Messi (6 page)

Before you come to the end of the motorway, you begin to see the outline of an attractive city, with skyscrapers of varying size; the road becomes tree-lined and all of a sudden you espy a gigantic modern factory complete with those labyrinthine tubes on the outside that add a strange industrial beauty to the landscape. The plant is fed by the Paraná River, and this is the first sight of this crucial river artery, bringing with it its fertile alluvial soil, an age-old source of wealth. And after the trees and the factory, then you enter the city through a new park before two-storey houses begin to dot the landscape on both sides. The ring road turns into a great avenue flanked by the outline of a city, tall, stately, old.

It was from Rosario, the gateway to the pampas, a village masquerading as a city, that Che Guevara, the singer Fito Páez, the cartoonist and writer Roberto ‘el Negro’ Fontanarrosa and football greats Marcelo Bielsa and César Luis Menotti emerged to challenge the establishment; and where thousands upon thousands of European immigrants landed. And it was also here that other iconic Argentinian symbols were born: here where the blue and white flag of Argentina was hoisted for the first time, created in 1812 to distinguish them from the Spanish troops they were fighting.

On the way to the centre of town is Independence Park, described
by the journalist Eduardo van der Kooy as ‘where the city starts to define its own style and personality. From the park starts the elegant Boulevard Orono which looks like a Parisian postcard. Buried in this mass of mature trees and natural foliage is Newell’s stadium.’ The streets become narrow and at the crossroads – of which there are many – you’re never sure who has right of way: it seems to be the first person to get there. The white walls have turned grey and the cafés have high ceilings, large picture windows and small tables. Inside the cafés many of the men pass the time looking at the pretty girls, while the ladies, including the older ones among them, enjoy admiring the physiques of the young guys, all of whom look fit enough to be footballers.

Everyone says that the most beautiful women in Argentina come from Rosario; there’s that irresistible mix of Serbian and Italian genes that combine to create blonde-haired beauties with olive skins and light coloured eyes. The good food contributes to the overall healthy and lustrous complexions of the inhabitants. Rosario is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country, surrounded by fields producing cereals and soya oil. The young grow fit and strong.

There are not many football shirts in evidence, neither those of Central or Newell’s or of the national side, although there are football pitches everywhere, sometimes every two blocks. There are five or six leagues and many of the footballers play in more than one: finish one game, pick up your motorbike and then go and play another in a different league. In Rosario, anyone who isn’t a footballer is an organiser, trainer, referee or whatever. Women included.

‘It’s different from other cities because of its unique passion for football,’ says Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino, former Newell’s manager and now at Barcelona. ‘The area near the city is a conveyor belt of players, a football factory that produces the talents that are central to the objective of Rosario’s footballing dreams. They are what we describe around here as “well-fed” youngsters with an enormous passion for football. That’s why the Rosario academy is so important and has created such great stars as Valdano, Batistuta and an interminable list in which Lionel Messi is the icing on the cake.’

He could also have named Mario Kempes, Abel Baldo, Roberto Sensini, Mauricio Pochettino and many more. Indeed, ten of
the regular players in Alejandro Sabella’s squad for the qualifying stages of the 2014 World Cup are from Rosario, including Javier Mascherano, Ever Banega, Ángel di Maria, Ezequiel Lavezzi, Maxi Rodríguez, Ignacio Scocco, Ezequiel Garay … and, of course, Leo.

It was in Rosario that ‘the Church of Maradona’ was formed (half in jest one would imagine), devoted to Diego, whom they consider to be the greatest player in history and in whose honour they have a quasi-religious ceremony every year on 30 October, his birthday, that parodies the Catholic tradition of the country. Maradona had a brief spell at Newell’s in 1993. Leo went to his debut in the black and red shirt.

Football is life in Rosario, and life is football. And to that end the spirit of the city is appropriately reflected in one goal in particular, according to
The Guinness Book of Records
the most celebrated one in history. It happened on 19 December 1971 in a match played in suffocating heat in Buenos Aires between Newell’s and Central. It was the semi-finals of the National Championship and the only time the two clubs had faced each other in the country’s capital. Neither side was able to find the opposition’s net in a match that was taken up with the battle to win control. Then, 13 minutes from time, there was a foul close to the Newell’s penalty area. Aldo Pedro Poy, the Rosario Central striker, made his way into the area. As he did so he called out to one of the cameramen – what was it? A premonition? A prediction? Call it what you will – ‘Get your cameras ready, this one’s going in.’ And so it happened. Poy, jostling with his marker, before getting away from him, soaring into the air with his body arched, his arms extended. Goal. A flying header. So what if the ball had brushed the stomach of central defender DiRienzo, wrong-footing the goalkeeper. Goal, a definitive one, too: the eternal rival had been knocked out in the semi-finals. Central went on to win the final, the first title the
canallas
had won in their history, but not as celebrated as Poy’s diving header. The ambitiously titled Organización Canalla for Latin America has for the past three decades met every 19 December on the pitch at the Central stadium: on this day someone crosses the ball and Poy re-enacts his diving header. Lately, however, the problem, as Poy himself says, is not so much making the dive, but ‘getting up again after it’.

This is Rosario. This is football. Messi did not rise out of
nothing. Neither did Alfredo Di Stéfano or Diego Armando Maradona. Perhaps it’s not about an Argentinian gene, but one thing for certain is that the three were born in a country where every day football takes you to the bigger glory (the fame, the money) or the smaller one (the recognition of all your neighbours).

But as Martino says in the magazine
Panenka
, this excellent raw material and passion that is found in the streets of Rosario has to be channelled in one way or another: ‘To this end the work of Jorge Griffa has been vital. A man who, after retiring as player, was quite clear about what he wanted. He had no ambitions to become the manager of a team in the Primera, but rather the creator of players and he never betrayed his original ideas. From the mid-seventies, and for 20 years thereafter, he left an indelible mark on Newell’s Old Boys. Later he went on to become youth coach at Boca, but always with the same idea; to be a forger of players. Griffa has a great talent in this area and a clinical eye for spotting talent. Even to the extent of enlisting assistants. Marcelo Bielsa was one of his assistants in the glory years. He crossed the country from end to end, not just Rosario and the surrounding areas, searching, always searching, for hidden gems. Bielsa travelled thousands of kilometres in his tiny Fiat 147 in this tireless mission that bore so much fruit for the “
Leprosos
”. His hard work was rewarded. Newell’s were champions in 1988 with José Yudica and in 1991 and 1992 with Marcelo Bielsa as first team coaches.’ Griffa also spotted the talent of Messi at a crucial moment in what had been, till then, a brief footballing career.

You breathe football everywhere in Rosario, but, curiously, the air doesn’t smell of Messi. There are hardly any photos, or pictures, nor even advertisements depicting Leo. Everybody has a story about ‘the Flea’ but the Santaferina city does not seem to want to gloat. It’s almost as if it is considered vulgar to have his face posted everywhere. Or perhaps they have just decided to respect his low profile.

But for Leo, Rosario is everything. When you ask him what his favourite memories are, he is in no doubt. ‘My home, my neighbourhood, where I was born.’

The Messis lived for decades in a small house on the Calle Lavalleja, located in a suburb some four kilometres south-east of the centre
of Rosario, known by some as La Bajada or Las Heras. To others it remains nameless; it is just home. It is a typical low-rise community where front doors are left ajar.
Cumbia
music, chatter and laughter emanate from within. Kids play in the streets. Traffic is rare. Time seems to stand still in Bajada. In this sleepy working-class area, at number 525 on the narrow Calle Estado de Israel, is the house Jorge Messi built with his own hands.

His father, Eusebio, was a builder by profession and Jorge quickly learned to do everything. The two Messis used the weekends to lay brick upon brick on a 300-square-metre plot of land bought by the family. It was at that time single-storey, a similar size to all the other houses in the street, with a backyard to play in. One wall faced the house of Cintia Arellano, who was the same age as Leo and his best friend. Today the road surface has been improved, as has the street lighting and the drains. The house has a second floor, a fence (the only one in the street) and a security camera, but almost always remains closed.

This is where Jorge Messi, Celia Cuccittini and their four children lived in the early years. It was, remembers Leo in
Corriere della Sera
, ‘Small. A kitchen, living room, two bedrooms. In one bedroom my mum and dad slept and in the other me and my brothers.’

This, then, was Leo’s street, just 200 metres from an uneven piece of fenced-off land covered with rough, wild grass where football was played; next to it, the kiosk where Matías worked when Leo was already in Barcelona, is still there, right next to the house where Matías lived and that he later gave to a relative. Go to the top of the street and there you will see Grandoli. Grandmother Celia lived around here and a little further up were the cousins. And close by are the paternal grandparents, Rosa María and Eusebio Messi Baro, who, at 86, and years after retiring, still gets up every morning to open the humble bakery he installed in a room in the house that they have lived in for the past 50 years.

Everything starts and finishes in that neighbourhood. The family unit is the fertile ground on which the Messis and the Cuccittinis were raised. Leo is devoted to his parents, his brother, his cousins, his uncles. To his mother, above all to his mother: he has a tattoo of her face on his back. ‘He did it without saying anything to anyone. He came around one day and showed us. We almost fainted with
the shock. We didn’t have a clue that he was going to do this. But it’s his body and there’s nothing we can say to him,’ his father said in Sique Rodríguez’s book
Educados para ganar
(‘Educated to Win’) in which the parents of the best-known graduates from FC Barcelona’s La Masía give their side of the story.

From here also come Leo’s best friends whom he still sees whenever time permits. For Messi, Rosario, La Bajada, or whatever you want to call it, represents his childhood, ‘a man’s true homeland’ as the poet Rilke would say. The place where he wants to return (where he returns constantly), the place he has never left; the place he has recreated for himself in Barcelona to make everything easier.

That’s why he returns home to his family whenever he can. It is to Rosario that he escapes when there is a sufficiently long break at any time in the summer, or at Christmas. You don’t see him in the neighbourhood so much now, not since he bought a larger property on the outskirts of the city, but at other times he has been seen cycling there. Sometimes he travels around neighbouring regions, as in the summer of 2013 when he was seen in a supermarket pushing a trolleyful of muffins, wine and breadsticks; he was spending the day in Gualeguaychú, in the south-east of Entre Rios, a sleepy town where, despite the cap he was wearing, he was easily recognised and asked to pose for photos. He’s had to get used to being photographed in the street. He never has any protection.

He even has a long-term girlfriend from his home town. Antonella Roccuzzo, is, like Leo, from Rosario, and is the cousin of his best friend, Lucas Scaglia, who plays for Deportivo Cali in Colombia. He has known her since she was five and today she is the mother of his son, Thiago. But things could have worked out differently. Antonella and Leo stopped seeing each other for a while, when he was just another boy trying to attract her attention and she was a cute little girl who wasn’t interested. Leo went to Barcelona and, on a trip back home for the holidays, the romance blossomed.

Make a note of this: Roccuzzo, Scaglia; Leo is a Messi and his mother’s maiden name is Cuccittini. The family are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Italian immigrants who came to Rosario from Recanati and Ancona, in the Marche region of Italy. Lionel also has Spanish blood. Rosario attracted Europeans, mainly the
Spanish and Italians who made up half the population in the first decades as the city grew. One of Leo’s great-grandmothers, Rosa Mateu i Gese, came from Blancafort de Tragó de Noguera, an area in the Pyrenees near Lleida, and emigrated to Argentina as a child. Crossing the Atlantic she met a man from Bellcaire d’Urgell, José Pérez Solé. When you leave home, new relationships are strong and long-lasting; they are the life raft of the immigrant. This is the real New World, the foundation of a new life. Rosa and José supported each other throughout the transition to a new beginning in a foreign land. They eventually married in Argentina and had three children, one of whom was Rosa María, wife of Eusebio Messi, the parents of Jorge Messi.

Recently,
Corriere della Sera
carried out an interesting exercise with Leo, reminding him of the Messi family roots.