Messi (21 page)

Messi had to wear a plaster on his leg. He would occasionally go to training on crutches, but his trainer noticed a surprising strength in the 13-year-old: ‘We didn’t have to encourage him, you saw that he was strong.’ Those closest to him, though, remember him being ‘fucked’. His little sister María Sol didn’t need to be told about how difficult it was to take Leo from training, away from the ball. Some afternoons when the day was dragging, without saying a word she would hold Leo’s hand.

Then, in June, a week after coming back, he suffered ligament strain to his left ankle. Going downstairs! Three more weeks without playing. His body wasn’t just small, it was fragile. By the end of that unfortunate period, four months after he had arrived in Barcelona, Leo had played only two official games and one friendly tournament.

The Messi/Cuccittini family spent the summer of that short and irregular first season back in Rosario. Celia had travelled home earlier to be with her sister, Marcela, who needed a kidney operation.

But something had changed; a light had gone out during those first months in Spain. It was not clear if Leo, now 14, would return
to his new club; if he would decide to stay at home or return to Barcelona with his family after that summer.

*

It has been said somewhere that, even before the family left Rosario, Jorge spoke to his mother’s cousin who lived in Lleida, 76 miles from Barcelona, seeking support. In fact, they met many months later when they were already established and living in Spain. They had set out on their voyage of discovery without a safety net, without even life jackets, without any family support other than what the five of them living together in the apartment on Gran Via Carles III gave each other.

All this, and the fear of shipwreck, brought them closer in those first months in Barcelona: they shared free time together, meals, disappointments. Leo wanted to discover the sea and they would all walk there together. ‘We’d go to the beach. I lived in a city with a river, without the sea, so the beach for us was very attractive. It was cold, that made it a bit sad, but I liked it,’ Messi told Cristina Cubero in
El Mundo Deportivo
in 2005.

Jorge tried to ensure that the setbacks did not affect the harmony of the family unit, but Leo couldn’t play football, the main reason they were there. And Barcelona were not paying what they promised, nor were they rushing through the necessary paperwork. You could already discern a certain sloppiness, a lack of urgency, following the September trial, and now that everything had been signed and sealed, certain doubts were beginning to surface, evidence of a lack of care even. Furthermore, Jorge’s employment situation had not been sorted out, and he ended up writing a letter to the president, Joan Gaspart, explaining how abandoned they felt. ‘My situation and that of my family is desperate. I have made all the necessary economic provisions up to the current month, at which time the signed agreements between us should have taken effect, and today I find myself without notice of any new payments and without anyone to speak to and advise me as to what actions I should take.’ This desperate letter had been written on 9 July 2001 and published much later in
El Gráfico
.

The list of grievances was becoming long and heavy. The Messis felt deceived. Not so much by the club as an institution, but, rather,
by those who had promised to take care of the family, and that included some of the player’s representatives. Leo was FC Barcelona’s principal, or more accurately, sole concern: they wanted him at school, at training, to make sure he ate properly, and to supervise his physical and hormonal development. Leo and his father were the only members of the family with an NIE (
Número de Identidad de Extranjero
, an identification number required by non-Spanish nationals in Spain). For this reason, Rodrigo was unable to carry on playing football, María Sol ended up in a state school where she suffered a certain amount of discrimination because she was foreign and Matías, who had left his girlfriend back in Rosario, felt lonely and displaced. The fabric of family life was slowly coming apart at the seams.

With the first team repeatedly trying unsuccessfully to win titles, as a consequence the entire club was in the doldrums, and Leo Messi was seen by those both inside and outside the club as something of an experiment. Let’s see what comes of it was the thinking. He was just a number, perhaps a good financial investment. But it was becoming obvious that the Barcelona board lacked experience, astuteness or an understanding of how to handle their Argentinian.

Meanwhile Leo attended classes, as did all the young
blaugranas
, at the Lleó XIII school. He didn’t enjoy it and as a result did not get good marks. He wasn’t lazy, just a bit uninterested and, like many, would open a book at a particular page that would remain before his glazed eyes, unread, until the end of the lesson. He attended, but wasn’t there, complied – but that was it: he knew that it was all part of becoming a professional footballer. And so he did it. Albeit reluctantly.

Sometimes the school bus that picked the boys up at the gates of La Masía left without him. Training, yes. Resting, yes. And the PlayStation, any time of the day. Anything else: not a great deal. He had completed the first year of his secondary schooling in Rosario but, in Barcelona, he left his studies two courses short of a possible transition to university. He still excelled in gymnastics, but his childhood dreams of becoming a PE teacher were soon abandoned. Celia would have liked him to work harder, in case a career in football failed to materialise, but Leo’s lack of attention in school, a source of many a family discussion, was readily forgiven. When he rose to
the Barcelona B side in 2004, aged just 17, he did not have much time to attend the lessons, what with all the training and so many hours in the gym dedicated to putting on muscle. He had the perfect excuse. No more school, then; it lost its appeal when the objective of becoming a professional seemed even closer.

But there was something else that made it a bit less attractive. In Barcelona, at the Lleó XIII, he was ‘different’ – he was from abroad, had an accent, different customs, was quiet, and had growth problems; he was a figure of ridicule. He couldn’t overcome that just by showing off his footballing skills so as to win the appreciation and unconditional respect of everyone, as had happened in Las Heras, because in the Catalan school there were others, his team-mates, who were just as good.

So he had to toughen up quickly. In public, Leo had become even more reserved than he had ever been in Argentina, with the attitude of a much older boy, serious, taciturn. He preferred to listen, remain seated, watching. Surrounded by older people, away from the ball, he didn’t seem like a normal boy, rather someone who had switched off. His father says that he is more responsible than he is himself, his mother that he has a strong but quiet personality. All true, but Leo was, above all, a boy in exile.

In Rosario he had lived the healthy, if fantasy-filled life of a child. Dreaming of getting onto an 11-a-side pitch and playing. Getting into the first division with Newell’s. Like his brothers and his father, he wanted to be a footballer. Later on came the training, the matches, including the important issue of the 11-a-side game urged on by the coaches, together with an obligation to behave responsibly; and the perennial question, ‘you want to be a professional footballer, right?’ At the age of 12 he had to answer categorically because the chance of emigrating had arisen. And football was no longer just a game.

Suddenly everything became black or white. Yes or no? Did he want to be a professional footballer? He would do whatever was necessary to achieve it. He didn’t mind going abroad. Even at that early age he had to get it right; ‘yes’ was the only answer, he could not get it wrong. This wasn’t pressure put upon him by his mentors, but failure had potentially disastrous consequences for the family. His father had left his job, his mother had said goodbye to her family, his brothers had left their friends behind. And if it didn’t work
out, what then? Many children of that age have felt such pressure that their progress has become permanently stifled.

There’s a seed, one planted almost always subconsciously, which germinates in the minds of these youngsters. Leo had been heard saying, from the time that he was playing with the
Infantiles
, that he would one day play in the first division. At 11 he’d told his brother Rodrigo that he wanted to win the Ballon d’Or. This was no longer the innocent dream of a seven- or eight-year-old boy; it was effectively a refusal to allow the remotest possibility to enter his head that he would
not
achieve his objectives, that it would all end in disaster.

This happens to the majority of boys who take the step from playing for fun to playing because they want to earn their living from it. But especially to those who leave everything behind them: failure is not an option. If failure was ever to be considered (and it never would be), their whole world would fall apart. Leo and many other 12-, 13-, 14-year-old boys tell themselves every day of every week, with all the certainty of an adult, that everything is going to come good. And the reality is that things, particularly at that level of expectation, rarely do.

This extraordinary mindset doesn’t just reject the possibility of failure, but is also accompanied by the suppression of emotion. You become desensitised.

Leo Messi arrived in Barcelona at the height of
Pujolismo
, a political programme begun by Jordi Pujol, the president of Catalonia, in 1980. Embraced by the Catalan middle classes, the Church and the intelligentsia, it still exists today. As an ideology it sought to create a Catalan ideal that would bring social cohesion to the Catalan nation in the post-Franco period.

One of the first directives was to restore a national holiday, to be held annually on 11 September. This date, seared into the minds of Catalan nationalists, recalls the nation’s defeat by Spanish Bourbon troops in 1714 and the suppression of Catalan identity. It was clearly chosen to play on that sense of exclusion and victimisation that is so much a part of the conservative nationalist ideology that has become so popular. Harnessing and promoting feelings of discrimination by the central government based in Madrid (with justification,
both historically and to the present day) has been the hallmark of ‘Pujolism’ and its political offshoot, CiU. This has often led to misperceptions internationally, as many observers confuse Catalonia with the conservative nationalistic ideology that claims to speak in its name. Quite intentionally ‘Pujolism’ perverts and occludes the fact that there are many ways to be a ‘Catalan’, and all of them are legitimate.

None the less a programme of positive discrimination took root as the regional administration bowed to Pujol’s fantasy and implemented a number of radical reforms that further fed public sentiment. The most far-reaching was the imposition of the Catalan language in all state schools. This had its origin in the doctrine espoused by the pedagogue Alexander Gili, who taught that students should not be separated by language, and was based on his teaching experience in Quebec and the USA. His philosophy would eventually be enshrined in the 1983 Language Policy Act.

FC Barcelona became central to the policies of
Pujolismo
. Viewed by many as the Catalan national team, it was used by politicians to foment and export nationalistic sentiment, while at the same time integrating recent arrivals to Catalonia in such a way that they would ‘become’ Catalans. Nationalism used FC Barcelona and the club bowed to the pressure. The result of this was, and still is, the perverse notion that to be a true Catalan you must support Barcelona.

In Barcelona in the spring of 2001 having the surname Messi carried no weight whatsoever – the family was just one more group of South American immigrants. They had arrived from Rosario with only four months remaining in the school year, and Leo’s sister María Sol had to integrate quickly into the state education system that would require her to learn a completely new language. The delay in payments and Barcelona’s inflexibility meant that she was unable to put her name down for a private school where the language barrier would have been non-existent or dealt with differently.

She was approaching her sixth birthday.

State schools have an obligation to welcome and support new pupils, but most of the teaching is in Catalan. Castilian Spanish is introduced gradually. How an immigrant child adapts depends on
many factors: the origin and social background of the other pupils, the percentage of other immigrant children (low in the case of the school that María Sol attended) and, of course, the willingness of the pupil to learn and adapt quickly. Maybe María Sol was just unlucky in the school that her parents were obliged to choose for her, but in general there is a certain conflict within Catalonian society that, while encouraging national pride, often discriminates both socially and economically against those who do not speak Catalan. The
sudaca
(a pejorative term used to refer to those of Latin American origin – the English equivalent would be ‘spic’) never receives the same kindness and acceptance as someone from white northern Europe. Schools made and do make a conscious effort to eliminate discrimination but in the street, at the shops, in the neighbourhood, the spectre of xenophobia hovers.

The Messi/Cuccittinis felt alienated, like ‘bugs from another well’ as they say in Argentina. So explained Sique Rodríguez in his book about the parents of footballers at La Masía in which Jorge Messi said, ‘It was a very hard change. The customs, the idiosyncrasies, the values, the food … everything was different. We had to start from scratch. Practically from zero. Even the language was different. We had to adapt to Catalan.’

Argentinians are proud people, respectful of their roots and keen to maintain them. Perhaps no one had thought to give them a small potted history on Catalonia. Maybe they would have identified and empathised with a region that had suffered discrimination and suppression and was now attempting to assert itself by promoting its own language. Argentinians are no strangers to oppression. The fact is though that integration into this baffling new society was taking much longer than anticipated. In addition to the emotional upheaval and the perennial financial problems, FC Barcelona’s perceived and continuing lack of sensitivity towards any number of issues meant that family suppers at the flat on Gran Via Carles III were becoming increasingly tense.