Messi

by Guillem Balague

  ‘We thought he was a mute,’ says Cesc, laughing.

  ‘Messi is very shy, and I think he always will be, even though he is a bit better now. He is very respectful of people. There are those who say it’s because he is the best player in the world, as if he is super-important and has an inflated opinion of himself. But I think that this is more the case with players like Cristiano Ronaldo. Not Leo, though. He’s more of an “I don’t feel comfortable here, I wonder what this person is going to say to me” type of person.’ This is how Víctor Vázquez, who tried to discover if they shared any common interests, remembers it: ‘We tried to get him united with the group but he was more “no, I don’t fancy it, I’d rather go home”. He was the type of boy who just wanted to be with his family. He wasn’t like the rest of us. We could spend an afternoon laughing and joking, or at the cinema, or at El Corte Inglés, or just hanging out in the neighbourhood where anything could happen.’

  Leo did not live at La Masía, so he missed the nightly goings-on on the second floor where the bedrooms were situated and where the boys met to study. Or, rather, where they were meant to study. Sometimes someone would turn off the lights. Then some unfortunate, usually Piqué, whose cheekiness had done more than enough to deserve it, would get slapped on the back of the head. It was all done in fun and Piqué enjoyed it and laughed along with the rest of them. But that wasn’t Leo’s scene.

  ‘He was very shy,’ the full-back Oriol Palencia recalled in Jordi Gil’s book. ‘He went out, played, and nothing else. He wasn’t one of those types that puts himself in the forefront and says things like “come on, give more to the team, we need to work harder, come on guys” or stuff like that. He was much more in the background, but playing he was in a completely different class. In the Infantiles A group it was a bit more difficult for him because his physical shortcomings were more noticeable. He was very good, fast, skilful. But shorter. And as he responded to the physical conditioning, at Junior level he was explosive. But a whole year went by before he opened his mouth, or so it seemed. It was when we went to play a couple of tournaments with the Junior B side that he really opened up.’

  His family insist that Leo is not shy, he’s just reserved. This is worth reiterating because the difference is crucial and it is something he learned at home, a code of behaviour instilled in him in Argentina: he would speak, if necessary, on the pitch, respect the group and take on whatever role was assigned him. No more. His attitude was extreme, but in many ways also reflected his immigrant status. He was, after all, a stranger in a strange land.

  The consequences and effects on any youngsters forced to leave their country and adapt to a strange new environment are too numerous to mention. One constant, though, is their ability to mature faster than their indigenous peers. Threatened by an alien culture and maybe a new and baffling language, they feel vulnerable and, like any creature plucked from its natural habitat, quickly develop survival skills that often show themselves in a lack of trust, at least until new friendships are forged. Often the best form of self-protection is the simplest. Merge into the background. Offer no threat. And, if you’re lucky enough to have them with you, enjoy the protection of a loving family.

  The pressures heaped on young footballers aiming for the top make them age before their time, as they miss out on the natural developmental and emotional growth of childhood. They are entering a cutthroat, adult world and are suddenly exposed to a level of pressure that many 30-year-olds would find daunting. Even more so for the young migrant footballer. The child remains, though, locked inside the man-child, and every so often his plaintive cry can be heard…

  This makes them complex, and for many people hard to understand. And sometimes it creates instability.

  ‘Leo is smart, he knows when he has to be good, when to joke, when to be serious,’ explains Cesc. ‘I notice these things a lot. Many of us here are, at times, out of control, loose cannons who say things without thinking … but Leo is very smart, he knows how to handle himself, how to pick the right moment. We know how he is on the pitch, but in his house, or in the dressing room, he always knows what he has to do and when he has to do it.’

  But an immigrant boy is still a boy.

  And it’s that young boy we see when he gets cross at being substituted, or when he collides with an opponent or a team-mate. Nobody’s perfect. Can we accept it? These conflicts come from the child within, the child in all of us. Both family and club wanted to make the most of this part of his character: if it didn’t exist, an essence of who Leo was, the pleasure of playing, would be gone, would be lost. Those close to him believe that if he retains the characteristics of a child, he will continue to get pleasure from playing; that without them he will simply be a footballing automaton.

  And because part of Leo is still a child, he cries. Not only the tears of someone who misses his mother or his brothers, private tears. Also, the tears that flow after losing a match.

  ‘I saw him cry after one game, I think it was against Espanyol,’ remembers Víctor Vázquez. ‘We lost at their ground when we were playing in the league. We were in the Junior A side, and that particular game wasn’t a decisive result, because we ended up winning the league anyway. We had some chances towards the end, me as well as him, that we missed loads of chances lost, their goalkeeper stopped everything.’

  They were 15 years old. Víctor and Leo entered the dressing room together, Leo with his head bowed. He sat down, Víctor next to him. Messi covered his face with his shirt, just as he did when he missed that penalty against Chelsea in the semi-final of the Champions League in April 2012. ‘I thought, he’s missed a lot of chances, he hasn’t played badly but I guess he is upset. Later I put my arm around his shoulder and asked him: “Anything wrong?” And when I saw he wasn’t talking I pulled his shirt a bit. He was crying. “Fuck me,” I thought. He really felt it. He didn’t cry loudly, like many people do. His eyes looked watery, and tears were falling. There was such anxiety. And he said to me, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t score, I feel really bad, I couldn’t help you win.” And me as well, fucked, thinking: “holy shit, we couldn’t score any goals and the chances are that now we’re going to lose the league because of this one stupid game.” He was crying with rage. And, of course, despite what I was thinking, I was trying to console him by saying, “don’t worry, we’re going to win the league”.’

  They showered and Víctor carried on talking to him, and he promised him that they would win the next game. A joke or two. We’ll stick three past our next rivals. We’ll win next week, wait and see. We go now and have something to eat with the family and everything will be forgotten, believe me. And Leo said, ‘Okay, maybe, but I’m so upset because I couldn’t score, because we lost.’

  In the next game Leo scored a hat-trick.

  There were four games left until the end of the season, and after the defeat they were six points behind Espanyol. But their Catalan rivals lost two games and Barça won all theirs. And Víctor and Leo remembered that tearful day. He was the first to say, ‘See how everything can change?’

  One of the trials of the man-child is the growing realisation that he is not the centre of the universe and that in the future things will not be exactly as they are now. The reference points in life – home, family, friends – begin to shift as the wider world and new experiences start to encroach. The sooner this lesson is learned and embraced, the better for the individual’s emotional growth.

  When Leo went to Italy with Barcelona’s Junior A side everything started to make sense and he began to integrate himself into the group. He became one of them, rather than an outsider. As a consequence, the world became a slightly bigger place.

  Víctor Vázquez tells the story: ‘Messi had gone back to Argentina following a serious injury with the Infantiles and when he returned everything was, if not exactly new to him, almost. He was practically starting from scratch. When we went to Italy, to Pisa, for a Junior tournament, we were put up in a hotel that was a bit like a summer camp
. Here we spent twenty-four hours a day with him and we started to joke about with him, so he would become more confident.’

  That Junior side of Tito Vilanova’s was invited to compete for the Maestrelli trophy in Pisa, and Leo at 14, wearing the number 14 shirt, finished up as top goalscorer and player of the tournament that Barcelona won by beating Parma 2–0 in the final. Messi also won the virtual league on the PlayStation.

  ‘I remember that Piqué, the first or the second day, took all Leo’s things out of his room, his PlayStation, his clothes, his bed even, everything – and left his room completely empty. We hid it all somewhere else.’ Vázquez smiles mischievously as he recalls the event. ‘Poor Messi. After eating he went up for a rest, for a siesta, and we all trooped up silently behind him without him noticing, and he arrived at the room, and stared. He became serious, his eyes like dinner plates, and he started to cry. But really crying, the poor lad. Throwing himself on the ground: they’ve stolen everything, I haven’t got anything, no phone, no PlayStation, nothing … And Piqué, laughing, recording it on his phone, and all his stuff hidden in another room. We told him what we’d done, but not until a few hours later, and a team-mate had to take him to another room to rest. He was so wound up. Piqué is a real practical joker, and we laughed a lot that day, poor lad.’

  But from that moment everything changed. Leo wanted to be part of the group dynamic, he knew them all a bit and he knew they were a healthy, competitive group and that they respected him – in the sometimes strange world of football, being the target of a joke is a good thing, is a sign of respect, of belonging. ‘Well, Leo never let himself go totally, because he isn’t the sort of person to let himself go, and didn’t get involved the way Piqué or Cesc or even I did,’ says Vázquez. ‘But he laughed more, he was more integrated, he participated more. You might have been eating and he’d play a joke on you like hide your fork or your glass of water. And we spent a lot of time playing on the PlayStation. I’ve never played as much Play-Station as I did during that tournament, we were playing all hours. We had loads of free time and it was all PlayStation tournaments, PlayStation tournaments, and he always won. And I mean, always. We played for a bit of money, nothing huge, probably about €10 or 15, always joking with him. I used to say to him: “Fuck me, this fucking dwarf wins everything, the lot.” We tried to get him off the PlayStation, and beat him, on something called Golden Goal. We put on a game that would last for an hour and whenever someone let in a goal that person would drop out and someone else take over. Messi played for three hours without a break … and there was us, sick to death of him!’

  Víctor Vázquez and Toni Calvo, two of Leo’s best friends in Barcelona were the first people to call him enano – dwarf. ‘And Leo, to get his own back, would speak to us in Argentinian slang. We didn’t understand a word,’ Calvo says. An insult is an insult if it is taken as one, and Leo knew that it was not said with any malice, and that to reject the nickname would have been to show disrespect to the group and a sign of weakness.

  ‘We saw a completely different Leo on that trip,’ says Cesc. ‘I don’t know if we made him feel more comfortable, but we certainly paid more attention to him. It’s that sometimes, when you see such an introverted boy, it does something to you, you don’t want him to think that he’s not part of everything, but nor do you want him to think he deserves special attention. You have to measure what you do. We were adolescents, we used to hold little parties … without drinking alcohol or anything … but anyway … Leo opened up … imagine just how much he opened up that everyone remembers that trip … He was still introverted, but something good happened in Italy.’

  At Barcelona airport, the inside-left Robert Giribert had to ask for something from someone he didn’t know. He couldn’t pluck up the courage. Off his own bat, Leo got up and asked on his behalf. The boys looked at each other.

  Back in Barcelona, Leo’s flat was transformed into the meeting place for the next round of PlayStation.

  As often happens, the passage of time created a certain order and unity in the team. Every player started to become more comfortable in his role, and every role was defined by the shared experience and growing interaction between the team members, by the common cause. The team were beginning to gel. The generation of ’87 spent two and a half years together before the departure of Piqué and Cesc, and during that time Leo went from being an unknown to a valuable member of the team, although there were still minor hurdles to be overcome. In the eyes of his team-mates he was both strong and fragile at the same time. There were many in Rosario who would have done anything for him, those who wanted to sit him on their lap and look after him; his grandmother, the girlfriend from school, his mates from the schoolyard who followed his lead and always wanted him in the centre of the photograph, the coaches who asked the referees to look after him, and the referees who didn’t have to be asked.

  But in Spain, a combination of a changing physique, his reserved personality, undeniable talent, the self-belief that he would go far and his footballing style were contradictions that often confused the rest of the group and created mixed feelings among them. ‘Just leave him alone, he can look after himself,’ said some of his team-mates, all of whom were vying with him to achieve their own dreams of first team football. ‘You have to look after him,’ others said. The feeling that he needed protection was no longer unanimous now that he was beginning to grow, but there were still some who cared and who recognised his vulnerability.

  Leo and the rest of the gang moved from Tito’s Junior team to Junior A, managed by Alex García. From that season 2002−03 everybody remembers a youth clásico, a Barcelona−Damm played on one of the pitches near the Mini Stadium. Barcelona were winning 6–0, but Leo was still looking for one on ones attacking from the left. And wham! They whacked him, then again, and again. In the Cadete category, more than one of the boys had had a growth spurt and all of a sudden looked twice as big as the rest. Messi still looked small. ‘They gave him such a kicking, I tell you,’ Víctor Vázquez says today, closing his eyes almost as if he was the one receiving it. ‘It was inhuman. But the bloke got up, and got up again, and again, and the kicks he was getting were heavy. That day they were killing him. I remember Alex got off the bench to protest: we were all protesting. There was a brawl.’

  ‘Piqué came to blows defending him. He was sent off,’ says Cesc. ‘Piqué jumped in at the first opportunity, he would come running from the back, and at one metre eighty, who was going to argue with him! Anyway, he’d stop and say to them “don’t kick him like that, he’s not doing any harm, he’s just making sure everyone enjoys the game; if you can’t stop him, well, then don’t stop him”.’ ‘Piqué was the boss,’ Messi has often said.

  ‘If the referee isn’t going to protect you, then I will,’ Alex García told Leo as he subbed him. ‘The Flea’ was furious, not because they were kicking him badly, but because he wanted to carry on playing. ‘The normal reaction,’ Víctor Vázquez says, ‘is to think, “they’re kicking me because I’m very good and they can’t stop me, but anyway, probably best if they take me off”. But not him, he wanted to carry on playing, he probably thought, “put me on the other wing, I don’t care, but let me play”. And we were winning 6–0, remember!’

  ‘Some of us saw him as defenceless,’ remembers Vázquez. ‘He was good with his head, for his height, with a spectacular left foot, dribbling, speed … he played well, he was a good person, a good friend, nobody wanted any harm to come to him … in fact you had to help him, you felt bad if you didn’t. How can you not help a person who’s looking at you, albeit out of the corner of their eye, as if to say “please, help me, I need you to help me, because I need to adapt to this level of football because I want to be here and I want to succeed here”? So your heart takes over from your head and you say: I’ve got to give him a hand.’

  Víctor Vázquez saw him administering his hormone treatment at his home on Gran Via Carles III. By now they were meeting at Leo’s to play on the
PlayStation and sometimes his father would interrupt them. ‘It’s time for your injection.’ Leo would leave the room, he’d go to the kitchen or the bathroom and inject himself. Again. As time passed, Leo opened up to Víctor and told him that he didn’t like doing it. ‘Víctor, I hate this, I hate it, but I have to do it. If I don’t I’m going to end up a dwarf.’

  ‘On the one hand we were working hard at the club to ensure that Leo would grow normally, so his physique would match his natural skill,’ explains Alex García. ‘But on the other we were praying that Piqué wouldn’t grow any taller.’ At the age of 14 the central defender already measured one metre ninety. A few centimetres more, the club thought, and perhaps his footballing days would be over.

  In any case, Barcelona decided to stop Leo’s hormone treatment when he was 14. The following year, he measured one metre sixty-two and weighed 55 kilos. But he still couldn’t finish games well. ‘I lack resistance, speed. And, yes, I get tired from time to time,’ he said in an interview in 2002. He participated in a voluntary individual physical fitness programme designed by the club that was being overseen by a physiologist, a sports doctor and a physical trainer. Gerard Piqué and, on occasions, Javier Saviola, also took part in the programme.

  The idea, as Toni Frieros explains in his biography of Messi, consisted of individual training to suit his own muscle structure. The final report, written in June 2002 after analysing 44 gym sessions, was, in Messi’s case, ambiguous: ‘He is the player who has participated the least in this study. He has missed 12 sessions because of problems caused by the Christmas holidays and because of illness. When he has been able to work he has done so always in the shadow of his team-mates, correctly but without showing any initiative.’

  Behind the apparent fragility of the Argentinian lay a personality prepared to fight for his place in the football jungle. ‘I don’t see him as a weak bloke … well, perhaps he is a bloke people feel they need to protect because they are close to him, I understand that,’ admits Cesc. ‘Leo may well be introverted, may well be timid, perhaps he doesn’t say much, but Leo has got collons [the Catalan word for cojones]. What Fàbregas is saying is that he never felt the need to come to blows in his defence, because Leo could, when necessary, demonstrate a steely resolve that showed his inner strength. One minute an opponent would be attempting to kick the hell out of him and all of a sudden Leo would come up with a spectacular dribble and the attacker would be left floundering! And that is much worse for the victim. Yes, Cesc believed Leo could look after himself all right.