During those first few days during pre-season, Leo noticed that Pep was a demanding, meticulous coach with very clear ideas of who was going to help them win. But it was necessary for Pep to intervene in the Olympic Games issue, in order to convince Leo that he was indeed, as he said he was, ‘on his side’.
Messi hardly ever made public statements about his situation, but without revealing too much he had made it very clear what he wanted. He joined the Argentina squad in China waiting for news. Barcelona were continuing the fight to keep him, but in the meantime they let him go: ‘If we get what we want, you’ll have to come back.’ Leo accepted the conditions.
Barcelona, meanwhile, left on tour to the United States while Argentina prepared for the imminent Olympic tournament in Beijing.
‘Jorge, I have to speak to your son and I can’t find him anywhere.’ Guardiola had made the decision but wanted to tell Leo first. ‘He is at the training camp in Shanghai,’ Leo’s father told him. ‘Get him on the phone for me,’ the coach asked him. Pep organised a meeting in his New York hotel room. President Joan Laporta, Txiki Beguiristain and Rafa Yusté, the sporting vice-president, were called in.
Guardiola had convinced Laporta that the best option was to let Messi play in the Beijing Games.
Pep dialled the number that Jorge Messi had given him and he and those present heard Leo’s emotional request for the first time. He definitely did not want to come back. They all sensed in his words the tension that he had lived through that summer.
Pep told him of his decision: ‘Play in the Olympics and win the gold medal,’ he told his player.
GB: At St Andrews you and Leo had to adapt.
PG: He already seemed to me to be a different footballer just from watching him on television. This type of player always observes you on the pitch, he observes you, to see what you do and what you don’t do, to see if what you do is good for him … They are different from us. You have to adapt to this type of player, history turns up very few of them and you have to adapt to understand, more than the other way round. They are not stupid; they are more intelligent than your average Joe. Maybe intelligent is not the word, but more intuitive than average. We noticed that he was a bit depressed at the start, but you tried to understand him and talk to him … I spoke to everyone a lot in the first few days at St Andrews, not just to him. You had to meet the people, discover what had happened to them in previous years. And I also talked to him a lot, but to the others, too.
GB: During that time you also got rid of three of his adopted ‘brothers’. And his sporting ‘father’ is suddenly not there either. And after, there was the whole Olympics saga. I don’t know if Leo’s mind was on training.
PG: I remember that he always trained really well in the early days. We always aimed to make him comfortable. If we could not manage that with a player of his quality, then he would be better off being coached by someone else – if it didn’t work, I would have to go or he would. Faced with that prospect, we decided that we had to give him that comfort, we had to give him what he needed. He had to enjoy himself, that was key. This is more or less the idea I’ve always had, since I started with the reserves, up to my present position in Germany, too: it only makes sense if you always enjoy yourself. If you only enjoy it when you win a match, this job doesn’t make sense. But the club, Txiki, myself, decided to let him go to Beijing. We were clear that we had to take his discontentment seriously because we knew we had a very special player in our hands.
GB: How do you speak to Leo? Is he one of those you can ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ and who replies, ‘Well, look, x, y and z’?
PG: Some days, yes. It depends on the day. He always says, ‘when I shut myself away, I shut myself away and don’t speak to anyone, and have to get better alone’, and it must be respected. At the start I found it hard to understand him but you gradually get to know him better over time. You realise he is a different person. Just like everyone, he has his private moments and on those days you leave him alone, and when you notice he wants you to speak to him, you go and speak to him. As for the Olympics: Laporta was the key. Naturally I had the last word, but he knew Leo much better than I did at the time. I remember that he said to me: ‘We will make a mistake if we make him come back. If he wants to go to the Olympics, he must be allowed to.’ I already knew what the Olympics meant; I knew what that event signified. At that moment you think, ‘We will play the Champions League qualifier, we are new here, without the best player we have, let’s see how it goes.’ But at the end of the day, what use is a player who wants to be at the Olympics to me? If his mind is at the Olympic Games and not here, why do I want him to be here for the Champions League qualifier in our first season? I have never believed in impositions in football. That is to say, however much we say play this way, if I don’t convince them, it will not work. Then we spoke to him on the phone and, with president Laporta, we decided that it was best to let him go to the Olympics.
GB: And that was one of those ‘you owe me one’ decisions.
PG: No, no. At that time, I understood that it was best for him to be able to go and enjoy it; going to the Olympics is something that happens once in a lifetime. That was the only argument and the only reason behind the decision. Evidently, it could also have gone wrong, and if we had not got enough out of him it wouldn’t have worked. Nor do I think he is like that. I thought that when he got back, he would try to play well today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But not because he had to give anything back to me.
Leo Messi will always be grateful to him: ‘Guardiola always tells me that I don’t have to thank him for that, but it was his decision, he thought it was best for me,’ he explained that summer. The first match in the Olympic tournament was on 7 August. Ivory Coast were the opponents. Leo scored the first goal of the game and assisted Lautaro for the second in a tight 2–1 victory. Three days later, Argentina scraped past Australia. Having already qualified, Sergio Batista left Leo on the bench in the third game so that he would be fresh for the quarter-finals against Holland. He scored the first goal in that round but Holland equalised and the team needed one of his assists so that Di María could score the winning goal. In the semi-finals, Argentina would face Ronaldinho’s Brazil.
Ronnie had already sealed his transfer to Milan, and Messi insisted in a press conference that his former team-mate was the best footballer with whom he had ever played, that he would always be the best. ‘It is perfectly natural that he missed such an outstanding presence,’ admits Barcelona winger Pedro Rodríguez. ‘When you have very strong support, as Ronaldinho provided for Leo, and he leaves, you end up a little bit alone. But he found himself with players who had been here for many years, such as Víctor Valdés, Andrés, Xavi and Puyol, who were prepared to shield and protect him.’ Players with the club’s DNA running through their veins would be positioned around Leo. And so with those players the Guardiola era began: or the Messi era. Call it what you will.
Argentina convincingly beat their eternal rivals 3–0 in the semi-finals, and the much-remembered hug that marked the handing over of the baton from Ronaldinho to Messi. Messi had accepted the challenge to replace him and, regardless of the reluctance he would show in public, privately he felt himself capable of it. ‘He wanted to succeed at Barça,’ says Cristina Cubero, who would keep Messi informed about how things were going in Barcelona and with whom he spent many hours in Beijing. ‘He said to me: well, I want to succeed and I’m going to win the medal, and then we’re going to win everything with Barcelona, I want to be the leader of the team.’ Thus spoke a 21-year-old-boy who had grown up before his time and who thought he had achieved his first triumph: the fact that Barcelona, in search of glory, had chosen him to show them the way.
‘I think he was very clear about it in his head: “I know what I want, I want the Champions League, I want the World Cup, I want titles, I want records … I want all of this because I can achieve it”,’ explains Ferran Soriano, financial vice-president who resigned that summer,
disillusioned with Joan Laporta’s style of leadership. ‘I’ve always seen very clearly that, without saying a single word about these things, Leo had no doubts about it: because of his attitude and behaviour, he was convinced he could go far and reach the heights. Things would happen to him and he was still up for everything.’
Argentina played in the Olympic tournament final on 23 August. The 1–0 win over Nigeria saw the gold medals hung around their necks. ‘It was an incomparable prize,’ declared ‘the Flea’, who returned to Barcelona soon after. The club had all but secured qualification to the Champions League group stage following a 4–0 win over Wisła Kraków. The return leg, played three days after the final in Beijing and watched on TV by Leo at his home in Castelldefels, ended in an irrelevant 1–0 defeat.
Leo joined up with the squad when they got back from Poland. The Spanish league was about to start and the foundations upon which the group would work had been laid. Messi had worn the number 30 in his first games with the Barcelona first team, and later the number 19. From that summer, the number 10 shirt became his. ‘When they gave me the number ten, obviously I felt very proud and happy to be able to wear it,’ he explained in the Audemars Piguet advertisement. ‘It is a shirt that many great players have worn at this club, Ronaldinho used to wear it, a man who has done so many things for this club. It was a fantastic responsibility for me.’
But if Leo now had the ball, as it were, what was to be done about Samuel Eto’o? While Messi was taking Beijing by storm and having heard what ‘the Flea’ thought of him, Pep Guardiola and Txiki Beguiristain decided one morning that the Cameroonian was going to stay at the club: his attitude was admirable. Although they suspected that Eto’o wanted to be the boss, he seemed to have accepted the Argentinian’s lead. Furthermore, Leo and the senior players felt comfortable with him and he was one of the greatest goalscorers in the world. If he played in the Champions League qualifier, he would be cup-tied and so could no longer be sold, so at breakfast on the morning of the first leg against Wisła it was decided that he would start and they duly informed Eto’o and president Juan Laporta. ‘Awesome,’ thought Leo, conscious of his role, and, back in Barcelona with his gold medal, he endorsed Pep’s decision to the press.
Intelligence is measured by the ability to recognise and adapt to new opportunities. Seizing and making the most of them is the mark of bravery and ambition. Leo showed that he had all these qualities during a trying summer. He also revealed a more complex side to his nature: he has a clear idea of his path and demands that his trajectory be followed, and the presiding coach, in order to get the best out of him, must know how to manage him.
Pep only had a few days before the start of the season to get his ideas across while trying to find the right equilibrium for the squad. From the start, winning would be vital in order to put in place the first few bricks of the building he was constructing.
Guardiola took advantage of Messi’s absence to reflect on his relationship with ‘the Flea’, and he realised there was a particular way of handling him: you could not meet him head-on, the train-crash approach was not to be recommended. Pep blended tactical discussions alone with Messi in his office with indirect instructions in front of the group: ‘Today the forwards are going to press high up, because Leo is going to do it, too, and we cannot leave him on his own.’ So he was ordering Messi without exactly doing that. Yes, he was going to be treated differently, with respect, because the player felt more encouraged that way.
After the initial reservations, Leo would enjoy the sessions that always involved ballwork. Pep knew that players got bored with tactical meetings. That is why, when he sat them down, his speeches were short and sweet.
‘I remember pre-season was full of little details and tactical adjustments,’ explains Eidur Gudjohnsen. ‘He would not bore us because he would very intelligently mix the tactical part with games, challenges and explanations. He would leave us in peace while we implemented what he would ask of us, but suddenly he would demand that we concentrate on two or three details that he had prepared for that particular day. He wanted us to end up doing those things subconsciously and that is why the first sessions were somewhat repetitive: about the positions we had to take up, or, if the opponents had the ball, how the attackers had to press … lots of little things. Suddenly, after two or three weeks, he no longer had to shout, we knew instinctively what was expected of us.’
He would sometimes ask Leo, as he did other important players, what he thought of the last session, how he felt. But he needed to do it less and less: Messi understood what was being asked of him and would smile. He was clearly ready for the upcoming season.
‘That pre-season was spectacular, really spectacular,’ says Txiki Beguiristain. ‘They were all ten out of tens, in intensity, desire, commitment, explanations, details. It was a bloody brilliant pre-season.’
And then Barcelona lost their first league match against lowly Numancia.
‘This season we will have many matches and it is good that the whole squad is ready to play at any time. It [the rotation system] motivates everyone, because you never know who will play. There are always new team-mates coming in, which focuses you and helps you to concentrate on the next game if it’s your turn to play. Guardiola is very close to the players and seems like another member of the squad, another player. He is very committed to us, constantly giving us instructions and teaching us what he wants us to do. In the meantime, we are trying to soak up a bit of everything so we can do the best we can. He asks the same from me as he does from the rest of the lads: high pressing, in a group and well-organised, but, when it’s time to play, he gives me a lot of freedom, although always with structure. I hope we can win a title this year, and if possible more!’
(Leo Messi on the club website, October 2008)
Martín Souto: ‘Did he [Guardiola] get on your nerves in the beginning?’
Leo Messi: ‘No, because you could see straightaway that the guy knew his stuff. In pre-season he did drills that we didn’t do again for the rest of the year. He prepared us pre-season and then we all knew how he wanted to play, what movement he wanted in defence, midfield and up front. A few details remained but he had already taught us everything.’
Martín Souto: ‘Who taught you more? Don’t say “everyone” because not everyone can teach.’
Leo Messi: ‘Well, the man from whom I learned the most was Guardiola. Not only because he knew so much, but because he took me under his wing during a stage when I was developing, the stage at which I grew and learned the most.’
(Leo Messi, interview with Martín Souto, TyC Sports, March 2013)
2. MATCH AGAINST SPORTING GIJÓN AFTER ONE POINT FROM SIX
Barcelona’s loss against Numancia 1–0 did not reflect the Catalan team’s dominance or their persistent pressure. ‘We were going through a transitional period, a bit like the one I experienced with José Mourinho at Chelsea,’ remembers Eidur Gudjohnsen. ‘The foundations were there, the quality was tangible, the house just had to be rebuilt. And we lost the first game against one of the smallest teams. Guardiola was furious. He told us that we had forgotten everything we had done pre-season and had disappointed him. Leo was staring at the floor, he knew that he was right.’
Leo Messi, on the wing with Eto’o in the centre and Henry on the left of the attack, hit the post.
As Luis Martín wrote in El País, ‘the Flea’ and Barcelona were certainly missing ‘a pinch of salt and a few minutes’ cooking time’. But as well as the positional errors and the result, something else annoyed Pep. Samuel Eto’o, following on from previous seasons, had called a meeting with the players before the game and left Guardiola and the entire technical team outside the dressing room. He gave a team talk, a clear threat to the authority of the coach who anyway was suspicious of the Cameroonian’s apparent acquiescence. The squad’s willingness to adapt to new leadership was going to lead to a bumpy ride.
While new rules were established, Leo distanced himself from every
thing and everyone; he was, as one player who saw him up close, states, ‘waiting to see what unfolded’.
After the defeat by Numancia, players joined their national teams and, following that, Messi – having just returned from Buenos Aires – was left on the bench until the last half-hour against Racing Santander at the Camp Nou so he would be fresh for the Sporting Lisbon match four days later. But Barcelona could only draw – one point out of six in the league.
‘There was uncertainty, people were nervous,’ remembers Silvinho. ‘They would say: “well, what is this new Barcelona doing, and what is Guardiola doing to Barcelona? He is not right for the first team, he isn’t tough enough.” But from the inside, working there, I knew we had chosen the right path.’
PG: The week after the Numancia defeat was a long one.
GB: After the draw with Racing, you had one point from six and were in the bottom half of the table.
PG: After the international break, we played Racing and drew. Following that was Sporting Lisbon in the Champions League, who we beat 3–1, and then we played Sporting Gijón.
GB: Did you have any doubts at the time? Did you receive any messages of support from the squad or were they all convinced you were on the right path?
PG: We knew we were on the right path. The only one I heard from was Andrés Iniesta. He came to my office. He said: ‘don’t worry, everything is going bloody well, we are doing everything well and it will be fine.’ I don’t think many people had much faith in us those first few days after the defeat against Numancia. Nor after the draw with Racing at home. But that was normal. We were at a low, and very few believed in us from the beginning anyway. I always thought: ‘It’s better that way.’ You disappoint fewer when there are so few who think it will go well. They weren’t easy days but I remember I said to myself one day: ‘Look, we will do what we think we have to do, we will keep going. We will play as I like my team to play. And that’s that.’ Txiki was on my side back then. I felt him, that’s the right word, very close to me. He had more faith in me than I had in myself.
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