Messi (40 page)

‘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
uncle, 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.’

The result was that Barcelona began to structure its financial agreements with Leo in such a way that Leo’s qualities as a player would be suitably recognised and rewarded. ‘From the point of view of Leo’s management, we decided to make his contract much more proactive,’ explains the then sporting vice-president Ferran Soriano. ‘We thought: every year we’ll sit down and talk about how much more we’re going to pay him. We didn’t tell Jorge that we would increase his son’s salary almost every year, but both he and Leo were aware that the matter would be discussed at the beginning of every season. We knew the value of the player, we were aware of his value on the football pitch, and we were conscious, too, that he had never asked for anything. We were moving him up the various levels, setting tasks that became increasingly difficult, but we wanted to send a clear message: “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll take care of you.”’

The third contract was signed in Utrecht during the Under 20 World Cup. Director of football Txiki Beguiristain travelled to Holland and met up with Leo and his father before the semi-final against Brazil. Messi had reached the age of majority and his working contract signed by his father could now be replaced by one signed by the player himself. But it was put together with a degree of haste. It made him a Barcelona player until 2010, two years less than the previous contract, but with much greater financial remuneration. He would be paid as a first-team player; he was never again to be demoted to Barcelona B. His earnings were €90,000 a year in 2004, €110,000 in 2005, and in the last year €450,000;if he played 25 games, he would receive a further million, and an additional million if he got to 45 games;he would also receive a bonus of €225,000 in October 2005. The buyout clause remained at €150 million.

‘We have great confidence in the player: we are convinced that his participation in the first team would be very important from this moment on,’ said Txiki Beguiristain at the time. He believed Leo could ‘alter the rhythm and dynamic of many games’.

This contract would be rendered invalid before it even came into force, and three months later he signed a new one. Such was the speed at which the ‘Messi effect’ was moving.

From the beginning, Silvinho happily adopted the roles of confidant, best friend, guide and protector that others, namely Grighini, Ustari and Víctor Vázquez had fulfilled in his previous sides. ‘We spoke a lot about football, Leo’s not the sort of bloke to tell you a lot, he’s more of a listener. And I always liked talking a lot, about life, about what was going on, everything,’ says the now retired Brazilian. ‘Leo’s not one for talking much, nor for jokes, but he’s fast, he’ll come back at you with a quip very quickly. He always says he is no Silvinho … He always used to say to me: “okay, Silvi, go out there and tell the press everything you’ve got to say and then I’ll go out there when there’s nothing left to say”.’

‘Messi knew that Silvinho was very fond of him, that he enjoyed watching over him, he was a father figure,’ adds Eidur Gudjohnsen, the Icelandic player signed from Chelsea in 2006. If Ronaldinho was the fallen angel on Leo’s left shoulder, then Silvi, a profoundly committed Christian, was the good one on his right. ‘Silvinho is a good man, there’s no side to him. He laughs a lot, makes jokes, but he is very religious, very much a family man, a home lover, and he had a very clear idea of where he was going in life.’

‘At the age of seventeen Leo already knew what he wanted, and had very fixed opinions on a number of issues,’ insists Silvinho. ‘You’d go up to him to give him some advice, to explain something that had happened and he would tell you that he was aware of it, he knew what was happening. How Barcelona was faring, what was happening in the football world, stories in the media …’ The relationship was strengthened on a Barcelona tour in the summer of 2005 to Korea, China and Japan.

Leo went on the promotional tour as world champion, league winner and with his first professional contract. He was, for the first time, a fully recognised member of the first team, with all the security and prestige that such a position affords. And he could begin to enjoy the experience of being an equal member of the group. He followed the Brazilians everywhere. ‘He didn’t speak a single word of English, so he came with us,’ said Silvinho who spent two years
at Arsenal and one at Manchester City. ‘I knew enough to be able to change currency, stuff like that, and I used to do it for him. One day I brought the money up to his room and as I went along the hall I could hear shouting from Leo’s room, “Go, go, no, leave it. Just go.” It was Leo, very agitated. And I thought, “what’s going on here?” So I went in and there was a Chinese guy trying to clean the room who didn’t understand a word that Leo was saying.