Another test passed.
Without the international transfer papers that Newell’s still hadn’t sent, he received a provisional licence from the Catalan Federation on 6 March, and the club, conscious of the strength of Borrell’s Infantiles A team, decided that Leo would play more regularly if he went down to the Infantiles B side of Xavi Llorens, the only time in ‘the Flea’s’ career that he was the oldest boy in the group.
At Newell’s he even took the warm-up sessions while the coach was otherwise occupied; at Barcelona, he was not yet completely in his comfort zone.
But despite the fact that the situation was a new one for the club and complicated for the new arrival, no one doubted his talent. He trained with Llorens four times a week, from six to nine in the evening. He arrived a little before six, collected the kit that the club had got ready for him, changed and trained. And he was never in any hurry to go home afterwards.
Where are you from? Where do you play? the kids would ask him in his first training sessions with the Infantiles B side. He was a year older than them but physically still much smaller. ‘Enganche,’ he’d reply. No one was quite sure what that meant; it was a very Argentinian expression. But, at the end of the first week, a boy approached Llorens to ask what was becoming a rhetorical question: ‘Is he going to play for us for long?’ The boy wanted it to be a positive answer, but it wasn’t to be – the coach preferred to sidestep the question. Surely Leo was too good for that level.
‘I well remember one match we played in training,’ says the Infantiles B trainer. ‘There was a corner against our side, and he put himself on the edge of the area to defend, as he’d been told to do. The ball fell to him, he started heading towards the opposing goal, going the length of the pitch, the one we call number three, opposite the Mini Stadium, passing one, two players – they’d all been attacking up the other end so there weren’t many. He got to the opposition’s area, took two more steps and then did what Maradona had done that day against Red Star: disguised his shot by sticking in a little dink, a lob. Unbelievable. He scored and went back to the centre circle as if nothing had happened. And you’d look at him and think … bloody hell! He walked back without looking towards the bench, straight down the middle of the pitch, hugging his team-mates. When players do something like that, they look at the bench to catch your eye, to see if they’ve done well or not. Not him, he just did it his way. It’s a small thing that I will always remember. As if nothing had happened.’
A bit later, Xavi Llorens wrote a report that Joaquim Rifé had asked for, confirming that the quiet, 1.47-metre-tall Leo was a ‘little Maradona’, small in stature but with supreme speed and skill.
Leo made his debut in an official match in a Barcelona shirt, with the number 9 on his back, at Amposta’s ground, in the Catalan regional league in which he was eligible to play. He scored one of Infantiles B’s three goals and naturally he was selected for the next match, against Ebre Escola Deportiva. It would be played on 21 April.
The teams had breakfast together on the day of the game and their photographs were taken on the pitch. Marc Baiges, the opposing number 10, placed himself for the photo behind Leo’s slender frame. In fact, the star of that side was not Leo, who had only just arrived, but Mendy, a goalscorer with great physical presence.
The game kicked off. That was the good news.
In playing what was his second official match for the Infantiles (aged 12−13 years), he fulfilled the requirements of the Spanish Federation that would now allow him to play in the national category, too, a rule that youth coach Albert Benaiges discovered almost by accident: further proof of just how unaware and unprepared Barcelona were for what Leo was bringing. If, as a foreigner he had not played in those two games, he would have been obliged to jump from the next category, the Cadetes (aged 14−15 years), directly to Barcelona B in the second division without being allowed to participate in the two intermediary stages Barcelona academy footballers tend to play in to ensure their careful progression through the ranks.
By being unaware about the obligation for foreign players to play at least two games in the Infantiles, the club had inadvertently affected the career of other footballers. Leo was kept on the right road by Benaiges’ chance discovery, but Gilberto, a Brazilian youngster, was not so lucky. Having not played at Infantiles level and so having the normal progression through the ranks blocked, the club decided to loan him out. But he did not adapt to being sidetracked and finished off playing in minor leagues after leaving Barcelona. Sometimes the margins between success and failure are very narrow.
Now for the bad news.
Seconds after the start of the game, the ball came out to Leo on the left wing and he lost control of it. From the throw-in, Baiges, the kid who’d stood behind Messi in the team photo, shaped to boot the ball upfield, only for the young Argentinian to put his leg in the way. Result? A fracture of the left fibula. The first major injury of his career, and one that prevented him from playing for two months. ‘Are you saying that I broke it? Mother of God!’ exclaimed Baiges years later when the magazine Libero told him what had happened that day. ‘It’s not that I didn’t know that I’d broken Messi’s leg, it’s that I didn’t know that I’d broken anybody’s leg.’ In fact, it wasn’t even a foul.
‘He got injured in front of the bench,’ remembers Xavi Llorens. ‘We noticed that something serious had happened and so we sent him to hospital to have it checked. He twisted in pain at first, but soon calmed down. He said he had hurt himself, but wasn’t moaning or anything. His father was at the hospital with him. I couldn’t go at that point because we had to finish the game. One of the directors went with him. And the boy asked, “What have I got? Will I be out for long?” When a footballer is injured he thinks, “tomorrow I want to go and run, and now I can’t. In a few days I have a game, and now I can’t play …” That is all he had on his mind.’
Messi had to wear a plaster on his leg. He would occasionally go to training on crutches, but his trainer noticed a surprising strength in the 13-year-old: ‘We didn’t have to encourage him, you saw that he was strong.’ Those closest to him, though, remember him being ‘fucked’. His little sister María Sol didn’t need to be told about how difficult it was to take Leo from training, away from the ball. Some afternoons when the day was dragging, without saying a word she would hold Leo’s hand.
Then, in June, a week after coming back, he suffered ligament strain to his left ankle. Going downstairs! Three more weeks without playing. His body wasn’t just small, it was fragile. By the end of that unfortunate period, four months after he had arrived in Barcelona, Leo had played only two official games and one friendly tournament.
The Messi/Cuccittini family spent the summer of that short and irregular first season back in Rosario. Celia had travelled home earlier to be with her sister, Marcela, who needed a kidney operation.
But something had changed; a light had gone out during those first months in Spain. It was not clear if Leo, now 14, would return to his new club; if he would decide to stay at home or return to Barcelona with his family after that summer.
*
It has been said somewhere that, even before the family left Rosario, Jorge spoke to his mother’s cousin who lived in Lleida, 76 miles from Barcelona, seeking support. In fact, they met many months later when they were already established and living in Spain. They had set out on their voyage of discovery without a safety net, without even life jackets, without any family support other than what the five of them living together in the apartment on Gran Via Carles III gave each other.
All this, and the fear of shipwreck, brought them closer in those first months in Barcelona: they shared free time together, meals, disappointments. Leo wanted to discover the sea and they would all walk there together. ‘We’d go to the beach. I lived in a city with a river, without the sea, so the beach for us was very attractive. It was cold, that made it a bit sad, but I liked it,’ Messi told Cristina Cubero in El Mundo Deportivo in 2005.
/> Jorge tried to ensure that the setbacks did not affect the harmony of the family unit, but Leo couldn’t play football, the main reason they were there. And Barcelona were not paying what they promised, nor were they rushing through the necessary paperwork. You could already discern a certain sloppiness, a lack of urgency, following the September trial, and now that everything had been signed and sealed, certain doubts were beginning to surface, evidence of a lack of care even. Furthermore, Jorge’s employment situation had not been sorted out, and he ended up writing a letter to the president, Joan Gaspart, explaining how abandoned they felt. ‘My situation and that of my family is desperate. I have made all the necessary economic provisions up to the current month, at which time the signed agreements between us should have taken effect, and today I find myself without notice of any new payments and without anyone to speak to and advise me as to what actions I should take.’ This desperate letter had been written on 9 July 2001 and published much later in El Gráfico.
The list of grievances was becoming long and heavy. The Messis felt deceived. Not so much by the club as an institution, but, rather, by those who had promised to take care of the family, and that included some of the player’s representatives. Leo was FC Barcelona’s principal, or more accurately, sole concern: they wanted him at school, at training, to make sure he ate properly, and to supervise his physical and hormonal development. Leo and his father were the only members of the family with an NIE (Número de Identidad de Extranjero, an identification number required by non-Spanish nationals in Spain). For this reason, Rodrigo was unable to carry on playing football, María Sol ended up in a state school where she suffered a certain amount of discrimination because she was foreign and Matías, who had left his girlfriend back in Rosario, felt lonely and displaced. The fabric of family life was slowly coming apart at the seams.
With the first team repeatedly trying unsuccessfully to win titles, as a consequence the entire club was in the doldrums, and Leo Messi was seen by those both inside and outside the club as something of an experiment. Let’s see what comes of it was the thinking. He was just a number, perhaps a good financial investment. But it was becoming obvious that the Barcelona board lacked experience, astuteness or an understanding of how to handle their Argentinian.
Meanwhile Leo attended classes, as did all the young blaugranas, at the Lleó XIII school. He didn’t enjoy it and as a result did not get good marks. He wasn’t lazy, just a bit uninterested and, like many, would open a book at a particular page that would remain before his glazed eyes, unread, until the end of the lesson. He attended, but wasn’t there, complied – but that was it: he knew that it was all part of becoming a professional footballer. And so he did it. Albeit reluctantly.
Sometimes the school bus that picked the boys up at the gates of La Masía left without him. Training, yes. Resting, yes. And the PlayStation, any time of the day. Anything else: not a great deal. He had completed the first year of his secondary schooling in Rosario but, in Barcelona, he left his studies two courses short of a possible transition to university. He still excelled in gymnastics, but his childhood dreams of becoming a PE teacher were soon abandoned. Celia would have liked him to work harder, in case a career in football failed to materialise, but Leo’s lack of attention in school, a source of many a family discussion, was readily forgiven. When he rose to the Barcelona B side in 2004, aged just 17, he did not have much time to attend the lessons, what with all the training and so many hours in the gym dedicated to putting on muscle. He had the perfect excuse. No more school, then; it lost its appeal when the objective of becoming a professional seemed even closer.
But there was something else that made it a bit less attractive. In Barcelona, at the Lleó XIII, he was ‘different’ – he was from abroad, had an accent, different customs, was quiet, and had growth problems; he was a figure of ridicule. He couldn’t overcome that just by showing off his footballing skills so as to win the appreciation and unconditional respect of everyone, as had happened in Las Heras, because in the Catalan school there were others, his team-mates, who were just as good.
So he had to toughen up quickly. In public, Leo had become even more reserved than he had ever been in Argentina, with the attitude of a much older boy, serious, taciturn. He preferred to listen, remain seated, watching. Surrounded by older people, away from the ball, he didn’t seem like a normal boy, rather someone who had switched off. His father says that he is more responsible than he is himself, his mother that he has a strong but quiet personality. All true, but Leo was, above all, a boy in exile.
In Rosario he had lived the healthy, if fantasy-filled life of a child. Dreaming of getting onto an 11-a-side pitch and playing. Getting into the first division with Newell’s. Like his brothers and his father, he wanted to be a footballer. Later on came the training, the matches, including the important issue of the 11-a-side game urged on by the coaches, together with an obligation to behave responsibly; and the perennial question, ‘you want to be a professional footballer, right?’ At the age of 12 he had to answer categorically because the chance of emigrating had arisen. And football was no longer just a game.
Suddenly everything became black or white. Yes or no? Did he want to be a professional footballer? He would do whatever was necessary to achieve it. He didn’t mind going abroad. Even at that early age he had to get it right; ‘yes’ was the only answer, he could not get it wrong. This wasn’t pressure put upon him by his mentors, but failure had potentially disastrous consequences for the family. His father had left his job, his mother had said goodbye to her family, his brothers had left their friends behind. And if it didn’t work out, what then? Many children of that age have felt such pressure that their progress has become permanently stifled.
There’s a seed, one planted almost always subconsciously, which germinates in the minds of these youngsters. Leo had been heard saying, from the time that he was playing with the Infantiles, that he would one day play in the first division. At 11 he’d told his brother Rodrigo that he wanted to win the Ballon d’Or. This was no longer the innocent dream of a seven- or eight-year-old boy; it was effectively a refusal to allow the remotest possibility to enter his head that he would not achieve his objectives, that it would all end in disaster.
This happens to the majority of boys who take the step from playing for fun to playing because they want to earn their living from it. But especially to those who leave everything behind them: failure is not an option. If failure was ever to be considered (and it never would be), their whole world would fall apart. Leo and many other 12-, 13-, 14-year-old boys tell themselves every day of every week, with all the certainty of an adult, that everything is going to come good. And the reality is that things, particularly at that level of expectation, rarely do.
This extraordinary mindset doesn’t just reject the possibility of failure, but is also accompanied by the suppression of emotion. You become desensitised.
Leo Messi arrived in Barcelona at the height of Pujolismo, a political programme begun by Jordi Pujol, the president of Catalonia, in 1980. Embraced by the Catalan middle classes, the Church and the intelligentsia, it still exists today. As an ideology it sought to create a Catalan ideal that would bring social cohesion to the Catalan nation in the post-Franco period.
One of the first directives was to restore a national holiday, to be held annually on 11 September. This date, seared into the minds of Catalan nationalists, recalls the nation’s defeat by Spanish Bourbon troops in 1714 and the suppression of Catalan identity. It was clearly chosen to play on that sense of exclusion and victimisation that is so much a part of the conservative nationalist ideology that has become so popular. Harnessing and promoting feelings of discrimination by the central government based in Madrid (with justification, both historically and to the present day) has been the hallmark of ‘Pujolism’ and its political offshoot, CiU. This has often led to misperceptions internationally, as many observers confuse Catalonia with the conservative nationalistic ideology that cl
aims to speak in its name. Quite intentionally ‘Pujolism’ perverts and occludes the fact that there are many ways to be a ‘Catalan’, and all of them are legitimate.
None the less a programme of positive discrimination took root as the regional administration bowed to Pujol’s fantasy and implemented a number of radical reforms that further fed public sentiment. The most far-reaching was the imposition of the Catalan language in all state schools. This had its origin in the doctrine espoused by the pedagogue Alexander Gili, who taught that students should not be separated by language, and was based on his teaching experience in Quebec and the USA. His philosophy would eventually be enshrined in the 1983 Language Policy Act.
FC Barcelona became central to the policies of Pujolismo. Viewed by many as the Catalan national team, it was used by politicians to foment and export nationalistic sentiment, while at the same time integrating recent arrivals to Catalonia in such a way that they would ‘become’ Catalans. Nationalism used FC Barcelona and the club bowed to the pressure. The result of this was, and still is, the perverse notion that to be a true Catalan you must support Barcelona.
In Barcelona in the spring of 2001 having the surname Messi carried no weight whatsoever – the family was just one more group of South American immigrants. They had arrived from Rosario with only four months remaining in the school year, and Leo’s sister María Sol had to integrate quickly into the state education system that would require her to learn a completely new language. The delay in payments and Barcelona’s inflexibility meant that she was unable to put her name down for a private school where the language barrier would have been non-existent or dealt with differently.
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