Messi (31 page)
Authors: Guillem Balague
As part of the planning for Messi’s season, the coaches of the various sides that he represented would meet every Thursday and decide which team needed him most. And so he ended up as part of the under-16 side in the last three league games of the season, helping them win the title, despite having problems with his groin which meant he couldn’t train. ‘Anyone else would have got cross,’ explained Juan Carlos Rojo. In truth, that year Leo never completely left the Juniors: he would often pass by to see his team-mates, boys of his own age, play, and he would even join in the technical team talks at half-time.
In the 2003−03 campaign, Messi scored in four of the five teams he played for: a total of 35 goals in official games, more than 50 in all competitions.
‘Suddenly we went from nothing, to everything we’d dreamed of,’ recalls Jorge Messi speaking to the Argentinian press. ‘It was so fast that we seemed to have neither the time nor the place to digest it, to celebrate it, to enjoy it.’ Pere Gratacós likes to say that year Leo had 10 fathers and 75 brothers, as many as coaches and team-mates.
One doubt remains, though. Was it advisable to ask so much of a boy of just 16 years old? Would it not have been better for him to have gone through every stage of the process? Were Barcelona thinking of the footballer himself when they made him go through so many stages so quickly? Or were they merely focused on winning competitions and avoiding relegation? What are the priorities with a player of only 16? What are the physical and psychological effects on a footballer, or, indeed, on anybody, when they are identified as the winner in the team, the special player, when demands are placed upon them to achieve victory regardless of which level they play at?
Eleven months after his debut in Porto, seven months before his first
match with Barcelona B, Leo was going to walk onto the pitch at Camp Nou with the first team for an official competition.
At the same time he recorded the following commercial while he was still with Nike:
In it you see Messi and other promising Barcelona youth players (Jonathan dos Santos, Ricardo, Isma) playing on the beach, in the street, in the Boqueria Market in Barcelona, in the dressing room. You hear the Barcelona anthem being played by a discordant electric guitar, in the style of Jimi Hendrix. At the end the boys turn to the camera. The last one to come out after scoring a goal from a free-kick is the Argentinian.
‘Remember my name: Leo Messi.’
The world, Leo, was beginning to take note.
T
here’s been an earthquake. Where? In La Plata, Argentina. Are you sure? That’s what it looks like. That’s how it registered at the Seismographic Department of Weather Information at the La Plata Astronomical Observatory. Confirmed. An earthquake. Registering more than point six on the Richter scale.
It was 5 April 1992. A football match was under way. A goal would move the earth, literally.
In the general scheme of things it had been a game like any other. Gimnasia, the visitors, were playing a
clásico
at the Estudiantes ground in La Plata. There was nothing particularly memorable about it. It was a local derby and, yes, tensions and rivalries were at maximum levels, as usual, but there was certainly no league or title at stake, just the seventh weekend in the Clausura tournament.
The game had developed into a tight physical contest. With 54 minutes played, the Uruguayan winger José Perdomo was about to earn himself the nickname that would stick with him for ever. There was a free-kick against the home side, Estudiantes. Perdomo placed the ball, focused on the opposing goal some 35 metres away. Marcelo Yomo, the goalkeeper, prepared to defend his six-yard box.
Perdomo moved forward, summoning up all the power and accuracy he could muster.
And the keeper could only look on as the ball flew like a rocket, just inside the right-hand post.
Goaaaal!!!!
And in the stands the thousands of
triperos
(Gimnasia supporters)
rose as one and celebrated with such joy and passion that La Plata literally shook. It had never happened before, and it would never happen again. Anywhere in the world.
The game, the 113th
clásico
between the two sides, ended in victory for the visitors, thanks to the only goal of the game scored by the newly christened ‘Earthquake’ Perdomo.
Football creates passion wherever it spreads its roots, but in Argentina it literally shakes the ground. But how is this so? Like everywhere else, football is a mirror of society, but in Argentina it seems to be a reflection from a distorted looking-glass: everything from enthusiasm to legend multiplies dramatically. That’s its appeal … and its danger.
The commentator on foreign policy and economics Enrico Udenio paints a pessimistic picture in his book
La Hipocresia Argentina
(2008) in which he says, ‘Argentina is comprised of a neurotic society in which its inhabitants feel unfulfilled and compelled to act in a self-destructive manner. It’s about a society which in the past longed for greatness but in reality found itself unable to provide for its basic needs, such as housing, food, health, education and security, right up to the most elevated of demands, especially the spiritual and intellectual aspirations of its members.’ Within this framework you find the roots of an overheated passion.
‘It’s a society in which its participants are not only unable to achieve wellbeing, but one where they experience permanent sensations of being threatened’ continues Udenio. ‘This situation creates a chronic stress whose symptoms are usually seen in the form of tiredness, feelings of impotence, depression, sleeplessness and a failure to respond to stimuli. It’s a society that builds up dreams and, when they aren’t realised, looks outside itself for explanations and to apportion blame.’ They very easily find things and people to blame for their stagnation, ‘diabolical figures’ as Udenio calls them, and these frustrations become a ‘psychological irrationality’ and a tendency to see everything in black and white together with an ‘accentuated emotional compulsion. This helps raise some of their representatives to the level of gods, with the same speed and facility as it can convert them into demons,’ concludes the Italian-born writer who has lived in Latin America since childhood.
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset saw it the same
way a hundred years ago: ‘the Argentinian is a frenetic idealist: he positions his life in a place that, in reality, doesn’t exist, in search of an idea or an ideal that he has of himself. The Argentinian is, in fact, what he imagines himself to be.’
Everything had started so well: the country, a fountain of wealth and the destination for waves of immigrants, became, in the early years, the ‘El Dorado of half of Europe’, in the words of the writer Marcos Aguinis in his essay ‘El Atroz Encanto de Ser Argentinos’(‘The Terrible Delight of Being Argentinian’). Fifty years ago it was still one of the richest countries in the world, one that produced artists, scientists, politicians and writers.
And as Argentina drifted further away from that ‘grand destination’, one that remained just over the horizon, football became the repository of all the hopes and frustrations of a disillusioned nation. ‘I think we are a country that believed itself to be destined for great achievements, great successes, but something went wrong,’ reflects the writer Eduardo Sacheri, whose novella
La pregunta de sus ojos
was turned into the Oscar-winning film
El secreto de sus ojos
(‘The Secret in Their Eyes’). ‘It’s very difficult for us to reconcile ourselves with this. We weren’t that good, we were not destined for greatness, but none the less, we play football well, strikingly well. Remember that there aren’t that many of us. We say that in Brazil they play fantastic football but there are 190 million of them; here we are forty million at the most, and we can still take them on, and hold our heads high as one of the best football teams in the world.’
But this extreme passion for football means that Argentinians are blinded by successes (believing that they have finally arrived at the Promised Land) and also by defeats. And they believe that the good and the bad only happen to them. ‘Our “destiny of greatness” is pure fiction, God isn’t Argentinian and it’s nonsense to claim that Argentina is the best place in the world … At least now we can laugh at ourselves, and that wasn’t always the case when we were locked into a parochial sense of nationalism,’ insists Marcos Aguinis.
‘Argentina has been in ruins for a generation and a half, and we still haven’t reached rock bottom,’ confirms Liliana Grabín. ‘When you can’t feel Argentinian for any other reason, when your country’s identity begins to fail, you adapt to whatever idea gives you hope. Football gives us an identity, one that allows us to feel established,
rooted. You say “I am Argentinian” and you hear “Maradona” and now “Messi” and the Pope. Yes, this is Argentina.’
Ironically, two of Argentina’s most recent exiles have become two of the most famous people in the world: Pope Francis and Leo Messi. Queen Maxima of the Netherlands is another, albeit on a rather more rarefied level. And many more native Argentinians have died abroad after achieving worldwide fame: Che Guevara, José de San Martín, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Gardel. Argentina punches well above its weight and yet, as Liliana explains, ‘It would seem that you can achieve a greater sense of Argentinian identity by living outside the country rather than inside. Those of us who live here are forced to accept the grim realities of corruption, disenchantment, the fact that people no longer sing the national anthem. Those who leave carry with them an ideal of Homeland which makes a sense of patriotism easier to maintain.’
But there’s always football, that substitute for organised religion. In an otherwise grey world of poor economic performance, unemployment, mistrust and general disillusionment, football provides the colour that brightens peoples’ lives. In a country failing in virtually every area of growth, it is football alone that produces positive weekly results. As Sergio Levinsky comments, ‘Many go so far as to maintain that the national anthem should be replaced by the Argentinian football shirt, because it represents more of what Argentina is than all the rest put together. It’s the only thing that wins.’
And although football is also the perfect breeding ground for frustration, unfulfilled dreams, demons, gods, the entire gamut of human emotion, good and bad, it also unites. Sacheri adds, ‘In a land where we are accustomed to being divided, on just about every issue, where we have a fervent individualism, the national team is the only thing that unites us, because not even having an Argentinian pope can unite us. An Argentinian pope was elected, and the following week we were fighting to the death over whether he was a good person or a bad one.’
What’s at stake in an Argentinian match? Values, pride, a way of understanding the world? Or is it just points, titles? ‘Football allows, and continues to allow, any guy from a poor neighbourhood the right to have what has been snatched from him from the cradle: pride.’ This is the belief of football coach and
intellectual Ángel Cappa. ‘That’s to say that in football terms I can be somebody, in the deepest sense of the word. I earn self-respect and the respect of the people. In the neighbourhoods the one that earned the most respect was the one who was best at football. What other means does he have, not just to be known, but also to establish his identity? Only the ball. Playing well has an enormous significance.’
A game on a pitch is played for points but also for the chance of gaining a sense of self-importance, admiration. And just about the entire male population and a large percentage of the female one either play, or are involved, in the organisation of these competitions. ‘In the neighbourhood the person who didn’t play football was a rare bird. From that point on, life codes are formed,’ continues Cappa. ‘Football shows you how to be brave, to conquer the fear of defeat, the fear of screwing up, of losing the ball. It also teaches you to maintain that balance between success and failure, because you know when you are walking on a narrow ledge where sometimes the difference between success and failure can depend on stupid little things. As a result you become wiser. At the core of it all you know that you can be successful in a game or that you can lose, because sometimes you hit the ball well and it hits the post and then you mishit the ball and it goes in anyway. This to me is fundamental. But above all it’s about respect.’
But now, as happens everywhere, the Argentinian footballer has become an employee, a guy with a job. ‘After the massive industrialisation of the Sixties the “factory ethic” was transferred to football, which obscured the sheer joy of the game and destroyed that sense of pride we were talking about earlier,’ analyses Cappa. ‘Consequently what we are creating are production-line players. In general, the footballer produced by this process earns more and more money, as the big capitalists were quick to seize on football as a huge business opportunity, with sportswear, television, radio, etc. What they have achieved is the transformation of twenty-year-olds, kids like Ronaldo [Nazario] and Raúl, into sad youngsters with pots of money’.
In addition to being a worker, the Argentinian footballer is, as has been said, just another emigrant: between 2009 and 2010 Argentina ‘exported’ close to 1,800 footballers; Brazil, 1,440. ‘The very good,
the good and the average, they all go,’ adds Ángel Cappa. ‘In effect everybody goes. And here in Argentina the only ones who play are those who are about to leave and those who have returned late in their careers.’
The good footballer leaves, everybody plays all over the place, the fan, frustrated for six days of the week, allows himself to be carried along on a wave of passion inside the stadium … and that is how we get to an earthquake! This is football in Argentina. Sacheri encapsulates it best in two scenarios. ‘For me football is about two images. On the one side what we call a
campito
[a mini pitch], a barren piece of wasteland without goals, where kids gather to play football. They’re normally a long way out of the city. And the other scenario is of another group of blokes jumping about in the stands, which is how we watch football here. This thing about remaining in our seat … it’s very difficult. I go with my son to watch Independiente. And me, at my age I’d say: “… best I go to watch the game in the box and sit down.” And I can’t because my son says to me, “no, let’s go to that place where we’ve got a bad view, the sun’s beating down on us, and where we’re squashed for the entire game … but where we shout, jump, and where everyone is around us.” That way we are in a permanent collective conversation, where someone makes a comment, someone else makes fun of somebody, then someone else answers back … And then you sagely analyse a match with a bloke you can’t even see because he is two steps up from you and you can’t even turn around and look at him.’