Messi (52 page)

In this he is not dissimilar to the vast majority of those who make it to the first division. Being freed from many of the hazards of normal life, the footballer is free to pursue his dream.

There’s more: in Grandoli, as at Newell’s, in the trials at River and at Barcelona, he was made to play against older boys, the best in the school. Similarly in the street, against his older brothers. Having the shit kicked out of him, without complaint and always accepting apologies, strengthened his character and his resolve. And made his learning process more difficult – in his training sessions, Tiger Woods would deliberately hit his ball into the sand to make his day more demanding. Players of a high standard, or even players who are older, all help to improve the quality of the practice sessions and help to intensify and promote the winning mentality, the ambition. Quality coaching is key, too: excellence comes from the constant search for the grand objective which is sometimes identified by the coach, the only one capable of seeing whether or not it is obtainable.

It’s said that one of the reasons for Brazil’s footballing success
is because its players have passed through small indoor pitches, similar to those at the Malvinas where Leo played until he was 11. A smaller ball demands more precision, encourages more passes; a smaller space multiplies the contact you have with the ball. At Newell’s Leo found a club that was looking for footballers with coordination and technique and what the coach, Quique Domínguez, calls ‘a continuity of enjoyment’. A great mixture.

Shortly after marrying, Jorge and Celia considered moving to Australia. Leo might have been born in Sydney, without the support of the passionate football infrastructure and the institutions that picked him out because of his co-ordination and technique. That helped him grow, also because of the competition with other good players and the experience of his veteran coaches. The Argentinian gene would have been a long way away, represented only by his father. Insufficient data for the creation of a member of the footballing elite.

Here’s an example: the high altitude region of Nandi in Kenya has produced more marathon runners than anywhere else in the world. It isn’t just that the conditions help the development of the body to cope with the rigorous demands of the race: the area is so poor that the children regularly run to school, which can be as far as 20 kilometres away. Success depends on social and geographical conditions, thus it is much easier to be an elite footballer in Argentina than it is in Australia. Compare the number of professional footballers from both countries who play in the world’s top leagues.

As part of the footballing context, you also have to include the great rivals that Messi has come up against, especially his relationship with Cristiano Ronaldo, with whom he constantly competes for ownership of football’s throne, a rivalry that has undoubtedly made them both better players.

And what about FC Barcelona?

Maradona says: ‘I think Messi makes Barcelona play the way he wants them to.’

Barcelona has added practically nothing to his football idea, to his style. Leo Messi continues to be the 12-year-old boy who always looked for the goal and who considers football to be an individual battle between himself and the defence.

When they asked Leo if he was a son of Argentinian or Spanish
football his answer was clear: ‘Argentinian, because despite the fact that I have grown here and learned a lot in Spain, I never changed the way that I play, the way I have done since I was very small.’

When he was a small boy, recently arrived in Barcelona, Rodolfo Borrell asked him to play on the wing and Leo answered with a categorical no. ‘I’m an
enganch
e.’ That was his way of asking for permission to play as he wanted. His team-mates from his time at La Masía recalled how, during exercises in possession, it was difficult for him to pair up, and how he enjoyed much more the one on ones with a shot at the end or the challenges where he could exploit his speed. ‘For me it was difficult to pass the ball, I kept forgetting to do it,’ Leo told
El Gráfico
a few years ago.

In his first years at Barcelona Leo insisted on being Lio, the kid who left Rosario.

‘Absolutely everything he does now on the pitch, the moves, the strikes of the ball, the lowering of the head, the intelligence to put the ball between the lines, he has been doing since he was twelve years old, thirty centimetres shorter and twenty kilos lighter.’ So says his former coach at Newell’s, Adrián Coria.

‘Leo had something that I didn’t see in many boys,’ says Xavi Llorenç, who had him in his first campaign at La Masía. ‘When he got here the idea of tracking back hadn’t even entered his head and here the direct game doesn’t exist. The norm is to attack from the back with the ball, looking for the horizontal pass, going from side to side. “If the goal’s over there and I want to score, why do I have to go backwards, if it’s easier to go forward?” That’s how he thought.’

Leo Messi’s footballing mindset, his concept of football, is encapsulated in the now famous Maradona-type goal he scored against Getafe. He made this play, obviously not always with the same success, hundreds of times in the lower ranks. In Barcelona B’s youth side he did the same: he would pick the ball up in the middle of the pitch and the only idea that he had in his head was to attempt to dribble past whoever came into his path up to and including the goalkeeper. Later on, in the first team, he got the ball just behind the main striker, playing as the false number 10, and ended up scoring lots of goals breaking from deep. The concept is the same. The only difference is the distance to goal.

Leo is a finisher; very fast with the ball at his feet, like few others in history. Cristiano Ronaldo is fast with space in front of him but he doesn’t have Leo’s skill in full flight. Hardly anyone in the world could link together three dribbles without falling, and no one is capable of mixing up this power, speed and body movement. Only Maradona, who was slower, can be compared to him on a technical level.

Leo always wanted to play like this, and Barcelona provided him with the platform to exploit his talent.

Messi ‘is a fruit from an Argentinian field,’ insists Adrián Coria. The last time he said it coincided with the four goals Leo scored against Arsenal in the Champions League. Around about then, April 2010, it was being said that Barcelona was collectively the best team in the world. But most of the offensive moves that night were the product of individual play, especially the fourth goal that he created from nothing, running at the Arsenal defence from deep. It is not a trivial detail. The Barcelona/Messi marriage is, without doubt, a perfect union between a young, quality, direct player and a team style that needs this direct approach because it often overeggs the pudding.

But who needs who more?

Xavi Llorenç, who was an attacking footballer, tried to transmit to the very young players in his charge some bold tactics but without the tactical restrictions of the following years. The following year, Alex García, a former defender, set out to establish certain tactical parameters and positional strategies under the 3-4-3 system that was used throughout the whole academy. It allowed for freedom in attack but demanded the return to the original position when possession was lost. He also forced changes of positions on players so they would understand the feelings and obligations of those who played on other parts of the pitch. ‘But you can’t put a brake on talent,’ says Alex García today. ‘You can say to Leo: don’t dribble so much. But then he dribbles past two, and then he’s gone. At
the end of the day, that wins you games.’ After Alex, Tito Vilanova, who understood Leo’s silent rebellion against certain instructions, insisted on a possession game, but was the first to play him as second striker, where he would always end up anyway, whatever the technical instructions might have been.

The coaches who had him did not demand that he was more disciplined, because they thought he would become more organised with the passing of time and at different levels. Someone else would show him the way. In the meantime they were winning matches, mostly thanks to him.

The junior sides at Barcelona are full of footballers who are the best from their zone, neighbourhood, town, village or wherever. They bring quality together. But when it comes to the best of the best (Messi, for example) demands are not made because, quite simply, the main preoccupation of the coach is to win. Victory makes the coach look good, and continued success means he isn’t about to change anything in a footballer that helps him win. In Messi’s case it didn’t create any great problem because his talent was such that he would win with either more or less tactical knowledge. But there have been other cases, less successful, such as that of Giovanni dos Santos, now at Villarreal, a player of great quality whose talent did not develop at the same rate as Leo’s and whose faults became greater than his virtues. He failed to make the first team because, in his day, being the most talented of his generation, he was not made to defend, work and assume responsibilities. He played as he wanted while his coaches passed the responsibility from one to another: someone else will put you right.

With the same neglectful attitude, Leo Messi continued his formative years doing exactly the same as he had done as a 12-year-old in Rosario.

Bit by bit he began to develop muscular definition following a special diet, gym sessions and training. But his footballing concept did not vary and that created new doubts at La Masía. It was understood that, generally speaking, as a footballer grows so does his talent until such a time as that quality stops. No one knows why. Messi was progressing physically, he was getting bigger but some of the coaches at La Masía believed that his style of play would not succeed in the first team because at some point the overflowing
nature of his game would be brought to a standstill, as always happened, and would also become limited because of the presence of larger defenders and a collective defensive game that would be difficult to break down. Leo insisted too much on playing his way, it was said, dribbling past one, two, four players, and, when it didn’t work out, it became a fault. But Leo felt so capable, so superior, that he carried on trying to score every time he got the ball. And his talent continued to develop, to the astonishment of many.

And he was also acquiring the support of the group because he understood that relying on his companions would make it easier for him to do what he wanted on the pitch, and with greater effect. ‘Messi,’ explains Charly Rexach, ‘is a bloke who, before he got to Barcelona, played well, had intuition, got into good positions: if there was a rebound the ball fell to him, and you’d say “isn’t he lucky”. But it wasn’t luck; he would see a fraction of a second before anyone else where the ball was going, it was intuition. But Messi has evolved. Before he got the ball, and every time he wanted to do a brilliant move, he’d dribble past three or four blokes and score. There were injuries, comings together and everything. Now he has discovered that he knows when to pick the moment to make the play or not. He has evolved, has learned to play his football within the framework of a team.’ Rexach has nailed it: ‘his football’.

The theory is that La Masía counts on a structure and development of talent that is responsible for the recent success of the first team, but it’s difficult to match this philosophy with Leo’s performance in the 2003−04 season, when he played for five teams.

‘Leo toughened up his personality partly because he was getting older, and as a result of the level of responsibility put upon him,’ says Juanjo Brau. ‘I remember when he was a kid, always laughing, and he had a certain aura about him. That character became harder, we hardened it up, football did, Barça did. There was a period when they always made him play with the team that needed to win. He trained from Monday to Friday and on Thursday they would tell him which team he would be playing in that weekend. What does that tell you? These teams were dependent on him to win. We have formed this winning player, decisive, determined, necessary.’

Barcelona fed his craving to win that he had brought with him
from Rosario, and helped to create the competitive monster that he carried inside and was unleashed as the seasons passed. It hardened the boy.

Fernando Signorini, the former trainer of the Argentinian national side, picks up this line of thought: ‘His development exploded so quickly and he was such a highly prized gem, you have to understand that no one dared to say no to him. And a lot of times I think that to do something good from a sporting point of view is quite harmful from a human point of view – it doesn’t prepare players for life. In the development we shouldn’t worry so much about the body or about victories – we should be thinking about human beings, because there is no guarantee that they are going to become great stars, even though finally some do.’

Leo was always asked to win at all times and in 2013, with the arrival of Neymar, another footballer who likes to play his game in a way that does not automatically fit in with the scheme of play that has brought so much success to Barcelona, he has now been asked to share his level of influence with the new arrival. For a person who is a competitive animal and has, since infancy, shouldered this responsibility, it must be difficult to get his head round this notion. He wants the responsibility, he needs it.

The problem with youth development is that with success comes confusion: Barcelona identified the work they had done at La Masía in the previous decades as the principal reasons for success during the Guardiola era. Perhaps the most sensible interpretation would be the assumption that the titles were won by a cocktail of talent from an extraordinary generation that learned from the youth system things like control of the game, positioning, the importance of technique, and so on, but that clearly benefited from a unique talent led by a coach who knew how to blend everything together, after offering the team to Leo, the special individual.