Messi (20 page)

In Barcelona

  
1
  

Landing in Barcelona. Well, in Rosario. That is, in Barcelona

O
n the flight from Rosario to Buenos Aires, Lionel Messi cried non-stop. As though he was never going to return. Silent tears. His face twisted, the teardrops streaming down his face. Until he breathed in and let out the deep sigh of a lost boy. That’s how he cried on the 50-minute journey to the federal capital.

It was 15 February 2001. After landing at Ezeiza airport and before boarding the plane to Barcelona, conversations took place around the table to take their mind off the coming events, and Leo calmed down. En route to Spain, in between bouts of nausea caused by the turbulence, he fell asleep, and bit by bit, with every mile further away from home, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, ‘the sea worked its magic, the sadness of absence would come later’.

The Messi/Cuccittini family arrived in Barcelona on a cold mid-afternoon, and took a taxi to the Hotel Rally in the Travessera de les Corts, opposite the Camp Nou. The club had summoned them a few days later for a meeting with the aim of getting all the contracts signed, although, strangely, nobody had so far offered to meet the cost of the treatment that Leo had started in Rosario.

Eventually, director Joan Lacueva agreed to stump up €2,000 of his own money so he could take the first doses he needed.

And so they spent 15 days in a hotel room and at training, feeding a passion and trying to put some order into the chaos of a new life.

On 1 March 2001, at a table in the hotel restaurant under the watchful eye of Lacueva, the young Leo Messi signed his first
two-year contract with Barcelona. In insisting that all the bureaucracy was sorted out and ensuring that Messi finally became a Barcelona player, Lacueva was derided by many of his fellow directors. They were convinced it was all a waste of money. Time, however, would reward him for his efforts, and those of Rexach, Rifé and Minguella.

But the matter didn’t end there: one director – who prefers to remain anonymous – was furious to discover that agreement had been reached without the approval of the board. Without any consultation. How could a young boy cost the club so much money!? He not only refused to sign the document, despite the fact that it had already been signed by both side’s lawyers and a vice-president; in a fit of rage he also tore up the document.

None the less, the club confirmed the contract.

‘When I hear someone say “I signed this guy or that guy …” it’s a lie; you signed no one, Barça signed,’ says ex-president Joan Gaspart in charge of the club at the time. ‘Did you pay for it, out of your pocket? You didn’t, did you? So it was Barcelona who signed him. You may have been the intermediary at the time … but you signed no one. And they say that Messi’s contract was signed on a napkin. Well, no actually. It’s a funny story, a good anecdote, but Messi’s contract was signed by the then vice-president of Barcelona, Francisco Closa. And he signed it because I authorised it.’

The most difficult part was still to come – how Messi would adapt. Barcelona had found a flat for the family on Gran Via Carles III, near the Camp Nou, and the Messi/ Cuccittinis moved in at the beginning of March, two weeks after their arrival. It was a large apartment, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a balcony that led to an internal area where there was a communal swimming pool adjoining another building, trees and tranquillity. Lionel could get up 15 minutes before training and still arrive at the ground on time. That way he could sleep a little longer. The concierge of the building – as revealed by Luis Martín of the newspaper
El País
, a journalist well known for asking those kinds of questions that no one else thinks about – did not realise for five years that the guy who greeted him every morning played for Barcelona. ‘It’s amazing, no? It’s just that I don’t really do football. I don’t like it,’ he told Martín.

In Rosario people from all over the province would come to see him. In Barcelona not even his concierge knew who he was.

And right from the start, everything went pear-shaped. Did he really want to be a footballer? Let’s see what he was made of. A rocky road lay ahead.

‘I did not understand a word. They all spoke in Catalan!’ A few years after his arrival, Leo looked back at his first days with Barcelona with a mixture of excitement and irritation. As happens with every new kid in a group of kids, Messi felt shy and apprehensive about jumping into conversations, but he was received with a lesser degree of understanding than people would admit now. During the first training games he did not get much of the ball, team-mates were not particularly encouraging, he felt a complete outsider. Even as a 13-year-old he understood there was a price to be paid to be accepted – he was there, potentially, to replace one of the friends of those playing.

Leo was told by some of his team-mates that one of the coaches who was checking on his level in the first weeks had told some of the kids to go in hard on him; he didn’t want him to stay at Barcelona. He was, Messi explained later on in the Argentinian TV show
Sin Cassette
, the same coach who ‘asked me to play one-touch, not to dribble too much. But to be honest I didn’t take much notice of what he said, I used to do what came naturally to me.’

It is the same story the world over. Once the door is open, when it is confirmed that you are staying with the group, then you’re accepted, the attitude of your team-mates changes. But Messi never forgot those early weeks when he was made conscious of his outsider status. He felt he had earned his place in the club.

As a foreigner, Leo was unable to play official matches with the
Infantiles
A side, the team that corresponded to his age group. He only had permission to play in the Catalan regional league and in friendlies, and what’s more, Rodolfo Borrell, the team’s coach, preferred to use him sparingly, in keeping with the unwritten law of not changing an unbeaten side during a season that was well underway, with youngsters performing at a high level and who had already become league champions with seven games still to play.

In any case the physical fragility of this Argentinian footballer was so obvious that in training sessions Borrell instructed his players to tread carefully with him. ‘Please don’t kick him,’ he asked his defenders when Leo came out to train, the first to step onto the pitch. ‘He’s so fast, and so slight that you could injure him.’ He might have looked like nothing but he was difficult to stop. He kept looking for the second dribble, the third, travelling at speed. Cesc Fàbregas couldn’t get the ball off him during one of those afternoons where Leo was showing off his stuff. He gave him a good kicking. ‘Cesc, please, calm down, he’s only just got here, that’s not the idea.’ The next time Rodo urged the players to be careful. To the amusement of everyone Piqué shouted, ‘How can we be careful? We can’t even get close to him!’

‘He was incredible, he picked the ball up and just started to dribble past everyone, that’s how he used to spend each session, dribbling past everyone and scoring goals, it didn’t matter against who,’ remembers Víctor Vázquez, who played with him for a few years in the lower ranks. ‘We hadn’t seen anything like it before because we were more of a passing side; he just got the ball and went. We said among ourselves that he was more of an individualist, but that was at the beginning. We soon realised that we should have been delighted to have a player such as him in our team.’

Bored of winning by six-, seven-, eight-goal margins, Borrell wanted his squad to play one of the tournaments against older teams so that his players would ‘feel the heat’. Barcelona accepted his suggestion and sent them to the Pontinha tournament in Portugal where they would come up against Portuguese opponents, a French side and one from Germany, with youngsters two years older than that historic generation that included Piqué, Cesc, Vázquez, Marc Pedraza, Rafael Blázquez and the recently arrived Messi, who was able to play because this was not an official competition. They finished third out of eight and Leo felt comfortable.

Another test passed.

Without the international transfer papers that Newell’s still hadn’t sent, he received a provisional licence from the Catalan Federation on 6 March, and the club, conscious of the strength of Borrell’s
Infantiles
A team, decided that Leo would play more regularly if he went down to the
Infantiles
B side of Xavi Llorens, the
only time in ‘the Flea’s’ career that he was the oldest boy in the group.

At Newell’s he even took the warm-up sessions while the coach was otherwise occupied; at Barcelona, he was not yet completely in his comfort zone.

But despite the fact that the situation was a new one for the club and complicated for the new arrival, no one doubted his talent. He trained with Llorens four times a week, from six to nine in the evening. He arrived a little before six, collected the kit that the club had got ready for him, changed and trained. And he was never in any hurry to go home afterwards.

Where are you from? Where do you play? the kids would ask him in his first training sessions with the
Infantiles
B side. He was a year older than them but physically still much smaller. ‘
Enganche
,’ he’d reply. No one was quite sure what that meant; it was a very Argentinian expression. But, at the end of the first week, a boy approached Llorens to ask what was becoming a rhetorical question: ‘Is he going to play for us for long?’ The boy wanted it to be a positive answer, but it wasn’t to be – the coach preferred to sidestep the question. Surely Leo was too good for that level.

‘I well remember one match we played in training,’ says the
Infantiles
B trainer. ‘There was a corner against our side, and he put himself on the edge of the area to defend, as he’d been told to do. The ball fell to him, he started heading towards the opposing goal, going the length of the pitch, the one we call number three, opposite the Mini Stadium, passing one, two players – they’d all been attacking up the other end so there weren’t many. He got to the opposition’s area, took two more steps and then did what Maradona had done that day against Red Star: disguised his shot by sticking in a little dink, a lob. Unbelievable. He scored and went back to the centre circle as if nothing had happened. And you’d look at him and think … bloody hell! He walked back without looking towards the bench, straight down the middle of the pitch, hugging his team-mates. When players do something like that, they look at the bench to catch your eye, to see if they’ve done well or not. Not him, he just did it his way. It’s a small thing that I will always remember. As if nothing had happened.’

A bit later, Xavi Llorens wrote a report that Joaquim Rifé had
asked for, confirming that the quiet, 1.47-metre-tall Leo was a ‘little Maradona’, small in stature but with supreme speed and skill.

Leo made his debut in an official match in a Barcelona shirt, with the number 9 on his back, at Amposta’s ground, in the Catalan regional league in which he was eligible to play. He scored one of
Infantiles
B’s three goals and naturally he was selected for the next match, against Ebre Escola Deportiva. It would be played on 21 April.

The teams had breakfast together on the day of the game and their photographs were taken on the pitch. Marc Baiges, the opposing number 10, placed himself for the photo behind Leo’s slender frame. In fact, the star of that side was not Leo, who had only just arrived, but Mendy, a goalscorer with great physical presence.

The game kicked off. That was the good news.

In playing what was his second official match for the
Infantiles
(aged 12−13 years), he fulfilled the requirements of the Spanish Federation that would now allow him to play in the national category, too, a rule that youth coach Albert Benaiges discovered almost by accident: further proof of just how unaware and unprepared Barcelona were for what Leo was bringing. If, as a foreigner he had not played in those two games, he would have been obliged to jump from the next category, the Cadetes (aged 14−15 years), directly to Barcelona B in the second division without being allowed to participate in the two intermediary stages Barcelona academy footballers tend to play in to ensure their careful progression through the ranks.

By being unaware about the obligation for foreign players to play at least two games in the
Infantiles
, the club had inadvertently affected the career of other footballers. Leo was kept on the right road by Benaiges’ chance discovery, but Gilberto, a Brazilian youngster, was not so lucky. Having not played at
Infantiles
level and so having the normal progression through the ranks blocked, the club decided to loan him out. But he did not adapt to being sidetracked and finished off playing in minor leagues after leaving Barcelona. Sometimes the margins between success and failure are very narrow.

Now for the bad news.

Seconds after the start of the game, the ball came out to Leo on the left wing and he lost control of it. From the throw-in, Baiges, the
kid who’d stood behind Messi in the team photo, shaped to boot the ball upfield, only for the young Argentinian to put his leg in the way. Result? A fracture of the left fibula. The first major injury of his career, and one that prevented him from playing for two months. ‘Are you saying that I broke it? Mother of God!’ exclaimed Baiges years later when the magazine
Libero
told him what had happened that day. ‘It’s not that I didn’t know that I’d broken Messi’s leg, it’s that I didn’t know that I’d broken anybody’s leg.’ In fact, it wasn’t even a foul.

‘He got injured in front of the bench,’ remembers Xavi Llorens. ‘We noticed that something serious had happened and so we sent him to hospital to have it checked. He twisted in pain at first, but soon calmed down. He said he had hurt himself, but wasn’t moaning or anything. His father was at the hospital with him. I couldn’t go at that point because we had to finish the game. One of the directors went with him. And the boy asked, “What have I got? Will I be out for long?” When a footballer is injured he thinks, “tomorrow I want to go and run, and now I can’t. In a few days I have a game, and now I can’t play …” That is all he had on his mind.’