Messi

by Guillem Balague

  The presidential elections of 2008 allowed a change at the helm of the club. López stood twice, winning once and losing fourteen years later. In between, he arranged for elections to be suspended, for the lists of candidates to be challenged, or for the justice department to fail to authorise the voting. Since 2008 the club has tried to return to the way it once was: in 2013 Newell’s became champions again, with Tata Martino in charge, just before he went to Barcelona.

  When Celia, Leo’s mother, declared in 2010, ‘I speak for myself, not my husband: for me, Newell’s doesn’t exist’, she was referring to the old Newell’s. The current board is very close to Jorge and to Leo, so much so that the Messis have even invested, so it is said, in a new gymnasium for the Sports City and a number of other projects. There are some who can see Jorge as a club director and Leo wearing the red and black shirt. One day.

  Leo’s departure has left scars, as Wright Thompson explained on a website. ‘ For years he [Ernesto Vecchio] resented his former player. Something happened here at this school, a bit of magic, and Vecchio played a role. Many people did. There should be some acknowledgment. Instead, they’re known as the shortsighted fools who let a legend walk away. The former Newell’s team official in charge of Messi’s growth hormone payments still carries around receipts, which seem like forgeries, trying to prove that he didn’t make the dumbest decision in the history of professional sports.’

  And Leo? When he was asked in 2009 how he felt about Newell’s, he chose to be diplomatic. ‘Angry, no, because I’m not like that. I have a lot of love for the club. I went to the pitch as a small boy and dreamed of being on it one day.’

  *

  So there it is. In Rosario, Leo had been surrounded by the people who valued him, who protected him, people who encouraged him and who helped him grow. All of them wanted to see him come out on top. All bar a few at the place where he played, his club. ‘When we found out that the club was not going to pay for his treatment we were very sad,’ remembers Cintia Arellano. ‘When the boys from the neighbourhood said their goodbyes, I was with him. He hugged me and said, don’t cry, don’t cry.’

  People who knew him well wanted to give him a send-off. They were leaving, surely never to return. We’re staying here, said his friends, his family. You’re very brave. Good luck to you.

  ‘We left the neighbourhood, Las Heras, and all our friends, all our people, came out to say their goodbyes,’ Leo told Cristina Cubero in the Catalan newspaper El Mundo Deportivo in 2005. ‘They were all in the street. The whole family was going, my parents Jorge and Celia and my brothers Rodrigo, Matías and my little sister María Sol who at that time was five years old. That day we were so sad that my brother Matías and I cried, we cried a lot. It was a very gloomy journey; we missed our family, my uncles, everybody.’

  Today, more than a decade later, he remembers the trip as if it were a dream, but at the time it was terrible – they were going to what seemed like the other side of the world, with the sound of his very roots being torn up playing in his ears. It happens with every departure, and it is a powerful echo.

  ‘He left, and from one day to the next we knew nothing about him,’ remembers Gerardo Grighini. ‘Maybe his neighbours knew. He is a very reserved person, not someone who finds out about something and has to go and tell everybody. And probably his father, his mother, told him, don’t say anything. What’s more, he had gone to River Plate, he had been at River for a week and later on he went to Barcelona. We didn’t know anything about River or the trial at Barcelona either; we found out about it afterwards when he was in Spain.’

  ‘I went to greet him at his hotel when he came with the national team to Rosario to play Brazil, but he couldn’t come down to reception,’ Vecchio remembers. ‘His parents came down, and I spoke to them for quite a while. The only thing I managed was to say hello to him when he was sitting in a group. He saw me and smiled … I cherish that memory.’

  Ángel Ruani, the father of ‘Luli’, Leo’s friend, recalls the following: ‘The last time I saw him was with my son and a few friends on New Year’s Eve 2005 when they came home at about five in the morning. They woke me up to wish me Happy New Year. Bighearted, no?’

  And Nestor Rozín: ‘You keep in your heart, in your mind, the good things that he did, and the day I have to go, maybe one or two will know in their minds and in their hearts that I helped him a bit.’

  ‘I had not seen him for a while and we met at the Copa América in Venezuela, in 2007. He came up to greet me. That was rewarding, he was the same kid I had in the ninth and tenth teams. He came over and gave me a hug … You should remember this: he’s the same person I knew when he was a nipper.’ This is Adrián Coria, who, as assistant to Martino with the Paraguayan national side in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, saw him again after that affectionate meeting. Coria was walking onto the training pitch just as Argentina were leaving. From a distance, Leo saw him, took off his top and gave it to him. Adrián has put it in his office in Rosario.

  The boy Leandro Giménez, who had a trial with Leo at River, never saw Leo in person again after he left Argentina. Nor has he spoken to him. ‘He gave me his telephone number when he went to Barcelona, but I never called him. I don’t know why. Before the last World Cup I left him a message on Facebook. I told him that he was a source of pride for all Argentinians. He was grateful for all the messages he received. But I also got a Like from him,’ he smiles. Today, aged 24, Giménez lives in Buenos Aires and works with a foreign trade company. He doesn’t want to play any more, except with his friends on Saturdays. He ended his footballing career a disillusioned man.

  Grighini, who spent six years in Italy, went to see an Inter–Barcelona game but did not ask Leo for a ticket. Or a shirt. Earlier, he had seen him at an airport, ‘but he wasn’t yet famous. At that time, as we had distanced ourselves from each other and we didn’t communicate on a day-to-day basis, he was that shy boy once again. He would answer: “yes, no, it’s going well, what do you know, Barcelona …” I’m talking about when he was 16 and had only just started to play. For me we would have to speak on a daily basis or maybe after a few hours together everything would click again and we could go back to “you remember when …” and all the anecdotes. But at the beginning, if you hadn’t seen him for a while, he was reserved, distant. But of course he is an idol to me. For me the matter of a shirt is different, I’m not interested, I’m more interested in sharing a meal, or going out for a bit.

  ‘I went to England, to Everton, in June 2005,’ Grighini continues. ‘But after that I had a bit of bad luck: I had a very bad car accident, we hit two lorries. I only fractured my fibula but my friend, the player Julio González, was travelling with me and could have lost his life. He had multiple fractures and they amputated his left arm. He returned to playing a bit later, how cool is that! Later I tore my cruciate ligaments, three times in a row, and I was out of the game for three and a half years. I came out all right but destiny and life mark you and if they tell you that football is not for you, then you have to follow your life in another direction.’

  And Diego Rovira: ‘I had to tell my parents, so I did, after supper. In fact, it wasn’t so much me coming up with any big news – I just confirmed what they guessed all along. Mum, Dad, I am leaving football. That was March 2011. Yes, I am quitting. They had supported me, bankrolled me. My dad said something very obvious: it is a shame, son. And it really was. He knew how hard I had tried, he was the one who had watched me in hundreds of games, with Leo at Newell’s … they still call me the number 9 who played with Leo.’

  It’s very difficult to make it in football.

  The last farewell, that of Quique Domínguez: ‘A while ago we played a qualifier for the 2014 World Cup, Argentina−Uruguay in Mendoza and Chile−Argentina in Chile. My eldest son Sebastián, Maxi Rodríguez (“the Beast”) and Leo were called up. The three of them in the same squad! And now they were going to meet. Maxi had to leave the squad because of an injury and return to Rosario
and my son Sebastián said to me: “the Beast is coming back, look for him because he’s got something for you. I don’t know what it is, but he told me to warn you because he has a present.” It had been more than 20 years since I had last coached the Beast, and 13 since I had trained Leo. Maxi brought me a shirt. Signed by both of them, by Leo, by himself. There are people who say to me, “How ungrateful, you never hear from them.” No, things happen naturally when you feel them. And that day they thought it was a good idea to send me a shirt. I am very thankful.

  ‘I feel,’ Domínguez says, ‘one drop of sweat, only one, from every game that Leo plays is mine, it tells me that I have something to do with Leo’s life, but I don’t ask for anything back, I don’t ring him, I don’t need all that. I saw him one day on television on a programme that honoured him, I was there and I said hi to him. But if Leo closes his eyes and you ask him, “remember the people who passed through your life” … roll of drums … Quique Domínguez will be there, briefly, in passing … this to me has a much greater value than any shirt …

  ‘No, I am no longer coach.’

  Is that Leo Messi, the one talked about by Domínguez, or Grighini or Rovira, the real one? Or are they seeing the Leo they want to see? With this Argentinian fascination for the Messiah, for the one who has the gift, the special one, it becomes difficult to separate image from reality, especially when the country was and still is in turmoil. It is in times of crisis when the need for heroes intensifies.

  This stage of his life was coming to a close for Leo, but it never totally ended for those who had been close to him. He stayed with them, in their minds and hearts.

  Jorge, by the way, never collected his final pay cheque from Acindar.

  Part Two

  In Barcelona

  1

  Landing in Barcelona. Well, in Rosario. That is, in Barcelona

  On the flight from Rosario to Buenos Aires, Lionel Messi cried non-stop. As though he was never going to return. Silent tears. His face twisted, the teardrops streaming down his face. Until he breathed in and let out the deep sigh of a lost boy. That’s how he cried on the 50-minute journey to the federal capital.

  It was 15 February 2001. After landing at Ezeiza airport and before boarding the plane to Barcelona, conversations took place around the table to take their mind off the coming events, and Leo calmed down. En route to Spain, in between bouts of nausea caused by the turbulence, he fell asleep, and bit by bit, with every mile further away from home, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, ‘the sea worked its magic, the sadness of absence would come later’.

  The Messi/Cuccittini family arrived in Barcelona on a cold mid-afternoon, and took a taxi to the Hotel Rally in the Travessera de les Corts, opposite the Camp Nou. The club had summoned them a few days later for a meeting with the aim of getting all the contracts signed, although, strangely, nobody had so far offered to meet the cost of the treatment that Leo had started in Rosario.

  Eventually, director Joan Lacueva agreed to stump up €2,000 of his own money so he could take the first doses he needed.

  And so they spent 15 days in a hotel room and at training, feeding a passion and trying to put some order into the chaos of a new life.

  On 1 March 2001, at a table in the hotel restaurant under the watchful eye of Lacueva, the young Leo Messi signed his first two-year contract with Barcelona. In insisting that all the bureaucracy was sorted out and ensuring that Messi finally became a Barcelona player, Lacueva was derided by many of his fellow directors. They were convinced it was all a waste of money. Time, however, would reward him for his efforts, and those of Rexach, Rifé and Minguella.

  But the matter didn’t end there: one director – who prefers to remain anonymous – was furious to discover that agreement had been reached without the approval of the board. Without any consultation. How could a young boy cost the club so much money!? He not only refused to sign the document, despite the fact that it had already been signed by both side’s lawyers and a vice-president; in a fit of rage he also tore up the document.

  None the less, the club confirmed the contract.

  ‘When I hear someone say “I signed this guy or that guy …” it’s a lie; you signed no one, Barça signed,’ says ex-president Joan Gaspart in charge of the club at the time. ‘Did you pay for it, out of your pocket? You didn’t, did you? So it was Barcelona who signed him. You may have been the intermediary at the time … but you signed no one. And they say that Messi’s contract was signed on a napkin. Well, no actually. It’s a funny story, a good anecdote, but Messi’s contract was signed by the then vice-president of Barcelona, Francisco Closa. And he signed it because I authorised it.’

  The most difficult part was still to come – how Messi would adapt. Barcelona had found a flat for the family on Gran Via Carles III, near the Camp Nou, and the Messi/ Cuccittinis moved in at the beginning of March, two weeks after their arrival. It was a large apartment, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a balcony that led to an internal area where there was a communal swimming pool adjoining another building, trees and tranquillity. Lionel could get up 15 minutes before training and still arrive at the ground on time. That way he could sleep a little longer. The concierge of the building – as revealed by Luis Martín of the newspaper El País, a journalist well known for asking those kinds of questions that no one else thinks about – did not realise for five years that the guy who greeted him every morning played for Barcelona. ‘It’s amazing, no? It’s just that I don’t really do football. I don’t like it,’ he told Martín.

  In Rosario people from all over the province would come to see him. In Barcelona not even his concierge knew who he was.

  And right from the start, everything went pear-shaped. Did he really want to be a footballer? Let’s see what he was made of. A rocky road lay ahead.

  ‘I did not understand a word. They all spoke in Catalan!’ A few years after his arrival, Leo looked back at his first days with Barcelona with a mixture of excitement and irritation. As happens with every new kid in a group of kids, Messi felt shy and apprehensive about jumping into conversations, but he was received with a lesser degree of understanding than people would admit now. During the first training games he did not get much of the ball, team-mates were not particularly encouraging, he felt a complete outsider. Even as a 13-year-old he understood there was a price to be paid to be accepted – he was there, potentially, to replace one of the friends of those playing.

  Leo was told by some of his team-mates that one of the coaches who was checking on his level in the first weeks had told some of the kids to go in hard on him; he didn’t want him to stay at Barcelona. He was, Messi explained later on in the Argentinian TV show Sin Cassette, the same coach who ‘asked me to play one-touch, not to dribble too much. But to be honest I didn’t take much notice of what he said, I used to do what came naturally to me.’

  It is the same story the world over. Once the door is open, when it is confirmed that you are staying with the group, then you’re accepted, the attitude of your team-mates changes. But Messi never forgot those early weeks when he was made conscious of his outsider status. He felt he had earned his place in the club.

  As a foreigner, Leo was unable to play official matches with the Infantiles A side, the team that corresponded to his age group. He only had permission to play in the Catalan regional league and in friendlies, and what’s more, Rodolfo Borrell, the team’s coach, preferred to use him sparingly, in keeping with the unwritten law of not changing an unbeaten side during a season that was well underway, with youngsters performing at a high level and who had already become league champions with seven games still to play.

  In any case the physical fragility of this Argentinian footballer was so obvious that in training sessions Borrell instructed his players to tread carefully with him. ‘Please don’t kick him,’ he asked his defenders when Leo came out to train, the first to step onto the pitch. ‘He’s so fast, and so slight that you could injure him.’ He might have looked
like nothing but he was difficult to stop. He kept looking for the second dribble, the third, travelling at speed. Cesc Fàbregas couldn’t get the ball off him during one of those afternoons where Leo was showing off his stuff. He gave him a good kicking. ‘Cesc, please, calm down, he’s only just got here, that’s not the idea.’ The next time Rodo urged the players to be careful. To the amusement of everyone Piqué shouted, ‘How can we be careful? We can’t even get close to him!’

  ‘He was incredible, he picked the ball up and just started to dribble past everyone, that’s how he used to spend each session, dribbling past everyone and scoring goals, it didn’t matter against who,’ remembers Víctor Vázquez, who played with him for a few years in the lower ranks. ‘We hadn’t seen anything like it before because we were more of a passing side; he just got the ball and went. We said among ourselves that he was more of an individualist, but that was at the beginning. We soon realised that we should have been delighted to have a player such as him in our team.’

  Bored of winning by six-, seven-, eight-goal margins, Borrell wanted his squad to play one of the tournaments against older teams so that his players would ‘feel the heat’. Barcelona accepted his suggestion and sent them to the Pontinha tournament in Portugal where they would come up against Portuguese opponents, a French side and one from Germany, with youngsters two years older than that historic generation that included Piqué, Cesc, Vázquez, Marc Pedraza, Rafael Blázquez and the recently arrived Messi, who was able to play because this was not an official competition. They finished third out of eight and Leo felt comfortable.