The one who learned of the fact that he was injecting himself with hormones (or who was suffering from a deficiency of the growth hormone, it’s the same difference) because, on one trip at the end of the term, Leo’s mother asked Cintia’s mother, who was travelling with the kids, to make sure that he was injecting himself every night.
‘Lionel was small, and always went around here barefoot and played with the ball,’ says another neighbour, Ruben Manicabale. ‘Many times we used to get mad at him, grab him and throw him to the ground, but he used to get up and carry on playing.’
A member of the Quiroga family, neighbours across the street, remembered that ‘the kids didn’t play all day with the ball, but he did. They all left and he carried on by himself by the gate. My mother scolded him many times because it was late and he carried on with the ball.’
‘When he played sometimes he would be hit, fall and cry, but he soon stopped and carried on running. You could see he was different: the skill he had, the speed …’ remembers Cintia.
It’s said that Rodrigo was the first person to call him ‘the Flea’. In truth no one in the neighbourhood gave him that name. The family believe that it was a Mexican football commentator who, years later, gave him the nickname. They are talking about Enrique Bermúdez, considered one of the most prestigious voices in the Castilian language, a champion of pure entertainment, a narrator of what Jorge Valdano describes as ‘the most important of the least important’. The ‘dog’ Bermúdez – that’s how he’s known – was a rocker, hippy, singer and film extra, before becoming a narrator and a creator of hundreds of nicknames (Adolfo Ríos became ‘Christ’s Archer’, Rafael Márquez ‘the Kaiser of Zamora’ and David Beckham ‘Blue Shoes’ because of the Smurf-coloured boots he wore) and of the outlandish description of the footballing style of Barcelona’s Pep Guardiola’s : ‘yours, mine, have it, lend it, caress it, kiss it, give it to me’. But Bermúdez never claimed to be the creator of the nickname. Whoever it was still remains anonymous.
In any case it was clear that Leo had something special. ‘He is a shining light sent by God. You know when someone says, “he will make it, he will”? He was a footballer from the day he was born,’ says Claudia, Cintia’s mother, who sometimes baby-sat the young Leo.
‘He played with a number five ball, so big that he could have hit it anywhere and yet he controlled it perfectly,’ remembers his brother Matías. ‘It was something beautiful, you had to see it, and whoever saw it for the first time would go back to see it.’
The ball, with a diameter that reached up to his knee, seemed stuck to his left foot, never too far away, small touches that enabled him to keep control, light strikes with the side of his boot, the ball always on the ground to avoid the possibility of a failure of technique that would cause the ball to bounce off his knee or his shin and run away from him to where the older boys could get it back.
He had extraordinary co-ordination, a stature that helped him control the ball and natural speed. He challenged the older boys and he shone. Was this a divine gift or natural talent? There’ll be time to discuss that later.
What’s more (his face redder than a tomato), he was a great competitor. Or, rather, very competitive. Or better still: he had a brave character, and did not like losing. Behind the silences, there was a boy. He would often come home with a box full of marbles that he had won in the street. He counted them and if there were ever any missing he would go wild.
Celia, his mother: When he was small, at home he was very naughty. We used to play cards and no one wanted to play with him because we knew that sooner or later he would cheat.
Jorge Messi: He did not want to lose at anything.
Celia: If he didn’t win he would toss all the cards away. He did not want to go to school, he would say no, he did not want to go.
Leo (to El Gráfico): Once I had a fight with my cousin in his house, my grandmother was there as well. Everyone ended up against me, they threw me out and wouldn’t let me in. So then I started throwing stones at the gate and kicking it.
Celia: When I left him at the gate, he began throwing stones at me, saying he would not be coming back at midday, he would pepper the house with stones, and so I would go out and say to him, ‘I’m going to tell your father!’ And he just scoffed at it. He was very spoilt … he had a very strong personality, which I guess he has got from the both of us, but a bit more from me. He is a person who says what he feels, both good and bad, because he doesn’t try to hide his annoyance or his joy. From his father he got his sense of responsibility and he is very fair.
That is what his parents were trying to convey in a documentary for Informe Robinson (fronted by the former Liverpool player Michael Robinson) of Canal + Spain: you cannot hide fierceness; if you have it, you have it, and sometimes, just occasionally, he would bare his teeth.
The small pitch at Grandoli Football Club is surrounded by the Soviet-style concrete blocks of a dormitory town, a humble neighbourhood on the fringes of the city. Some say it is a hard and dangerous place. If you look closely between the buildings you can see the boats that go down river to the port of Rosario. The pitch is of earth with strips of green along the sides which mark the touchlines. The tall blocks seem like giants to the small players, who are indeed very small: children of five, six and seven years old and some older ones up to 12. A gate, a blend of turquoise and rust, flanks the entrance while a fence around the pitch stops the balls. There’s a sign that reads, ‘Clean your boots here’. The stand only has three tiers, and in the second row the parents of some of the children and grandmother Celia are seated. She has led little Leo by the hand to watch her grandson Matías. Rodrigo, who has also worn the red and white shirt of Grandoli, now plays for the juniors at Newell’s.
Leo is intermittently kicking a ball against the wall.
The group is taken by Salvador Ricardo Aparicio, a thin, calm man who has spent four decades involved with formative football. On that day there was one player missing so the generation of ’86 could play the usual 7 vs 7 game. It happens sometimes. Salvador waited to see if one more turned up.
‘Put him on, put him on,’ says the grandmother, referring to the little five-year-old who in those days was not yet known as ‘the Flea’.
‘He’s too small, woman. He could get hurt,’ answers Aparicio.
‘Put him on, put him on,’ insists Celia. ‘
OK, I will, I will. But if you see that he is crying or he is scared, take him off. Open the gate and take him off.’
And so the coach puts him on even though he is a year younger than the rest at a time when such age differences are very noticeable.
Out comes the little shrimp. The ball, when it comes to him for the first time, looks bigger than he does.
And what happens next just had to happen.The usual thing.
The ball comes to his right foot. Leo looks at it and it goes way past him. The boy doesn’t move.
Aparicio raises his eyebrows. It’s what he’d been expecting.
Leo receives another pass. This time the ball comes to his left foot: to tell the truth it hits him on the leg. But he takes two steps, accommodates the ball, brings it under control. And with little touches he starts a diagonal run across this vast obstacle course, dribbling past anyone who gets in his way.
‘Kick it, kick it!’ shouts Aparicio. ‘Pass it, pass it, Leo!’
Grandmother smiles.
Leo doesn’t pass it.
He’s very small. But from then on there was no way the coach was going to take him off. ‘He played like he’d been doing it all his life, him against the other thirteen,’ Salvador remembered much later on. That year he played the rest of the matches with the 1986 Grandoli side. And won titles.
Messi doesn’t remember anything from that day. His grandmother told him he scored two goals.
Leo wanted to play, of course, be it in the square, in the street, on his own, with his cousins and with Rodrigo and Matías, but, like any other kid, he wanted to do so
with a kit, a team shirt, with a side like his brothers played in. And so at the age of five and after that day of surprises under the watchful eye of Celia, his smiling grandmother, in fact even before his first day at primary school, he began playing every week in what is called baby-football (seven-a-side, for those aged between 5 and 12) at the Grandoli club in the neighbourhood where he was born, located at number 4700 Laferrere Street, an institution founded in February 1980 by a group of local fathers hoping to form a competition for children from the area.
Take a look at this video: youtu.be/ojUNSuW6DHg
Leo is five years old. He is already demonstrating the same ease of dribbling and change of pace that he does today. The same joyous celebrations. The same diminutive stature compared to the others.
El Piqui gets the ball and looks for a gap, driving, dribbling. All his opponents follow him. So do his team-mates. If he can’t get in one way, he keeps the ball. He searches on the other flank, team-mates and opponents all around him. You have to understand that in Argentina it is considered vulgar to score – it is much better to create, assist and link and to leave your opponents in your wake. For that very reason many thought that there was little about this extraordinary player that needed putting right. Rarely would the cry of ‘Pass it, Leo’ be heard again. At any given moment, the way would open up, Leo would launch the ball close to the post, far from the goalkeeper. Goal.
There are those who like to say, probably to provoke you, that you need to see if Messi is capable of playing on a freezing Wednesday night in winter at, say, a rain-soaked Stoke. They need to look at the slopes, the stones, the small pieces of glass on the uneven football pitch on which he played for his first team, Grandoli’s pitch, which is provided by the local authority and can only be used at night because by day it is used by a school. The lighting was also poor.
From the age of two, Lionel and his maternal grandmother, Celia, walked the 15 blocks that separate the Messis’ house from his first club, Leo holding onto her arm as he struggled to keep up with her. Tucked under his arm was the ball he’d been given as a present. They were off to see Rodrigo and Matías. Later, just Matías. Finally now in the team of boys a year older than him, he took the same route to training on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Games were played on Saturdays.
‘She was too good. She lived for us, the grandchildren. She would put up with all our whims, the cousins used to fight to be allowed to sleep at her house. I don’t know whether my grandmother understood football but it was she who took us to play. She was my first fan at training, at the games. Her cries of encouragement were always with me,’ Leo told El Mundo Deportivo in a rare moment of personal reflection.
Celia did not watch football on television, nor would you find her at the Newell’s stadium. For her, football was where her grandchildren played. And for the grandchildren, life revolved around their grandmother, a definitive point of reference for this matriarchal unit of Italian origin in which mutual respect and family support formed the cornerstone. If Leo is asked to define some of the best moments of his life, his illuminating answer will be ‘the birth of each one of my nephews’. That was asked, mind you, before the birth of his own son.
Leo and his grandmother walked from home to Grandoli and back again, and when he started school Grandma would collect him there at five o’clock in the afternoon, they would have a refreshing drink, and then, along with Matías, go off to training. ‘The fact is that it was a beautiful period in our lives, we really enjoyed Leo because as a kid he was already showing what he was made of. My grandmother died later, but everything started with her,’ says Matías Messi.
‘Pass it to Lionel, pass it to the little feller. He can score goals,’ she would shout. Grandma knew about football.
And because of her roots – she had more Latin blood in her than the others – she was less able to control her emotions, showing her hand more often than not. Like every club in the world Grandoli has its eternal rivals, opponents who go back to the beginning of time; sometimes it seems even earlier. These are the games that they just cannot lose. Playing Alice was one of those. Hard, physical encounters that would sometimes end up with fathers exchanging words and the occasional slap. At one of these matches that got out of hand, Celia struck one of the Alice supporters over the head with a bottle. ‘Stop messing around,’ she screeched. No great harm was caused. That day, needless to say, Grandoli won.
Shortly afterwards, it was discovered that Celia had Alzheimer’s.
The journalist Toni Frieros reveals this in his early biography of Messi, Messi: El Tesoro del Barça (‘Messi: The Treasure of Barcelona’): ‘Celia gradually began to lose her memory, to have speech difficulties and to confuse people, so for the last months of her life the family watched helplessly as her vitality was slowly consumed by a degenerative and incurable disease. For Leo, it was like losing a part of himself.’
It was like watching a living death.
Leo’s grandmother died on 4 May 1998, shortly before his eleventh birthday.
Celia never saw him play at the top or at Barcelona.
‘For everyone it was a huge loss and all of us without exception felt such great pain. To this day I still get emotional remembering Leo grabbing onto the coffin, weeping uncontrollably,’ recalls his Aunt Marcela.
‘It was a dreadful blow,’ says Leo now.
Since then, when he celebrates every goal Messi looks to the sky and points to the heavens. ‘I think a lot about her and I dedicate my goals to her. I would like her to be here but she left before she could see me triumph. This is what makes me most angry,’ he confessed to El Mundo Deportivo in 2009.
‘The poor woman, she never saw him triumph but she was the catalyst,’ says Alberto Arellano, father of Cintia and neighbour of the Messis.
‘When he was forging his career, he always told me that at night he spoke to his grandmother and asked for her help,’ remembers Leo’s mother. ‘It’s a shame that today she cannot see him. Who knows whether from up there or from wherever she may be, she can see what he has become and is happy for the grandson she loved so much.’
Leo believes in God, even though he is not a practising Christian, like all the other Messis. But he owes gratitude to his grandmother for accompanying him in the formative years of his life. And because, surely, she is still with him. The only time he didn’t raise his fingers first in salute to his grandmother after scoring was just after his son Thiago was born, when a thumb went into his mouth. But after that one instance he would once again acknowledge Celia in the usual way.
Leo left his neighbourhood for the first time at the age of 11. It was a Saturday in spring. He caught the bus with his friend Diego Vallejos, who is, incidentally, the brother of Matías’s wife. He was from the same neighbourhood. The two youngsters made their way half an hour out of town to Villa Gobernador Gálvez, in the south of the city.
To visit his grandmother’s grave.
Leo was at Grandoli from the age of five to almost seven. In that team of ’87 he wore the number 10 and his cousin Emanuel was the goalkeeper. Two things in particular kept repeating themselves during this period: they won practically everything that was going and, well, Lionel always had the ball.
Each practice, each game, was the most important ever, and before every practice, every game (and each one was the most important of all), Leo prepared in the minutest detail and without any assistance from anyone. First the boots, cleaned with water then a cloth and a brush. Then the ankles were bandaged. He was like a professional, small and deadly serious.
Salvador Aparicio was his first trainer and in his sessions he made them jog, then asked them to loosen up a bit and then introduced the ball. In those days the entire enterprise consisted, really, of playing playing and playing.
Salvador, ‘Don Apa’, had a wonderful story – he was not the man who discovered him, rather the conduit for an unstoppable talent. The former railway worker who died of a brain fissure in 2009, aged 79 (according to some p
eople, you could hear the air escaping from his head), never presumed to be any more than that: ‘I didn’t discover him. But I was the first person to put him on the pitch. I am proud of that.’
Don Apa, like hundreds of anonymous trainers and technical directors, convinced dozens of children from the neighbourhood, aged between 4 and 12, to come off the streets for a while and spend time with Grandoli where they would learn a certain order and happiness. His are the videos of a Leo, small and going at full pelt in his red and white shirt, dribbling around defenders, getting the ball in his own box and taking it into the opposition’s, scoring, then collecting the ball from the net to put it back on the centre spot to start all over again.
‘He scored six or seven goals every game. He positioned himself in the middle of the pitch and waited for the goalkeeper to kick the ball. The goalie kicked the ball, one of his team-mates would stop it, he would then take it off him and set off on a dribble. It was something supernatural.’ This is how Don Apa, in various interviews, remembered Leo. ‘When we went to a pitch, people would crowd in to see him. When he got the ball he owned it. It was incredible, they couldn’t stop him. Against Amanecer he scored one of those goals like you see in the adverts. I remember it well: he dribbled past everybody, goalkeeper included. How did he play? Like he plays now, with freedom. He was a serious boy, he always put himself beside his grandmother, he was quiet. He never protested. If they whacked him, sometimes he would cry but he would always pick himself up and carry on running.
‘Every time I see him play I start to cry. When I see the Maradona-type goal he scored, the one he got against Getafe, I remember when he was little, so little …’
David Treves, who replaced Don Apa, is today president of Grandoli. He proudly displays the trophies won by the club and the team photos. Messi is the one wearing the shirt that is too big for him. ‘It was very rare for a boy of his age to do all this,’ confirms Treves. ‘It was said that we had the next Maradona. The best footballer in the world began here, and his first football shirt was ours.’
Messi Page 6