Messi (48 page)

The club was clearly responding to a widespread concern, but its answer was a somewhat conventional one. The club had a nutritionist,
who would prepare him a milkshake full of vitamins after training. He hated the milkshake. Juanjo Brau became his personal physiotherapist and also joined him with the national team. He would have a massage before training and the care would continue after training and matches. He gradually learned how to reduce his participation during training in order to be ready for the matches, to avoid new injuries. ‘We would get to the training ground and they would often already be treating him,’ remembers Gudjohnsen. ‘He reminded me of Michael Jordan: if you have a player like him, you have to look after him at all times because you’re going to need him. Nobody had the feeling that it was unfair to treat him differently. Other footballers had their own helpers.’

In any case, muscular injuries are not just coincidence. Twenty-year-old Leo was a youngster who had a fairly unhealthy diet: pizzas and hamburgers, escalopes, too much Coca-Cola, at any time of day. But the feeling in the dressing room was that almost everything was allowed as long as you played well. That was one of the lessons learned from Deco and, especially, Ronaldinho.

Leo’s path to adulthood on and off the pitch was being mapped out
by Ronaldinho, and suddenly all the discipline, effort and sacrifice that had driven him to the top was forgotten as Ronnie’s world opened up new and exciting possibilities and sensations.

From the centre of the whirlwind that was his new life, Leo faced up to his father. Rebellion, finally. At 18 he began to exhibit all the traits of an adolescent. He wanted to get to know life, the one he had not yet experienced, and that wish coincided with his adventures with Ronaldinho: he was eager to be led astray.

In September 2005, Leo Messi bought his first house in Barcelona. Fifty metres from his Brazilian mentor. The reason was obvious and it wasn’t just a social thing. It was also a sort of footballing fertiliser: much easier to grow closer to Ronnie by being his neighbour than far away from him. Zabaleta often came by his beach house, with its two large lounges stuffed with boxes containing shoes or Xboxes, where computer football games were played non-stop and Leo would choose to be Barcelona or Argentina: ‘Sometimes I pick myself. Sometimes I grumble that they do not make me as fast as I really am. But I pick myself and I don’t give the ball to anyone.’

Another guest in that huge house was the Argentinian goalkeeper Oscar Ustari: ‘He loves being with his friends, his family; I’ve always noticed that he says to me: “Aren’t you going to come and see me?” or when I’ve come over to Barcelona with my wife, my mother, the kids, he would say … “don’t go and stay in a hotel, stay at the house, I’ll lend you the car so you can go wherever you want”. And in the national team if he gets to the room first, he’s waiting for me with a
mate
… you know, stuff like that. It’s good that he lives in the real world. I am very much like him, calm, and I’m not saying to him all the time “you’re the best, you’re this, you’re that”. I ask after him, his family … We hardly ever speak about Leo the footballer.’

Ronaldinho had also made his debut in the first division as a 17-year-old so, as Messi says, ‘he knew what I was going through’. Once accepted as one of the group, Leo, Ronnie and Deco would enjoy playing with a little ball, the size of a tennis ball. Keepy-uppy with a twist before the training session. If Ronnie managed to come up with a new way to hit the ball or play with it, he used to look at Leo, smiling. ‘He would make a face that would say, “did you see that? I have a new challenge”,’ Messi remembers in the
Sin Cassette
programme. ‘He would practise and a couple of days later he would do that touch
or move to perfection. I am not like that, I don’t practise things. I feel ashamed if I try different things and they don’t come off.’

But the law of football is implacable. One day you are good, the next you are past it. A star player’s response before the inevitable decline often defines his personality. The coach bides his time and encourages the player’s defiant side in order to squeeze the last drop of blood out of him.

But Ronaldinho was not responding to that and the growing, and deserved, criticism that the Brazilian was receiving hurt Leo. ‘What Ronaldinho has to put up with is not normal,’ Leo said back then. ‘The best thing we could do would be to leave him in peace. Much is spoken about Ronnie and it isn’t always about what happens on the pitch. I don’t like that. We all have ups and downs, many matches are played, many minutes. Ronnie is an example to everyone, it is not easy to be the best player in the world and to stay in such high spirits as he does.’

‘Leo was a teenager,’ comments Joan Laporta, ‘who was playing alongside the best player in the world. Just imagine that. They promote you to the first team and the best player in the world realises that you, the
new boy
, are actually the best player in the world. You, the one promoted at sixteen. He was a teenager spellbound, of course he was, by Ronnie’s way of life. I prefer to remember the positives. Ronnie welcomed him instead of isolating him. We are all human and we can all make mistakes, but I think the way he welcomed Leo on the pitch was very positive, and on top of that Ronnie integrated him into his group of friends. Leo was a boy at the time, with twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old men. I believe that real-life experiences are incredibly important, to know what suits you and what doesn’t, and Leo learned a lot from Ronnie, and he definitely learned in every sense of the word.’

The fact is that Ronaldinho was not always a good example to Leo. ‘There came a day when Ronaldinho, he of the eternal smile, the player who had given Barcelona the self-esteem they had lost after five dark seasons, allowed himself to be consumed by long nights of partying, with the corresponding hangovers that were slept off on a massage bed in the changing room gym,’ explains the highly-regarded Catalan journalist Lluis Canut in
El Mundo Deportivo
. After the successful period (2004−06), he would train alone in the afternoons with
a member of the technical staff who had found out about Ronnie’s preferences and distractions, including his favourite women’s hair colour. He agreed to keep such information to himself in exchange for those extra sessions. During matches, if he felt worn out but thought he had done enough, Ronnie would tell Rijkaard that he had a muscular problem so that the coach would substitute him. The message being given to the rest of the squad was a dangerous one.

In any case, his decline was not normal. And it was accelerating at an alarming rate. What was happening to Ronaldinho? Just a year after being named the best footballer in the world for the second successive season, he had lost his love of the sport. Which is another way of losing self-respect.

But everything has to start somewhere.

Something broke in Ronaldinho’s mind at World Cup 2006 in Germany. Brazil arrived massive favourites after triumphing in Korea four years earlier and taking away the 2004 Copa América and also the 2005 Confederations Cup. They won their qualifying group, which included Croatia, Japan and Australia, with nine points.

But the team (with stars such as Ronaldo, Kaká, Cafú, Roberto Carlos, Lucio and Ronaldinho) was not playing well. Ronaldinho, a big child, extremely innocent and an eternal pleasure seeker, felt victimised. On some occasions he would call a friend and ask them to visit. He needed to clear his head but he couldn’t go out because of the paparazzi.

The Brazilian squad used the World Cup as an excuse to get away from routine, to remove the constraints of the many demands put upon them, but it was the new world star who got the stick, despite Brazil qualifying. They annihilated Ghana in the last 16 but did not correct the imbalances which prevented them from beating France in the quarter-finals. It was a huge disappointment in a country in which coming second is regarded as a failure.

And that is where Ronaldinho’s love of the game died. The pressure had been excessive, he appeared to lose his enthusiasm for a sport he had started playing for personal enjoyment. He went back to Barcelona weighed down by this.

In his first years at Barcelona, he was surrounded by his family, his brother, sister, mother. But after a while they started to spend
more time in Brazil. Ronaldinho was left on his own and did not have many reasons for staying at home. Sports psychologists say that for top footballers the harder it is for them to get where they are – and to get to the top it is a tough road – the more undisciplined they become when they unleash those other needs, when they feel they have to make up for lost time, when they have to compensate for what they have lost or sacrificed. Many people suggested Ronaldinho should get help. Even some of his team mates. But he wouldn’t listen. That is a sign of someone that doesn’t want help.

Leo would listen to Ronaldinho. And could see he was suffering. The bond between them continued to be essential to both of them, even though the balance was changing imperceptibly. Ronaldinho now needed Leo more than Leo needed Ronnie.

Frank Rijkaard was of the opinion that when a player starts to grow, to lead, score, win, fill the front pages of the sports newspapers, he should not be given more than a three-year contract. And when he is at the crest of the wave, contracts should be renewed year on year, out of respect for the player. And when he starts on the downward curve, he should be transferred, despite pressure from media and fans, who probably see him as an untouchable idol. Such a move extends his career and protects him from the often unbearable pressure of maintaining his god-like status. Moving to a club one step below with fewer demands and expectations would allow him to be welcomed and treated like a hero, and the drop in level would be less noticeable. That’s the way to bring the career of an idol to a close, was the Dutch coach’s belief: the landing could often be a bumpy one.

Rijkaard had the theory but at Barcelona he was not involved with contracts; and there is always a substantial difference between theory and practice. He was the type of person who felt obliged, grateful, to the players who have afforded the opportunity for him to excel as coach. He was willing to compromise instead of dealing with and halting the slackers, something that had to be done at that time. You have to be very brave to make those decisions, both for the club which lets a player go and for the professional himself.

Meanwhile, the two seasons after the World Cup were disastrous for Barcelona. The first year they managed to put up a fight for the league and only lost it on goal difference, but the next the points
distance with Real Madrid, champions in both seasons, was becoming greater by the month.

Leo would meet up with Deco, Thiago Motta and Ronaldinho in Castelldefels or in Barcelona. He didn’t always finish the party with them, as they sometimes had lock-ins. The next day they would meet in the
rondo
. ‘We would do
rondos
to start the sessions, ten on one side and ten on the other,’ recalls ten Cate. Leo usually joined the Brazilian group, which on one occasion was made up of eleven players, leaving nine in the other. One of the coaching staff asked Messi, as the youngest, to even up the numbers. Many times he asked him: four, five, six times. Messi ignored him; he felt a part of that
rondo
. In the end, Silvinho asked him to move to the other group. ‘Well, if he is like that so young …’ was the view of one of the coaches. It was the kind of thing that develops where authority is missing.

Barcelona suffered ten divorces or separations in those seasons of descent into hell. Samuel Eto’o preferred to keep his distance from that group and his enmity with Ronaldinho gradually divided the squad and the club. The two stars continually made gibes at each other in the media until Eto’o exploded at one famous press conference soon after returning from injury.

‘What you have to remember is I have always trained even when injured, and with a few knocks,’ Eto’o said, tired of the unprofessional behaviour of many of his peers. Rijkaard had publicly accused him of not wanting to play the last five minutes in the previous match against Racing Santander and Ronaldinho had continued the criticism of the Cameroonian in the press room. Eto’o could not control himself any longer: ‘If a team-mate says that you have to think about the group, I agree. You do have to think about the group. But I always think about the group first, and then about the money.’

The Ronaldinho problem was exacerbated: on the one hand his productivity on the pitch had gone down and on the other, as a dressing-room leader, his wayward behaviour was dragging others down. The directors were asking themselves if he was the best model for Messi, who was, without doubt, the Brazilian’s heir. ‘He has to go, he is influencing this boy, he is seeing how a football star behaves. He must never fall into that trap,’ explained one of the key executives on the board.

Any unity disappeared completely. Leo continued to allow himself to be influenced by the Brazilian ‘godfathers’ and any player who elected not to do the same was ‘eaten’ by the leaders – Bojan would be one such example.