).
Memory can play tricks with you. In truth the flight experienced a lot of turbulence. When the first meal was served Leo didn’t eat, sleeping instead, stretched out over three seats. In his short trousers, with his skinny little legs. He felt nauseous, his stomach was churning. He slept fitfully, and felt sick.
Years later, and with great frequency, he would feel the same nausea before running onto the pitch and would sometimes ask himself if that feeling of sickness he had experienced on that flight really had been caused only by turbulence.
The party arrived in Barcelona at midday on Monday, 18 September, seven months after taping a home video that demonstrated in some eyes that Messi was the new Maradona, and in others, more familiar, closer to him, that his was a natural talent that could help him make it as a footballer, if everything went according to plan.
Someone brought Messi a kilo of oranges and some tennis balls. They asked him to practise with them for a week. Seven days later they recorded the VHS tape which showed him making 113 touches with an orange. With the tennis ball it was easier: 140 jueguitos, as they say in Argentina, 140 touches in the keepy-uppy.
There was a table tennis ball lying around. ‘Give it to Leo.’ They gave it to him. Twenty-nine touches in a row. You try it. See if you can reach three. This Leo had an advantage over you: he spent all day, every day, with the ball. Between games, during the game, at home, in the school yard. Every blessed day.
Eight years later, Mastercard released an advertisement using some of those same images. You can see it on YouTube.
And since February, when the video was recorded, the Messi family would ask themselves, ‘When are we going? Where are we going? Are we going?’ It became the daily topic, one discussed both with uncertainty and a hint of excitement.
The video, along with others taken at the Malvinas pitch showing Leo in his Newell’s shirt performing his slalom-like runs and dribbles, landed on the desk of Josep María Minguella, a well known players’ agent with a lot of influence at Barcelona. And a member of the Catalan club as well. He wasn’t too sure at first; the age and distant location of the youngster put doubts in his mind, and he would not be the only one. In the end, though, months later, convinced partly by the spectacular technical skills Leo showed on the tape, partly by the insistence of colleagues who had faith in the boy’s future, he decided to put all his weight behind the project and persuaded Barcelona to give him a trial.
Just before Real Madrid made their own initial move to try to sign him.
From his office Minguella called Argentina to tell the Messis to get their things together and come to Barcelona as soon as they could. ‘Bring the boy.’ Leo was about to fly for the first time.
And to cross the Atlantic for the first time.
Out of the aeroplane and into a humid Barcelona towards the end of summer stepped a 13-year-old Argentinian boy with talented feet and a suitcase. With the dream of succeeding, against new rivals and with new companions, at a big club far, far away from home.
Those who saw him for the first time, so small, thought that Barcelona had made a terrible mistake. All this effort for … this? How was someone so small ever going to become a good footballer?!
‘I started to follow Barcelona at the time of Ronaldo and shortly afterwards came the opportunity to come here. At that time, to tell you the truth, I was very excited, and very keen to come here, to see what everything was like, because I was seeing it from a long way away. But when I got here I didn’t know how difficult it was going to be’ (Leo in Revista Barça).
It wasn’t Lionel Messi who arrived in Barcelona that day. It was just an excited kid.
Dave Sudbury’s song ‘The King of Rome’ says that when you live in a dump like the West End of Derby you can’t live out your dreams. ‘I know that,’ says someone who wants to challenge destiny. ‘A man can crawl around or he can learn to fly/And when you live ’round here/The ground seems awful near.’ In Rosario in 2000, it was harder than ever to learn how to fly.
Newell’s rejected the chance of helping the Messi family who needed a great deal of money to pay for the hormone injections that Leo so badly needed to help him grow. Had they paid for them, the young Leo would never have left Argentina.
Nobody knew of anyone who had crossed the Atlantic so young in search of their footballing fortune: 13-year-olds certainly didn’t leave Argentina, nor was it usual for European clubs to sign foreign players of such a tender age. No one had ever had such an opportunity so early. Back at Las Heras nobody had the faintest idea what was going on. Leo has hepatitis. Yes? That’ll be it …
In Barcelona, Minguella had been told that if Barcelona were prepared to meet the cost of the expensive growth hormone treatment and his father got a job, thus fulfilling the necessary regulations for the transfer of the youngster, Leo would come to them. There were calls to Real Madrid and Atlético de Madrid but nothing concrete emerged. ‘In any case, if Barça show interest, better with Barça’ was the rationale of all those who had worked to seal the transfer.
Josep María Minguella: Most of us involved in this were not used to dealing with such young players. For example, I came into contact with Pep Guardiola, or he with me, when he [Pep] was 20 years old, so I became his first agent at the time he was coming into the first team. All the machinery that is now in place for players of 12, 13, and 14 years old was not there at the time. So when our contacts in Argentina spoke to us about a youngster who was different, my first reaction was, right, what are we going to do with a boy of this age? I doubted it at first but in the end they insisted so much I started to take it seriously. I received a video, the one where he picks the ball up practically from his own goalmouth and dribbles it past about a thousand people and scores and yes … he struck me as something different. A few months later I spoke with the president Joan Gaspart and Anton Parera [sporting director] and Charly Rexach [technical director and adviser to the president].
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sp; Charly Rexach: Playing tennis one day, Minguella told me he knew of a boy who was a phenomenon … a bit similar to Maradona. But I’ve heard that many times … and then later he told me he was in Argentina. I thought, ‘ah, a youngster about eighteen or nineteen years old’. Then Minguella told me he was 13 years old. I said, ‘are you mad, or what? Do you think I’m going to put myself there … No way, no way.’
Joaquim Rifé: I was the director of the academy at Barcelona. And I eventually got offered the boy. Charly Rexach was the technical director of Barcelona and obviously centred more on the first team. What happened was that Charly Rexach is a good friend of Josep María Minguella who was the one who introduced the lad to FC Barcelona, so he listened to what he had to say about the kid.
Charly Rexach: There’s a process here. If they say to me that there’s a kid, for example, in Zaragoza who is a phenomenon, I ask, who is he, where does he play, and where do I have to go to watch him? Then I send two or three people to study him and then if one of them says yes, and the other no, I go myself and have the casting vote. Later you have to try to find him a place in the team and a number of other things. Another possibility is that an ex-Barcelona player, let’s say, Rivaldo, says to me, ‘listen, there’s a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy in Brazil who is a fantastic footballer’. I will take notice immediately, because [when] it’s someone like Rivaldo who is telling you this, you take it into account. If someone else tells me I will suspend judgement on it for the time being. But even if Rivaldo says, go and see him, I will say no. Let’s do it the other way around. If he’s so small and he’s coming from so far away … send him to me here, we’ll keep him for fifteen days so the coaches at the academy can study him at their leisure. And if in the first few days he is a bit nervous, he’ll get over it. Imagine if we go all the way to Argentina or wherever and the lad becomes ill, or can’t play or whatever. He has to be very good for us to skip the rules and regulations.
Josep María Minguella: The parents and the boy were going to leave Argentina anyway, come what may. If they had been unable to stay in Barcelona, they would have tried other clubs. I told Charly that he was following a course of treatment that the clubs in his country were not paying for and that Barcelona would have to make themselves responsible for this treatment.
Charly Rexach: So Minguella, who I trust very much, said to me: there’s a bloke they tell me is a phenomenon. So how do we do it?
And so since Minguella had received the video that displayed Leo’s keepy-uppy and dribbling skills, the months passed by that way – oh, I don’t know, maybe he is too far, he is too young … That was the confusing message that reached the family from Barcelona. Months of uncertainty for the Messi family who asked what had happened to that tape, the interest and the contacts? What was going to happen to Leo? What should they tell him?
Charly Rexach: So I said to Minguella that I was not prepared to travel so far to see a boy of twelve … Had he been eighteen or twenty … Anyway, that’s when I told him that by Easter, or Christmas, or whenever, we had to find a date for the boy to come over with his parents and stay here for fifteen days.
Rifé: I told Rexach that I had organised a game so he could watch the boy.
Gaspart, Parera, Rifé, Minguella, Rexach … Barcelona royalty to deal with a 13-year-old boy coming from Argentina. Heavyweights. And the significance of the presence of these ‘fathers’ to the young boy did not go unnoticed by the academy trainers who would be responsible for judging and training him for the next two crucial weeks.
Rodolfo Borrell: I remember that one day in the office, someone, I can’t remember who, gave me two black and white, double sided photocopies, an article from an Argentinian newspaper that talked about Messi. And they told me that this boy was coming over for a trial. I have been looking for these photocopies, I’m sure that they are at my parents’ home, I should find them. And I remember it because it was the first time I heard the word gambeta, dribbling, and the word enganche, which is a very Argentinian word used to describe the player who plays just behind the striker. They told me that the youngster was going to be in my group because he was born in 1987. I have always said that the reason I trained Messi first is only because I was responsible for the training of that under-14 side. I’m sure you have heard that there are 10,000 trainers who claimed to be the first to coach him. No?
Waiting for them at Prat airport in Barcelona was Juan Mateo from Minguella’s office, who took them to the north of Barcelona where the agent was based. In the lift the Messis crossed paths with Txiki Beguiristain, the future sporting director of Barcelona and someone close to Minguella. ‘We’re from Argentina,’ one of them dared to say. And Txiki, ruffling Leo’s hair said, ‘This boy must be good, he is small.’
After talking with the Catalan agent, Jorge and Leo made their way to the Hotel Plaza. It was not Barcelona who paid the expenses for this trip: they never did. Minguella, who knew the owner of the hotel situated in the Plaza España, arranged for the Messis to stay in room 546 of the hotel. With views. From the window they could see the halls of the Barcelona Exhibition Centre, and away in the distance the National Palace and the Montjuïc fountain that lit up at night in a blaze of colour to the sound of synchronised music. Closer were the towers that flanked the Avenida Reina Maria Cristina, erected for the Universal Exhibition of 1929. And in the foreground the fountain of the Plaza España, a classical allegory of the country with sculptures that symbolise the rivers that flow into the three seas that wash the shores of the Iberian Peninsula.
Leo Messi left his suitcases in the room. The young footballer was feeling a little better but still weak after the bumpy flight. Even so, Rifé had let Jorge know that he wanted to see Leo train. Today. At six o’clock. He had to go.
Rodolfo Borrel would be his first trainer at FC Barcelona.
Rodo, now director of the Liverpool FC academy, was for the 2000−01 season in charge of the Infantiles A side that would later become historic. Cesc Fàbregas, Gerard Piqué, Marc Pedraza, Marc Valiente, Víctor Vázquez, Toni Calvo, Sito Riera, Rafael Blázquez … One of the best junior sides that Barcelona have ever had, and now they were adding to it with a player who’d arrived with something of a reputation of his own.
That Monday afternoon those in charge of the academy (Quimet Rifét, Quique Costas, Juan Manuel Asensi, the coaches Rodolfo Borrell, Xavi Llorenç and Albert Benaiges) met on pitches two and three next to the Mini Stadium, one with grass and the other with artificial turf, to follow the progress of the group and especially the new boy.
Charly Rexach was not present, having gone to Australia to watch the games at the Sydney Olympic football tournament that was packed with well-known young players (among them Tamudo, Xavi, Puyol, Zamorano, Suazo, Mboma, Lauren and Eto’o). But in truth the matter of a young Argentinian boy did not require his presence: his prime responsibility lay with making decisions about the first team, not the academy. If down in that cauldron of talented youth they could all agree, then the boy recommended by Minguella would be signed. If not, he wouldn’t. Charly had arranged the trial; for the time being he didn’t have to do much else.
Messi felt calm as he made his way to his first day of training. Still a bit nauseous after the exertions of his journey, but he was there because this was what he had wanted and what he had fantasised about. He had a week at most (he had to go back to school) to demonstrate what he could do with the ball. That was the easy part.
Imagine never having seen the Camp Nou or the Mini Stadium. Leo hadn’t.
Arriving at the pitches adjacent to the Mini, a Camp Nou in miniature, ‘the Flea’ hesitated before entering the dressing rooms. He felt embarrassed walking in by himself. His shyness (no, he is not shy, he is reserved) is extreme. He started to get changed outside the locker room and ended up doing so inside, away from the rest of the group. In a corner with no one nearby. Standing up. Tense.
Imagine never having seen Lionel Messi. Like that group of players of the same age, or those c
oaches who had only briefly heard of him.
‘He’s so small,’ said the youngsters. Rodo was in the dressing room. ‘Sit down, young man,’ he said to Leo. The kid hadn’t said hello when he entered. Or, the noise he made when he came in did not sound like a greeting; it didn’t seem like a friendly hello.
For Cesc, for Piqué, who were also getting changed, the Argentinian was just another kid coming for a trial with Barcelona. They were rarely foreigners, but occasionally one or two were. A few new boys every month. Rodo approached the group while Leo was changing in the corner. ‘Be careful with him, he’s very small, don’t break him.’
Piqué: In that first week, Leo was isolated, very isolated. If there was a group of people talking or having a laugh, he was on the bench, right at the end, very reluctant. Quiet. Introverted.
Cesc: So many new players came that we didn’t attach any importance to it, but I remember perfectly well his first day.
The young players were giving him mocking looks. Messi was bandaging his ankles.
Piqué: He was very short, he hardly said a word and no one could have imagined what was going to happen.
He measured one metre and forty-eight centimetres – four foot ten and a quarter inches.
Cesc: He had longish hair, and spoke soft, quiet Argentinian so you could hardly hear him. In fact, he hardly spoke at all. He was a noodle. We thought, this bloke is a waste of space. …
Messi Page 2