Messi

by Guillem Balague

  Rijkaard spoke more with the other players, especially Ronaldinho, but he made a conscious effort to get Leo, who remained as reserved as ever, to trust him. Ronnie, Eto’o and Silvinho invariably took the lead in the usual team meetings, while Leo rarely said a word. Only if he was asked. And then his reply would be monosyllabic. The Leo whom Rijkaard had in those first few years was one who wanted only to follow orders, and the Dutchman used the close harmony he was creating to ease the Argentinian’s progress into the club elite.

  Messi left his apartment in Gran Via Carles III the morning of the match against Albacete, the thirty-fourth match in the league in that 2004−05 season. Since his debut against Espanyol he had played just five games with the first team in the domestic league but only for a few minutes, as well as nine with the Barcelona B side, plus one cup and one Champions League match. When Rijkaard called him up for a home game, Leo knew the routine: he had to get to the Camp Nou at 11 a.m. Those who wanted to could do a bit of gym work or get a massage. If there was time Leo used to play football tennis inside the changing room.

  It all began with Silvinho and Ronaldinho, who would often apply himself more to this pastime than to the training itself. The Brazilians would make the most of a wide rectangular space with three walls in the players’ space, between the gym area and where they got changed. They would mark lines on the floor with sticky tape and stretch a bandage across as a net. They played one against one, one bounce, a maximum of three touches before the ball was returned, with the first to reach 11 points the winner. Silvinho considered himself sufficiently skilful to challenge Ronaldinho; sometimes he did look better than him and he often won. In fact, he ended up beating everybody. Silvinho became the king of football tennis. Until Leo arrived.

  Messi saw football tennis as another challenge. It was just a game, but there was more at stake than a victory in some minor sporting diversion: there was prestige in the game, even within the hierarchy of the squad.

  Messi waited his turn to play at the beginning, but before long he was actively seeking opponents. He was the best. And the most consistent, always ready to play a match, a tournament.

  ‘We played before games or especially after training,’ remembers former Barcelona left-back Fernando Navarro. ‘In the end they put in glass walls, as if it were a cage, and a real net, quite high; the matches became quite explosive and very intense. But it was also good because it meant we got better technically. Messi was the best, the bloke always used to put it by the column; there was a column on one of the sides and he would always put it there, where you couldn’t get to it.’ Gio tried to beat Leo: ‘We would finish training at one and could spend the afternoon playing, even up to six o’clock. But it was unfair if you had to face Messi. He was a monster.’

  Even though it was just a space for the players, a bit of fun away from the daily grind, the coaches kept an eye on the football tennis matches: they demonstrated the competitiveness of a player, his character. If a player always played at the same level, it spoke volumes about his ambition. You could test the technical skill of the participant, and as his pulse rate increased, his mental state: see if he was switched on, detached, angry …

  After training, on match days, the team would retire to the nearby Princesa Sofia hotel to eat and rest.

  The match against Albacete was played in May. There were four games remaining in the league, and even if the opposition were at the foot of the table Rijkaard called for organisation and concentration. Madrid, with goalkeeper Casillas saving goals at one end and the Brazilian Ronaldo scoring them at the other, had had six wins on the trot, and they were getting close to Barcelona, who had taken up residence at the top for most of the season. The game proved to be more difficult than had been expected: Albacete held off a Barcelona, who, without a recently suspended Xavi, were finding it difficult to get into their rhythm. Iniesta had come on in his place but was unable to give the team the necessary fluidity to break down a packed defence. A couple of diagonal efforts from Giuly, a fluffed shot from Eto’o and an excessive display of overelaboration from Ronaldinho, who kept coming inside and narrowing the game, defined a tense Barcelona. Then, with an hour gone, Eto’o hit a shot from the edge of the area that Raúl Valbuena, having played with assurance all night, was unable to reach.

  With seven minutes remaining, and with a tight 1–0 lead, Ten Cate asked Leo to warm up. Eto’o looked to the bench and made a gesture that he was not ready to come off. But he was the one replaced. Messi went up to Rijkaard who spoke to him casually, as if he had played in a hundred games: ‘Play how you know. Stick yourself on the right.’ Leo looked at his coach, waiting for further instructions. There was nothing else. That’s it.

  In the forty-second minute an angry Eto’o walked off the pitch, shaking hands with Leo without so much as looking at him, the words of Ten Cate, reprimanding him for his behaviour, ringing in his ears as he headed for the tunnel. He went into the changing room and started kicking things. No one likes to be substituted, least of all by a youngster. Rijkaard said afterwards that he hadn’t seen his anger: ‘We thought it was an opportune moment to put on a youngster like Messi.’

  The game had to be won. The 1–0 scoreline demanded concentration. There were three minutes remaining until the final whistle, plus any added-on time. Ronaldinho went up to Leo. ‘I’m going to give you a pass for you to score. Tomorrow it will be you on the front pages,’ he said to him. From an attacking right-hand-side position the Brazilian found Messi, who was by himself, and Leo, with one smooth lob, beat the goalkeeper. Valbuena appealed for offside and the referee gave it. It wasn’t. The goalkeeper knew it and ruffled Leo’s mane by way of apology.

  ‘I’m going to give it to you again,’ insisted Ronnie.

  With normal time completed, Ronnie, in the position of mediapunta, used his instep to place a ball over the backs of the Albacete’s defenders. Messi let the ball bounce once, and with another delicate touch put the ball over Valbuena. His first goal for the FC Barcelona first team.

  And then something extraordinary took place.

  Leo ran off with his arms stretched out, shaking his hands. He stopped and turned in search of the collective hug. Ronnie came up to him, bent over and Leo jumped onto his back. The Brazilian was carrying the boy on his back. The kid had scored. The league was just a step away.

  The group celebrated the goal and the victory on the pitch. So did the fans. In the changing room the euphoria was palpable. Victory in the next game, with a defeat for Real Madrid, would bring the title back to the Camp Nou for the first time in five years. The whole world wanted to touch the goalscorer: ‘congratulations, son,’ they said. And: ‘careful with this one, Ronnie. He’s going to be taking your place. He’s even scoring now.’

  Leo moved across to the press area. ‘Everyone in the changing room treats me very well, but with Ronnie I have a special relationship, hence the celebration. I would like to dedicate this goal to my family. To my mother, who is travelling at the moment, and to a nephew who is on the way.’ Rodrigo’s wife was pregnant and was due to give birth shortly.

  His father Jorge still gets goosebumps when he thinks about that day: ‘You hear the people singing Messi, Messi, Messi. It’s the biggest thing that can ever happen to anybody.’ His son had become the youngest player in the history of the club to score. ‘I am very happy for him,’ said Rijkaard in the press conference. ‘With that goal he showed how talented he is.’

  Albecete’s goalkeeper Valbuena was teased by his team-mates: ‘You stop Ronaldinho and then you end up copping it from the little feller.’ He kept the ball from that game – he had a premonition. Today he says he wouldn’t swap or sell it for anything. The ball that featured in the first major goal scored by the best player in the world is at the home of Raúl Valbuena.

  Leo Messi returned home. They laughed about the fact that in three minutes he had scored two goals from almost identical plays. He had supper and went to bed.

  The next day he got a ca
ll at lunchtime as he was eating with the family in the flat. It was Maradona. The first time they had spoken. Diego congratulated him. Messi was going to hear from him again a couple of months later in the Under 20 World Cup Championship.

  ‘I always said that from the first moment I came into the changing room, Ronaldinho and all the other Brazilians – Deco, Silvinho and Motta – accepted me and made things easier for me. But especially him [Ronaldinho] because he was the star of the team. I learned a lot at his side. I’m grateful for the way he treated me from the first moment, he was a great help to me because I had never been into a changing room like that, and with me being the way I am, well, it made everything much easier for me.

  Ronaldinho was the man responsible for the change in Barcelona. It was a bad time for the team and the changes that were tried after his arrival were massive. In the first year we didn’t win anything but people fell in love with him. After that the titles came and he made all those people very happy. I think Barcelona should always be grateful for everything he did for them.’

  (Leo Messi in an interview with Barça TV on the tenth anniversary of Ronaldinho joining the club)

  ‘How you doing, bro!’ Ronnie said to Leo the first time their paths crossed in the club’s car park. The Brazilian had already heard people talking about ‘the Flea’. A few days later, after his first training session with the first team, Ronaldinho rang his friend, the journalist Cristina Cubero: ‘I’ve just finished training with someone who is going to be better than me,’ he told her. ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ replied Cristina.

  ‘The first training session! I remember it perfectly,’ Cubero recalls. ‘He called me just to tell me that. Lots of times he used to say, “you don’t know what he does in training, he is so good”. And this is what Ronaldinho, World Cup winner and at the time the best in the world was saying! Deco, too.’

  It wasn’t Silvinho, as Ten Cate recalls, but Deco on one of Messi’s first trips with the first team, who said, ‘hey you! Come here. You are the only Argentinian who’s going to sit at our table.’ They made space for Leo, the foreigner, at the foreigners’ table. Messi, aware of the unwritten codes within the group, was conscious of what a privilege this was: Ronaldinho was the new leader of Barcelona, of the Brazilian side, the best in the world, or so FIFA and anyone who knew anything about football said. He was going to sit at the same table as him! And once you’ve picked your table, you don’t change it: that’s how it goes in football. ‘Leo used to spend time with the Catalans at La Masía, but he is Argentinian and he felt at home with us, Latin Americans like Márquez, Ronnie, Deco, Edmilson and me,’ explains Silvinho. ‘I think he felt more comfortable sitting at a table where he didn’t have to talk or anything. He just sat, looked, laughed shyly. He picked up everything very quickly, he enjoyed himself.’

  All that helps to explain the gesture of Ronaldinho, his ‘guardian’, carrying him on his back after that goal against Albacete. ‘When he arrived at Barcelona, he had the advantage of being able to grow with a Ronaldinho who was at his best,’ explains former director Joan Lacueva. ‘He was like a mushroom in the shade of that tree that was Ronaldinho. He toughened up. While people paid more attention to the great things that the great Ronaldinho was doing, Messi was turning himself into a first-team player.’

  Ronaldinho showed him the reality of competitive football, of life with the elite, the mechanics to apply on the field of play. Ronnie knew how to use the press so he made sure that they did not turn their attention to the young Argentinian too soon. If Leo had played a poor game, Ronaldinho would come out into the press area to distract the media. And if someone was overaggressive towards him on the pitch, there was the Brazilian or Deco to look after the kid. ‘Ronaldinho used to talk football a lot with him,’ recalls Cristina Cubero. ‘He’d say things like, “hide on the wing and come out when I tell you to”. He taught him to follow the NBA, and to learn from the NBA, something he is now obsessed with, and to apply certain things from it to football. The assists from Ronnie have something of the NBA about them. He taught him to understand about blocking, and about reading the game. He educated him a lot more about football than people think.’

  ‘It’s clear that Ronaldinho did many good things for him and also some bad ones,’ comments Henk ten Cate. ‘But if you balance them out, I think it was the correct combination for Leo. He was a good example of what to do. And what not to do.’

  In Spanish football there is an expression ‘cuidado con los padrinos’, ‘careful with the godfathers’. You have to go easy on the ‘I’m looking after the boy’ approach, because it is just another way of imposing limitations. On the pitch there is only one ball and normally it has only one boss. When team-mates look up, they look for one player, a single point of reference, not two. If you have to pick one out of two, that’s when there is conflict. At that time, everyone, including Leo, was only looking for Ronnie.

  The great player quickly identifies who is ultimately going to take his place and reacts in one of two ways: either he isn’t very supportive of who is up and coming (it’s said that Juan Román Riquelme typified that particular approach) or he looks after him and encourages him, as Ronaldinho did with Messi. But with one tacit proviso: don’t jump into my seat; remember that you owe me for what I am doing for you. The protection offered in this somewhat perverse parental-type control allowed Leo to shine, but also served as a way of controlling him.

  Ronaldinho also did a lot to show Leo all the possibilities off the field. Ronnie, Motta and Deco were the leading social members of this group of greatly talented footballers. Once a month the squad went out together for dinner and Leo joined them, although his voice was rarely heard above the raucous conversation, ‘not even when he was speaking,’ says van Bronckhorst. But the 17-year-old became hypnotised by what he soon saw as the advantages of being recognised, of being a star. Ronaldinho lived life to the full and showed the adolescent Leo, who up until then had spent his life either on the football field or at home, how to live life in the fast lane.

  It was easy to fall under Ronnie’s spell, but the first signs that the Brazilian was living too close to the edge were beginning to appear. At the weekly sporting meetings in which select directors and the technical staff met, Messi was mentioned infrequently. It was Ronaldinho who dominated most of their conversations.

  Barcelona won the league for the first time in five years, and Leo, who had only played 77 minutes for the first team, including his debut in the Champions League against Shakhtar Donetsk, celebrated next to Thiago Motta, as the victory bus made its way across the city to the Camp Nou. He was the little kid, jumping around with the Brazilians, who had named him irmao (little brother), the group’s mascot. He danced around with a permanent smile on his face. He was celebrating for many reasons: for the season, for everything he had achieved so far. In the stadium they told him that his brother and his sister-in-law, Florencia, had had to leave the stands at the Camp Nou because she had gone into labour. Leo quickly left the celebrations: his sister-in-law was about to present him with a nephew. That day, Augustín was born.

  And after all that he returned to Rosario for a break.

  In the balmy first days of the holiday season, Rijkaard insisted that, yes, Leo was special, competitive, but he needed to mature, he was not yet fully formed. He wanted to keep protecting him. For his part, Messi understood that he had finally arrived at the level at which he belonged and under no circumstances should they consider demoting him. Age meant nothing to him. He was 17 years old, but he knew he could bring something to the table, that his rightful place was with Ronnie, with Deco, with Xavi. In the recent campaign he had also played 17 matches with a Barcelona B side that finally finished in seventh place, four points shy of a total that would have seen them promoted to the Second division A. They would be his last games for the second team.

  After resting, and with the satisfaction of having made his debut, scoring his first goal, winning the league title and becoming an uncl
e, Leo Messi set off for Holland for the World Cup Under 20 championships.

  He won the title and was voted best player in the tournament.

  Suddenly, everything in his world started to speed up.

  Those few months in the summer of 2005 were possibly the most frenetic of his whole career. In addition to the impact he had made internationally, Leo Messi was able to celebrate a new contract with Barcelona, his third, signed on his birthday in Holland during the Under 20 World Cup.

  The first contract came in the shape of the infamous ‘napkin agreement’. The second was agreed on 4 February 2004: it contained a buyout clause of €30 million if he played with Barcelona C, €80 million if he went up to the B team and €150 million if he made it to the first team. It was, despite the fact that he was a youth player, the contract of a Barcelona B player, and lasted until 2012: the first year he would earn €50,000 a year plus €1,600 per game; and the last year, €450,000 and €9,000 per game. It contained an interesting clause: in his first year he was paid €5,500 by way of compensation if he was made to play out of his normal position, a sum that would reach €50,000 in the last season. Barcelona paid for four flights between Argentina and Barcelona, a yearly housing allowance of €9,000 and wrote off a loan of €120,000, which had been given to Messi in his first contract to compensate for the many difficulties he encountered in those early years. In hindsight, members of his entourage describe that Leo as a mendigo, someone who goes ‘cap in hand’. Essentially he was happy to accept whatever Joan Gaspart offered.

  The new management of Juan Laporta, conscious of the difficulties that Leo had experienced, and his bravery and fortitude in the face of so many trials, were firmly on his side. But, as with all new relationships, they had to lay firm foundations based on communication and trust. ‘We tried to act as intermediaries between the various groups of people who claimed to represent Leo, some of whom had been involved in his sporting career since he was twelve years old,’ remembers ex-president Laporta. ‘Additionally, a number of bureaucratic problems emerged which we dealt with competently, and this helped to calm the father’s fears – that Leo’s right to play football would be somehow compromised. In this way we managed to build up a mutual trust. What we were doing, of course, was defending the interests of one of our players, which, naturally, also served the interests of Barcelona. That’s how we began our relationship with Leo, by giving him the priority that he deserved.’