Messi (29 page)

‘They quickly put Leo and me in the Junior A side,’ said Gerard Piqué. ‘Cesc had just left for Arsenal. At this age it’s usual for you to spend a season in the under-16 side, but Leo and I went into the under-17s with footballers a year older than us and we were a gang! Chechu Rojo was our coach, and in December they found out that I was going to Manchester so they dropped me back to the under-16 side again. But I went to see the Messi team, and in the Copa del Rey matches, Leo won the games single-handedly. I remember one match against Osasuna and it was a “Leo against the world” type of game and you need to remember that this was a side that had a lot of quality.’

Messi scored 18 goals in 11 games for the under-17s, one of them a memorably precise left-foot strike from the centre of the pitch that went in over the Betis goalkeeper in the final of a friendly tournament.

Barcelona C had problems – they’d won just one of their 15 games, and were lying bottom of their division group – and so Gratacós and Colomer decided he should play for the C team to get experience – his third team that season. ‘We’d seen him train and play with the Juniors,’ remembers Pep Boada, coach of the C team, Barcelona’s third side. ‘We thought he could give us something and that’s exactly how it turned out. We were going through a difficult period. The third division is a very hard and tricky division and we were a team full of very young kids. He arrived like a breath of fresh air, and the truth is he helped us a lot both as a group and individually. We were struggling at the bottom of the division and
Messi reactivated us; he had an extra gear from everybody else.’ First game, against Europa: victory for Barcelona C, 3–1.

Leo scored five goals in ten games for that side, including two in four minutes to turn around a game against Gramenet that they were losing. The C side emerged from their crisis.

He played in a Spanish Cup round for the same side against Sevilla. The job of marking a Messi brimming with confidence fell to Sevilla’s right-back: Leo scored three goals in eight minutes. The defender would never forget that morning. His name? Sergio Ramos.

Messi continued to make great leaps forward, always positive and never complaining. ‘He loved football so much that it was difficult for him to say no to anyone, no matter who the side was,’ says Boada. ‘He needed to become stronger, but none the less he made us more competitive. When Messi had the ball it was a revelation. The other boys were enthralled and wanted to copy his style and technique. That creates a lot of competition, which was very positive for the group.’

‘My first memory of Leo would have been about 2003,’ recalls Ferran Soriano, at that time recently appointed the club’s financial vice-president and an emerging heavyweight on the new board. ‘My first conversation about him was with director of football Txiki Beguiristain: we wanted to find a way of facilitating his continued growth. To start with we had put him in a side with bigger boys that would test him more. I remember on one occasion he had scored five goals in a game and we said to Txiki, we can’t go on like this. We had to push him more.’

But he continued to be physically weak, and, despite the fact that he was going up the levels, his physical appearance continued to be a problem. Unless … ‘What we wanted was to build him up,’ says Gratacós, ‘so that when he went out onto the pitch against men of thirty-two, thirty-three, he would have sufficient body mass not to be pushed around. We said: let’s treat him on a physical level. Let him train the same as everyone else, but with more physical work. But no weights. He may have used them occasionally, but very little. We were talking about physical exercise.’

Having stopped taking hormone injections when he was fourteen, Leo needed to feel confident that his footballing progression, now well advanced, would run parallel with his body growth. That
same season, even before the intervention of Gratacós, Leo and his father had frequently gone to a piece of waste ground close to the Hotel Juan Carlos (not far from their flat) and the Camp Nou to try out a physical regime, based on speed and stamina, initiated by Guillermo Hoyos. When he started training regularly with the Barcelona B of Gratacós, he focused on power and speed, aiming to increase the muscle mass in his legs and to strengthen his lower body. Later he would ask Ronaldinho’s personal trainer to complement this work, hoping to reduce the negative effects that such a rigorous exercise programme could have on a young boy. And when he wasn’t working, he was resting, crucial so that the benefits of the physical exertion should not go to waste: he had a siesta every day. On the sofa if he was at home.

So it was that Leo, in a demanding but carefully monitored way, gradually grew.

‘We’d been training for some months,’ recalls Gratacós. ‘Normally in the sessions I would put him on the right-hand side. Every Tuesday I would get together with Frank Rijkaard and we’d talk a bit about everything. Frank was insisting on replicating everything in the B side that existed in the first team. Ronaldinho would play on the left despite being right-footed, while Giuly was on the right. Leo would do what Ronnie did but on the right; being left-footed, with his mazy runs from far out into the danger areas, he would come inside and shoot at goal or confront the defence. Sometimes I would put three youth players (Paco Montañes, Oriol Riera and Leo) in those three positions in the attack; it was a way of helping them develop.’

At first when they asked him to train with the B team, four years older than himself, Leo felt out of his comfort zone, displaced. The players’ kit is kept in a cupboard inside the dressing room and everyone has to get their own. Leo, surrounded by new faces, could not shake off his shyness, and head bowed, would collect his things and find a place to change. None of this was helped by his slightly confused situation: he was a Barcelona player, but not from any particular side. These were exciting times because he was going through the stages at breakneck speed, but they were also perplexing times.

The day of his Barcelona B debut drew closer. Inevitably. But, before that, a surprise, and a present.

Sunday, 9 November 2003

Leo Messi scores a hat-trick for Juan Carlos Rojo’s side against Granollers.

Tuesday, 11 November 2003

Pere Gratacós meets up with Frank Rijkaard, who has now been at the club for seven months. The Dutchman both needed and actively sought out the opinion of those in charge of the academy. They talked about the youth set-up, the players.

Barcelona had been invited to participate in the inauguration of the new Oporto stadium, built in time for the European Championships that were being played in Portugal the following year.

Saturday, 15 November 2003

‘I’m writing to you now to give you some really good news just as you asked me to. Are you sitting down? ON SUNDAY I HAVE BEEN CALLED UP FOR THE FIRST TEAM FOR A FRIENDLY
AGAINST OPORTO OF PORTUGAL. THIS INFORMATION IS GOING TO COST YOU. GET MY PRESENT READY. HAHAHA. Well, I hope you’re still alive after this piece of news. I love you very much. Pray for me and wish me luck. Ciao, a kiss.’

Email from Leo Messi to a friend telling him of his call-up to the squad.

That morning the first team, or what was left of it, trained with some of the B team players who were to travel to Porto the next day. Leo Messi had been called up too but trained with the under-17 side that morning. That night, he had trouble sleeping. He kept turning over in his mind that this was the night before a possible debut for the FC Barcelona first team. He imagined the drive to the airport, wondered who would cross paths with him in the corridors on the way to the plane, who would sit with him. He pictured himself sitting on the bench at the Porto stadium. Being called up to warm up. Making his debut. Even for just a minute or two. Then he fell asleep.

Sunday, 16 November 2003

At Prat airport, Frank met the boys from the B team who were joining the squad and also the four Juniors Jordi Gómez, Oriol Riera, Xavier Ginard and Leo Messi, who had now played for his fifth team in one season, something unheard of at the club. The press photographers took a couple of pictures of the squad, the serious looks on the faces of the youngest members disguising their enthusiasm very well; so well in fact that they seemed totally unabashed. In truth they were a bundle of nerves on their first ever trip with the big boys. But the press were actually at the airport that day to record the return of Ronaldinho from Brazil, where he had played two games for his country and whose arrival coincided with the departure of his team-mates to Portugal.

The boys went around everywhere together. Conversation was limited.

Skipper Luis Enrique welcomed them in a typically light-hearted and jokey manner to break the ice and calm nerves.

The other familiar faces (Rafa Márquez, Luis García and Xavi, who is the only one still at Barcelona) and other, more experienced academy players (Jorquera, Navarro, Oleguer, Oscar López, Ros and Santamaría) made sure that the kids didn’t get split up from the group, telling them where to go and what to do. All the boys wanted was to get to the dressing room that they would all be sharing. On that day Leo, Oriol, Jordi and Xavier were just names that no one was going to remember. Names that surely no one would even try to remember.

With the team alongside Frank Rijkaard was director of football Txiki Beguiristain.

Travelling with them on the charter flight were Jorge Messi, Celia and his brother Rodrigo. Leo was going to pull on the first-team
shirt two years and nine months after that first uncertain family trip to Barcelona.

The flight was short, the team ate in the hotel, there was time for a rest and, when it was getting dark, they were taken to the new Estádio do Dragão in Porto. Nobody remembers anything that Messi did in the usual pre-game stroll around the pitch, damp and uneven. It still looked impressive, however, with 50,000 seats and a roof encircling the stands. A section of floodlighting had already been switched on. The opponents were José Mourinho’s Porto.

Back in the dressing room, Frank gave his team talk without confirming whether or not the youngsters would play. ‘Maybe’ was the only thing he would say to them in the stadium.

And then he named his line-up:

Jorquera; Oscar, Ros, Oleguer, Fernando Navarro; Márquez; Gabri, Xavi, Santamaria, Luis Enrique; Luis García.

Porto were playing with some well-known names: Vitor Baía, Secretario, Carvalho, Maniche, Thiago.

During the game, with a fired-up Porto and a Barcelona who allowed themselves to be dominated, Oriol Riera was brought on for Ros, Tiago for Gabri, Jordi Gómez for Santamaria and Exposito for Luis García. There were 25 minutes of the friendly remaining. ‘Right, let’s put the boy on as well,’ said Frank to Ten Cate. ‘Warm up, son,’ said Rijkaard with his hand on his shoulder. Leo was nervous, his heart pumping hard, but he wanted to play.

He was 16 years and 145 days old, and he could wait no longer. He wore Johan Cruyff’s number 14.

He warmed up for ten minutes. ‘Son,’ shouted Ten Cate. It was his turn.

He came on in the seventy-fifth minute, replacing another academy player, Fernando Navarro. The shirt looked big on him.