The role of a sports psychologist is a difficult one; he is seen by the players as a ‘grass’ and yet some of them take on that role as part and parcel of belonging to such a prestigious institution. The footballer is promised total discretion, but the enduring suspicion that any work done begins from a skewed standpoint is never far from the player’s thoughts. Colomer’s proposal was initially accepted by Leo, but it wasn’t long before he told the club that he had no wish to carry on talking with somebody whom he did not trust. And that trust was well and truly broken when the doctor brought in a group of psychology students to see how well he was working with the player. All that was serving no purpose for Leo, who stopped attending the meetings. He believed he could cope with all the pressure that came from being just a step away from the first team – mostly because he did not feel it.
His physical development continued: from August 2003 to April 2004 Leo put on 3.7 kilograms, primarily in muscle. The diminutive Leo was now a thing of the past. It was a growth strengthened not so much in the gym, but, rather, in the coaching sessions and his continued presence in the starting line-up of Barcelona B. The faith shown by Josep Colomer and the insistence of other coaches such as Guillermo Hoyos, Alex García, Tito Vilanova and Pere Gratacós was giving him confidence, too, the most important vitamin in a player’s development. ‘When he stops progressing, we’ll stop him there, whatever level he’s at. But why stop him before he’s reached that level?’ the director of youth football told Leo’s dad.
Those were the days when, it seemed, if a footballer did not sport a beard and a moustache, he didn’t play in the first team. What had happened in Porto was a product of necessity rather than clear strategy; it was almost impossible for a youngster of his age to make it into Rijkaard’s team. So, Messi thought, perhaps they think I have reached my limit. For now, he had to carry on working hard in the B team run by Gratacós.
Gratacós knew that Frank Rijkaard relied on players in his squad who were tried and tested and of great quality and who were blocking Messi’s path, but none the less, in his side, Leo was a budding star and he began to pick him regularly. Thus a chink of light began to appear through the cracks of the Camp Nou gates. In exceptional circumstances, they prepared a training regime specifically designed with his physical characteristics in mind and he began to combine his training sessions with the B team and with Rijkaard’s side. The Dutchman told the player’s family that he saw in Leo some ‘extraordinary characteristics’ but insisted in ‘going bit by bit to exploit them at the appropriate time’.
Gratacós also knew that his obligation was to instil in the player certain things he had not yet incorporated into his game and that were necessary to enable him to fit in with the second division B side. But it wasn’t that easy to make him change some of his worst football habits. On more than one occasion the veterans of the side (rarely older than 21) would moan at the coach that Messi lacked the defensive work required of him. ‘He doesn’t press,’ they said to him. Pere was well aware of it and would remind the Argentinian in training sessions that the game still went on even after he’d lost the ball; but he also told his charges, in private, that they should not forget what he brought to the team: ‘No, he doesn’t press, but what about what he does when he’s got the ball? Don’t worry, lads, we’ll work on it.’
The leap for the 17-year-old was proving arduous. Compared with his stellar rise in the junior ranks, Leo seemed baulked in the first months of this new campaign with the B team. Despite playing every minute, in the first 12 games Leo scored on only five occasions, including one against Girona in the second game. He was finding it hard to get away from defenders, to make a difference.
The team was also spluttering. In September, the Barcelona B side went to play against Zaragoza B. Technical staff thought they had given the right instructions to ensure a positive outcome, only to finish the wrong side of a convincing 3–0 defeat. Leo left the pitch upset and as soon as he was back in the changing room he began to cry. His reaction surprised Pere Gratacós: ‘Bear in mind that he had played well! We had to cheer him up, we told him that he had to persist, to get better, and that we had to convert this defeat into something positive.’ He was the only blaugrana who did cry in that fifth league match of group three of the Second Division B. For most of them, it was a game just like any other.
Messi trained every day with Gratacós, apart from once a week when he joined up with the first-team squad. This one day a week became two, and then three. The doubts expressed by Rijkaard’s technical staff began to disappear, although the Dutchman was still reticent. ‘He’s going well, he’s good, but certain aspects of his play must be improved,’ he answered when asked about Leo. He didn’t want to rush things. Rijkaard’s assistant, Henk ten Cate, thought he was ready. And then one day in October, Ronaldinho and Deco said to both of them that they were wasting time: ‘Gaffer, he should be here, playing with us.’
Ten Cate, the ‘bad cop’ to Rijkaard’s good, was responsible for keeping Ronaldinho on the straight and narrow, and generally counterbalancing with strong words and the stick what his analysing, decision-making boss did with the carrot. They worked well in tandem.
When Barcelona were looking for full-backs with the ability to go up and down the pitch, with personality and understanding of the football style needed, Gio van Bronckhorst fitted the mould admirably and was signed from Arsenal after an initial loan spell. Dutch footballers were all the rage at the time, being of similar upbringing to that of Barcelona youth players. Gio, today assistant manager to Ronald Koeman at Feyenoord, and Henk, whose last job was as coach to the Dutch side Sparta Rotterdam, met in the summer of 2013 in a restaurant in Rotterdam to reminisce about the arrival of Leo Messi into the first team.
Gio still talks about Leo with the smile of one who knows he has shared a changing room with perhaps the best ever representative of his profession. Ten Cate says that in 20 years’ time he will look back on his career not just as ‘the coach who had Messi’. No way. Henk was just a coach. Period.
HTC: We gave him his debut against Porto in the 2003−04 season when he was a teenager, even before he had trained with us. I got to know him for the first time at the airport on the way to Portugal. They had told us that he was very good and on that day we were very short of players. We said, why not? Later we invited him to train with us on a more regular basis.
GVB: Ronaldinho said in the first training session with Leo that this youngster was going to be better than him. And people laughed. ‘Yeah, right!!’ they replied. More than details, the only memory I have of his first session with us is a general feeling of being pleasantly surprised. And you?
HTC: I remember one thing. From the first minutes the Brazilians took him away and got him under their wing. Before starting training we used to do the rondos. You had a group of Spanish players (Puyol, Oleguer, Xavi, Iniesta) with you; then there was a second group of Brazilians with people like Eto’o and Rafa Márquez. It was Silvinho who said to him, ‘come over here, son’. And he joined up in the rondo with the Brazilians. Silvinho embraced him, not literally, but from that moment onwards he became like a father to him.
GVB: If you see a footballer who shines on television, you can shout out, ‘what a great player he is!’ But you only really know how good someone is when you train with them. It happened to me with Bergkamp, Henry and Ronaldinho. If you are playing with them every day, you discover just how special they are. With Messi, after the first training session you could already see it – I had never come to that conclusion so quickly before! Not even with the other three, even though they are superstars.
HTC: At the time there was an enormous difference between the first team and the young lads in the B side who played two divisions lower. Occasionally we relied on players like Joan Verdú, perhaps the best of the reserves, but not good enough to take the place of the bigger players. But Leo …
GVB: Some weeks later, we were playing a training match between the B side and the fir
st team. Messi used to play down the middle with the B and that area was being protected by Thiago Motta as defensive midfielder. And Messi was getting the better of him throughout.
HTC: Despite having played well at Porto, despite his self-confidence and quality surprising us, some time went past before we were convinced that he was ready to make his debut in an official match. About a year, in fact. Why? We had a lot of quality in that squad. Giuly on the right, Eto’o as a striker, Deco as leader in midfield and Ronaldinho on the left because we had to put him somewhere. We signed him as mediapunta (from PSG), but he kills you when we haven’t got the ball because he just doesn’t defend – so we stuck him on the wing. Xavi didn’t play every game, Iniesta even less, imagine the quality we had. Leo started to get called into the squad in the 2004−05 season, but he spent a lot of matches sitting on the bench.
GVB: The B side and the lower teams played a 3-4-3 and he was the enganche, the number 10, just behind the striker. So in the 4-3-3 system that we were using there was no place for him in the position he normally played.
HTC: With the reserves he was almost like a second striker. But the system isn’t important, it’s the position he naturally takes up when he’s on the pitch. And he couldn’t play in the middle. Our front target man had to be strong, playing with his back to the goal, able to receive the ball and turn. He wasn’t any good for that position.
GVB: What did the coaches say among themselves about all that, about his evolution?
HTC: Frank was a bit sceptical about his possibilities so early in his career. We had to wait, he said. We had a problem because he was very good, but there just weren’t many opportunities for him. He carried on training with us, more and more, but we didn’t play him. Who would we take off? His time hadn’t come.
GVB: Being a left-back, it often fell to me to mark him in training, because you put him on the right of the attack. Let me tell you, thanks! And you saw that for him every ball would be his last one, he had great motivation for every training session. For every attack. It was like Ronaldinho when he turned up wanting to train: you could see they were happy, smiling. And of course there was no way of stopping them.
HTC: They would kill anyone who crossed their path. Leo showed himself to be strong whenever he had the ball. Sometimes you have players who you push to do a bit more. With him you had to put a rope around his neck to pull him back.
GVB: I remember them as good training sessions because we had some really great players. Sometimes we would warm up in the changing room before going out onto the pitch and me, just by seeing Ronnie, or Deco, or Leo do such wonderful things with a ball, I felt ready to train. What a pleasure! Did you have to give Leo lots of instructions? I don’t remember you being on top of him all the time.
HTC: Not many, and that’s the truth. These people are so talented and so intelligent – two things that usually go hand in hand. With just one word they would understand what we wanted from them on the pitch. Most of what he did on the pitch he carried inside him. What we tried to do was to teach him to become a professional. How to look after himself, how to train … Sometimes there were three games a week and if he trained like mad, he couldn’t play three games in the week, not even two. He needed to match his enthusiasm with his physical capabilities. When he started to play, his level of achievement would go up and down, but that didn’t worry us because you could see that here was a young boy who had extraordinary qualities. It’s logical that a player of 17 should lack consistency.
GVB: I used to love it when the day before the games we used to have a really good training session, it was a good sign. We’d start with a rondo then would come an exercise, depending on who your opposition was, and finally 11 vs 11 on a small pitch. And Leo would play as if his life depended on it. It was impossible not to give him his chance sooner or later.
HTC: Sometimes I would say to Frank, ‘Did you see that?’ He would get in between two or three [players] where no gap existed. And his shot had such power. With a normal player you can see what his intention is, the movement of the leg, the moment that he pulls his leg back and shoots, all in a split second but with sufficient time so a defender can block it. With him, the leg doesn’t appear to move and yet the ball still leaves his foot with enormous power.
GVB: He seems to think before the rest of us. Or he sees a pattern in front of his eyes that allows him to understand exactly what play and movement is required. It’s like something from science fiction. All I see is the ball and a lot of legs. He sees the solution.
In the lower teams Leo would not accept playing on the wing, because there he had to wait for the ball to come to him, he didn’t get enough of it. But coaches often made him play wide, often on the right. It’s common practice: a right-back struggles defending a left-footed player, and Leo could cut inside and shoot often if used on the right wing. But bit by bit he would come out of his position and appear in the mediapunta zone. That is where he enjoyed himself more, where he felt he was giving more to the side. In any case, he knew that to go up into the first team he would have to accept the conditions imposed on him. He could not play as a mediapunta, because the weight of attack fell upon Ronaldinho who played out on the left. Neither had he sufficient status yet to make demands: the thing at that moment was to get up there with the big boys and stay there. But 11 months after his debut in Porto, and after dozens of coaching sessions with Frank Rijkaard and Henk ten Cate, Leo believed he was ready to make the great leap forward, to make his debut.
So did Rijkaard.
After six games unbeaten, Barcelona found themselves leaders on 16 points, thanks to a solid defence, Eto’o’s goals and Ronaldinho’s magic. The next game was on 16 October, the derby at Montjuïc, the then home of Espanyol. Leo came on for Deco with eight minutes left to play in a match that was still very much alive, with the blaugranas just 0–1 ahead despite having dominated most of the game; it was not a substitution made simply to appease the fans. ‘Get yourself on the right wing and look for the break, son,’ said Ten Cate. ‘Look to use your speed between the full-back and the central defender.’ There was no real time for him to make any kind of impact. Barcelona won by the only goal of the game.
At 17 years and four months Messi had become the youngest ever player to represent the club in an official competition.
His father took him back to his flat at Gran Via Carles III, just three streets away from the Camp Nou. As the journalist Roberto Martínez asserts, ‘He grew up just three streets from the hue and cry of the stadium, how’s he going to get stage fright? He plays at the Camp Nou as if he was playing in his own backyard, except that there are 100,000 people there.’
That night Leo didn’t talk about his debut, or about the game, in fact about anything in particular. He didn’t have any special celebrations: this was just the beginning. He hadn’t reached anywhere yet, he was just starting on the road. In his room, however, although the silence was deafening, the audible memory of a Camp Nou applauding as he stepped on the pitch remained etched on his mind.
After playing 20 minutes in the next game against Osasuna, he spent the next seven games on the bench, including one spectacular 3–0 victory over Real Madrid.
Sitting behind Rijkaard, Leo looked on as Ronaldinho, at the peak of his powers, celebrated, often with his trademark surfing gesture.
‘Rijkaard, the way he took me step by step, without any real pressure … I sometimes didn’t understand why I hadn’t been called into the squad or wasn’t playing. Now I look at it dispassionately, and I realise that he brought me along very well, without any rush. I am very grateful to him because he always knew what was best for me.’
(Leo Messi on Barça TV, 2013)
‘The fact that Leo had Rijkaard as his first coach at the top level was of tremendous benefit to him,’ explains Silvinho. ‘Rijkaard was always the big-hearted type, a true gentleman who always showed concern for everyone.’ It’s difficult to find anyone who has a bad word to say about the Dutch coach on a
personal level.
Frank is from the school of thought that believes a coach should only spend about 20 per cent of his time coaching. The rest of the time is taken up quietly doing whatever is necessary at that particular moment: sometimes he becomes a big brother, or a father, or a colleague. ‘I think he’s unhappy, let’s go and see what the problem is’ he might say to one of his assistants. Footballers can sometimes be very cruel, constantly looking for weaknesses in those who coach them, but they are more disposed to being managed when they see the coach has affection for them. And also when he shows he has the same touch with the ball as they have, that he has experienced the same doubts, jealousies and joy as them. In that sense, it suited Rijkaard to have been an altar boy before he became a priest.
He quickly applied this paternalism to Leo. With a hug, a show of interest in his life off the pitch, a joke just before going out to train, Rijkaard was getting closer to the Argentinian. Messi felt comfortable with him. And was eternally thankful. A young player might impress in the lower ranks, but one day a manager gives him the opportunity to play – footballers never forget the man who takes that big step. ‘It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes’, Rijkaard told him. ‘You will play again’. That faith in him helped Leo. Their connection was not just a professional one. Frank was born in Amsterdam but is the son of immigrants (his father is from Surinam) and he was the best player in the district, at school, in the junior sides at Ajax. He had empathy with those players who were ‘different’, including Ronaldinho, because he too had suffered the same stigma. And he also knew that football belonged to the footballers. He reminded them constantly, with every gesture, in every conversation, that he was there to help them. This shrewd tactic, coupled with his honesty, meant Frank got what he wanted out of the players.
Messi Page 30