Messi (24 page)

‘Come round and we’ll do a barbecue’ he might say to Zabaleta on another day. And everyone at Leo’s house soon discovered that he didn’t know where the plates were, or the cutlery, or anything in fact, but none the less they still had a fun
asado
. Or if they didn’t feel like making a mess, they’d spend the afternoon at La Pampa, another local Argentinian restaurant.

‘We shared a lot,’ says Zabaleta today, who was also his travelling companion on flights to Argentina when they were called up to the national squad, a journey that Leo soon started making regularly and one that allowed him to maintain ties with his own country. ‘I always lived in Barcelona: and he lived thirty kilometres away. Once we were coming out of a bar and he fell asleep in the car while I was driving. I assumed I was taking him home. Perfect. When we got there after about half an hour he said he was going to his brother’s house, next to mine. I could’ve killed him. So we turned round.’ Pablo and Argentinian frontman Martín Posse, also from rivals Espanyol, used to watch Messi at the Camp Nou and they often ended up dining together. ‘I used to tell him to calm down when I played him, so that he wouldn’t start running around in all directions,’ remembers Zabaleta. ‘You could see him getting annoyed with himself sometimes. Perhaps something didn’t turn out like he wanted in a game and he used to get angry, like everyone.’

Leo bought a dog, Facha, a boxer he used to take for walks around Castelldefels. Another companion.

Oscar Unari, another friend of Leo’s, who today plays for Almeria, shared many confidences. ‘If there’s one thing that he won’t talk about, one thing that hurt him, it’s his uprooting. It happened to me. I’m from a small town, much smaller than Rosario, with 15,000 inhabitants, and as a thirteen-year-old I started to go around on my own, without a father, or a mother, to find my life in Buenos Aires. From a town of 15,000 to a concrete jungle.’

Javier Mascherano, like so many others, knows the feeling. ‘I have heard Leo say that when he was younger he went through phases, after training, when he would return to his room and say “I can’t take any more”. It’s logical, it happened to me, even though I wasn’t so far away. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I also left my home in Rosario in search of my dreams in Buenos Aires: you have the uncertainty of not knowing what’s going to happen, if you’re really wasting your time or not. You think, “I’m here and perhaps I’m missing out on the chance to live a whole host of things, and I don’t know if tomorrow what’s to come will be worth it or not.” Life is beautiful now … when things work out. You go in search of your dream, the important thing is to try. Why resist when you feel bad? It’s obvious. Leo’s life is playing football, where he feels happiest, when he goes out to train, when he touches the ball … In truth what motivates us is our passion for this sport. So we have to resist the temptation to give up.’

‘You despair, you cry,’ says Pedro the Barcelona winger who left the Canary Islands to join La Masía when he was 16 years old. ‘It’s hard, because you don’t have anyone, let’s says “close”, to tell your problems to. Yes, you have people, a lot of people who work at the club, team-mates who can help you, but at this time you need someone closer, your family, your parents. And when you have them on the telephone it’s difficult to tell them all this type of stuff, it’s all much colder. And on top of that you don’t gel with the other boys of your age who are not footballers, because you are no longer involved with the things that interest them. For us everything happens very quickly. Footballers have fiancées from a very young age, they have children quickly, they mature earlier and live life at an unusual speed and intensity.’

‘I always say that we blow our own trumpets too much writing books about Leo, Piqué, Fàbregas …’ says the coach Rodolfo
Borrell. ‘Those are fantastic stories but they are the exception. You hear many traumatic tales of footballers who at the age of twelve leave home only to return at seventeen having failed at school, at football, with a family in disarray, and a five-year absence during which time they may well also have lost their friends.’

Leo went through much physical and psychological pain before becoming the very best at what he does. You need that strength in football in order to reach the finishing line, and you need the ability to make sacrifices. And perseverance.

But it was many years before he stopped crying after speaking on the telephone to his mum.

  
2
  

Making His Way

Rodolfo Borrell, his first coach at Barcelona:

If he was suffering we didn’t really notice. All we, as coaches, saw was a lad enjoying the sheer thrill of playing. Perhaps, with hindsight, that was the only time he was enjoying himself. He was always outstanding but, unusually for such a young player, he bore on his shoulders a huge weight of responsibility. This is an enormous burden for a young lad of 13, and the pressure could have broken him, but for Leo it had the opposite effect. He had utter conviction that he would make it, and that belief, a total belief in his destiny, enabled him to cope and overcome whatever trials he faced.

Additionally, he had extraordinary passion. I’ve never seen a player with such zeal. He was desperate to train, to run around the field, to do whatever was asked of him. And when we finished training he would ask if he could take free kicks. The others had left, and he still wanted to carry on! On his day off he’d suddenly appear, watch other teams and I swear that if we asked him to join, he would have! It was his day off, for God’s sake! Every other player enjoyed their rest day, went to the cinema or met with friends, whatever. But not Leo. Maybe that was his idea of rest and recreation. To play football. Maybe he had nothing else to do.

I vividly remember a particular occasion when I’d called into the gym at the Mini Stadium, just before his team was about to start a training session. I was no longer his coach as he’d left the Infantiles level a year or two before. Like all the other coaches I spent hours
there watching, chatting and learning about the up-and-coming players. That is, after all, part of our role in the club. To observe. As it happened it was one of the days when the kids were allowed to spend some time in the gym. His coach at that time had not arrived and the scene is imprinted on my memory. There were Víctor Vázquez, Piqué and I can’t remember who else, stretched out on a mat, throwing a tennis ball between them, and Messi, the bastard, working on his own. As if the coach was there. I’m not suggesting that the exercises were right, maybe he was doing the wrong kind of work, but I remember that, it was unusual.

A few hours later I met him opposite the Mini Stadium, and I stopped him and said, ‘with your attitude you may or may not make it to the first team. But you’ll certainly become a professional, because what you have, that passion, is not normal.’

I can’t remember if he answered or not.

Leo is being interviewed on the Catalan television channel TV3. His first months at Barcelona had been far from successful. He could, at first, only play friendlies. And he got injured in the second official match with the
Infantiles
B side. He returned to Rosario to recover and get his career back on track before going back to Barcelona to start all over again. In the new season, he was playing more regularly and scoring.

Leo, it should be added, always struggled to explain what made him what he is.

Season 2001−02: Taking off

Recovered from his injuries, Leo began the 2001
−
02 season with the Junior B side coached by Albert Benaiges. The boys of ’87, a historic generation of players from La Masía that included, among others, Cesc Fàbregas and Gerard Piqué, shared a dressing room for two and a half seasons. This team, usually playing the 3-4-3 instilled in them at the academy, deserves special mention as representative of one of the greatest generations ever to have come out of La Masía. At the start of the season, a typical line-up might be:

Dani Plancheria; Marc Valiente, Piqué, Carlos Algar; Cesc, Rafa Blázquez, Robert Giribert, Marc Pedraza; Toni Calvo, Víctor Vázquez and Juanjo Clausi.

And Messi?

Leo’s transfer issues still hadn’t been resolved and he was still ineligible for national competitions, so he was to be in and out
of Benaiges’ team, and when he did play he was placed wide on the left. ‘He loved playing as an
enganche
, between the lines and enjoyed coming inside,’ recalls the Junior B coach. ‘We put him wide because for the system we played it suited us better. But he had a tendency to come in between the lines, where he really wanted to be. He knew that with a couple of mazy runs, he would find himself in front of goal.’ Leo, therefore, took some time to fit in and adapt to the discipline. Marc Pedraza played in the
enganche
role behind Víctor Vázquez, and only when he left for Espanyol did the position go to Cesc and, sometimes to Leo. ‘He was a very quiet, calm boy, but you could read a lot from his expressions. Even when you saw him with his team-mates, he seemed quite forlorn, that’s the truth,’ recalls Benaiges.

The Junior category was divided into two parts: Junior A (17-year-olds) played in a league with Junior B of Espanyol, and the Junior B (16-year olds) of Espanyol had the A of Barcelona as rival. It was a tacit agreement between the two big Catalan clubs so that the A sides could share the titles between them. The generation of ’87 therefore found themselves competing for the league against the Espanyol Junior A side, in other words against boys a year older than them, some of whom went on to play in La Liga, players like Sergio Sanchez, today at Malaga, and Marc Torrejón (now at Racing Santander).

But for the first time in the history of the Catalan competition, a Junior B side became champions against an A side: in the twenty-third game of the season, seven games before the end, in the Damm stadium, the
cules
of ’87 won the league. In their last match against their city neighbours, Cesc, Piqué and Rafael Blázquez (another pearl of the Barcelona academy whose career was blighted by a terrible car accident) all scored to earn a comfortable 3–0 win. The Junior B side also won the Catalonia Cup, and, in fact, just about every title on offer apart from the Nike Cup, where they went down in the semi-finals against Atlético de Madrid.

The league win against Espanyol coincided with a change on the coaches’ bench where Benaiges handed over to a former Barcelona player who had finished his playing career at a modest club, Gramenet: Tito Vilanova had suffered a knee injury that stopped him from performing at the right level and he had been promised a team from the academy when he retired. At the start of 2002, halfway
through the season, he began his work as a coach, at the same time, coincidentally, as the arrival of a communiqué from FIFA finally declaring in favour of Barcelona in their dispute with Newell’s, still reluctant to agree to Leo’s transfer without compensation from the Spanish club: FIFA agreed that a 13-year-old child should have the chance to be a professional footballer if he so desired.

Messi was enrolled into the Spanish Football Federation on 15 February. At last, one year after his arrival in Barcelona, nothing could prevent him from playing any game, in any competition. One less hurdle to jump.

‘Boys,’ said a serious Vilanova to his young charges at the end of the following day’s training session. ‘We have a new player with us.’ They all looked at each other; there was no new face … ‘Leo Messi. Leo is our signing.’ The group, to a man, cheered, applauded and congratulated the young Argentinian.

The 17th of February, Can Vidalet Stadium. Opponents, Esplugues de Llobregat. Messi starts the game on the bench. He comes on in the second half to make his debut in the national championship. He scores three goals. Final result, 1–14.

Tito began to use him as a number 9, in the middle. His first time ever in the position of false number 9, an elusive role between the lines that would make him difficult to target. Cesc, who usually played in front of the defence at number 4, moved to being the organiser behind Messi.

It has sometimes been said that the real star of that generation was Víctor Vázquez, a young man brimming with quality and goal-scoring talent who finished up playing in the first team in a match against Rubin Kazan, alongside Leo. He got injured, though, and sadly never wore the Barcelona shirt again.