Messi (60 page)

So, from an early age, Messi was introduced to the football world of heroes and villains and epic victories.

And of legendary goals that were recorded on old video tapes.
Just like the dribble through the English defence at the World Cup in Mexico which, as sociologist Eduardo Archetti says, was the perfect Argentinian goal, with the mixture of park pitches (the freedom to create) and the audacity of kids: ‘It was an unusual goal, almost romantic, which does not belong to our much more rational era.’

‘When the ball went in I instantly knew that it would be a case of before that goal and after that goal for Maradona,’ Jorge Valdano told the magazine
Jotdown
. ‘And I actually told him in the shower: “That’s it, you are now occupying the same throne as Pelé.” And then he started explaining some of the play. I always say, jokingly, that it was me who retrieved the ball from the back of the net. Nobody thinks anything of that. I ran to give him the ball; after the goal I felt I had to do something useful rather than just hug him.’

Valdano, a sharp observer and analyst, believes that Maradona solved a problem for Argentina in what was one of their worst performances, ‘the only one that, without doubt, we would not have won without Diego’. It was also a symbolically charged match due to the proximity, time-wise, to the Falklands War. ‘That day Maradona, through strength of personality and his footballing genius, became the new General San Martín,’ concludes Valdano, in reference to one of the liberators of Spanish South America.

Argentinians had found their hero, albeit one who would later be revealed as a tragic figure, full of imperfections, all of them shown on television. And they loved it. Without knowing it, Leo Messi, while he was doing little tricks on the pitch, was setting out on the road towards the same footballing destiny as Maradona, who would become, at different points, his travelling companion, his nemesis, a mirror, a demanding voice, light and shadow on his path.

The first time Leo and Diego spoke was in 2005, the first big year of Messi’s career, just after his first goal against Albacete. Leo was at home having lunch when he received that call on his mobile phone. ‘Congratulations,’ Diego had said to him. He told him that he had been following him for a few games, that he looked good, had a bright future, and that he should continue scoring.

There was another chat on the phone soon after: following Brazil’s elimination from the Under 20 World Cup, a journalist from
La Gazzetta dello Sport
who was in Holland passed him his mobile.
‘What are you doing, monster?’ Diego said to him. Leo made a request: ‘I hope we can meet face-to-face one day.’

Diego and Leo arranged to meet in August, to take part in
La Noche del 10
, the television programme that Maradona presented on Canal 13.

Messi arrived at the studio very early and sat in a room with his father, uncle and a cousin.

‘It was the first time in my life that I was nervous,’ he said some years after. ‘That night I had my head in the clouds, my hands were sweating. Suddenly the door opened and Diego appeared. He said a couple of things to me. My chest felt like it would explode.’

Leo told Diego that his mother’s dream was that he would one day manage her son. ‘The number ten will come to you naturally,’ Maradona told him.

On his programme, Diego used to play football tennis. On that occasion, it would be an encounter of four of the best Latin American players ever. On one side the old guard, represented by Francescoli and Maradona. On the other, the heirs to the throne: Messi and Tévez. The first to ten were the winners.

It started out as a friendly game, but the tension and tempo soon increased. Leo’s hands were no longer sweating, he was competing. A point was argued over, the rules were debated. By Tévez and Diego. Leo and Francescoli watched it from a distance, not getting involved.

Not a single point was given away. Nobody wanted to lose. But one team had to.

When the score was level at seven all, Tévez complained that the opposition had stolen a point. The score was changed. The youngsters were ahead.

Everyone made mistakes; something much more than a game of football tennis was at stake.

In the end, Leo and Tévez beat Maradona and Francescoli 10–6.

Diego’s only loss in the whole series.

On returning to Barcelona, Messi could not stop talking about it. ‘Yeeees! For me, when I saw him, wow, the best, it was a dream come true. Really amazing,’ he kept repeating.

‘Messi always has to be Messi,’ said Maradona at the time. But not everybody was prepared to let that happen.

When Leo heard that he had been anointed ‘the Successor’ (with a capital S) he would say: ‘It is an honour for me to hear that, but I have only just started out. There is only one Diego and there will never be another, and I try to mark my path and keep on growing.’ However, footballing opinion all over the world differed as to how good Messi really was in comparison to Maradona. Many journalists, some of them with considerable influence on the choice of internationals and on public opinion, could not accept the existence of a new god. ‘Ah, in Europe they don’t hit him, they don’t go hard in on him,’ some would say. The doubts about Leo gradually increased, in parallel with poor performances from Maradona’s Argentina team, which was struggling to qualify for the World Cup in South Africa.

As has been explained, it is no coincidence that a player who could rival Maradona in terms of hero-worship emerged in Argentina. For that to happen a decade after his retirement sounds like a Hollywood movie, but you had to choose between one and the other – that is how Argentinian society works. ‘We Argentines are fanatical about countless things,’ says Quique Domínguez. ‘If it is about one club, we do not accept anything from the others. We are fanatical about a religion and do not tolerate others, we are fanatical about our city, and so on … And we have to decide to be with Leo or with Diego.’

Instead of enjoying two extraordinary talents, the country started to squabble about who was the best. To be honest, though, it is not just an Argentinian thing: there really does not seem to be room in the world for more than one legend.

‘If it is all about success, Di Stéfano never won a World Cup. Nor did Cruyff, and then you have Pelé, who never played [club football] in Europe. If Maradona had been Brazilian and Pelé had been Argentinian, who would have been considered the best in the world in Argentina?’

(Fernando Signorini)

It is obvious that when people talk about who is the best footballer in history, they are not really talking about football – or not just about football. Leo and Diego, debutants for their respective clubs at a very young age, both with scintillating left feet, are two number
10s who have worn the captain’s armband for the national team. They are footballers who have defined their eras and on whom Argentinians have pinned their hopes of World Cup success. They are also an excuse for a debate, Argentinians’ main preoccupation. Every country needs its stars but the first problem arises with the definition of the word ‘star’: a brilliant player, for Argentinians, is more attractive if he possesses an ‘innate talent’, one that emerges as if by magic and which he uses to reach ‘impossible’ targets that, tragically, will end up condemning him. Messi represents hard work, sacrifice and compromise with his profession and his body; but it is difficult for him to be accepted as a star because, as well as all this, he has a public image (the one he has chosen) that offers little evidence of verbal imagination and a private life that is secluded and free from drama.

Being the best is not enough to be considered the best. ‘Messi is a poster, Maradona is a flag,’ wrote Argentine writer Hugo Asch in an article ironically entitled ‘Messi, the foreigner’.

Maradona displays the characteristics of an astute, streetwise Latin. Messi has also scored a goal with his hand but over 90 minutes, over a season, that Latin guile seldom appears. With the ball, like Diego he always has a trick up his sleeve, but he does not look to bend the rules to his own advantage.

Messi is too correct and proper in a country that is attracted to and even demands the incorrect way. People’s fascination with him ends as soon as he crosses the touchline towards the dressing room; he is then no longer a part of their world. While Messi’s succinctness makes the majority of his interviews dispensable, Maradona has no filter. He likes to draw a red line under any topic for discussion, to place himself on one side and point out the enemy on the other. He manipulates verbs with mastery and has a dynamic use of the language, drawing expressions from the streets (‘suck it’, ‘the hand of God’, ‘they chopped me down’). He came out with the line that Sergio Batista (his replacement as national coach) ‘will have to dress up as Piñón Fijo [an Argentinian clown and singer-songwriter] to make Messi happy’.

Sometimes his posturing suggests that he needs the media more than they need him. That is why he called up a magazine programme from the United Arab Emirates to clear up a few personal issues. A
journalist friend went to see him at the Chenot Clinic (in Switzerland) where he was trying to lose weight. They had been walking in numerous streets without anyone stopping them and the friend remarked about this to him. ‘It’s marvellous, isn’t it?’ Maradona’s reply sums it all up: ‘one more block, and I’ll die.’

‘Diego was really explosive, and that converted him into an informative, permanent consumer product, on and off the pitch,’ Jorge Valdano says in
Jotdown
. ‘I went to visit him once in Naples and it was like a non-stop carnival. He would leave his house in his car and twenty or thirty boys on motorbikes were waiting for him downstairs. They would go with him, some would overtake and repeatedly shout ‘
Arriva Maradona!
’, and then the shopkeeper would come out, the guy at the bar, too … Every day, situations would arise which could only happen to a character like Maradona. I cannot imagine a similar episode with Messi in Barcelona.’

Leo’s only remotely political statement was to defend the Catalan language, but Diego showed himself to be anti-authority while he played (with strong words against the Vatican or right-wing politicians). He was the spokesman for the man on the street without a voice, although he later ended up being a friend of the country’s then president, Carlos Menem, and of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, showing one of his many contradictions that suggest an unstable personality: it is one thing to be a rebel, but another to be constantly searching for a path to follow. It is like being in the middle of everything and a part of nothing.

Maradona’s very defects became virtues in the eyes of his adoring fans. ‘All that converted him into a terrible, reflective surface of the Argentines; not of what we Argentines are, but of what we want to believe we are: creative in the face of adversity, spontaneous, heroic, passionate …’ says Eduardo Sacheri.

Diego is so Argentinian, typically Argentinian some would say. Messi has been called ‘the foreigner’ even though, paradoxically, he is, according to Cristina Cubero, the most Argentinian of the Argentinian footballers who have lived in Barcelona. That tends to be the personal drama of every immigrant – unaccepted at home and an alien abroad.

Diego Maradona has said that he went out into the street, he was kicked and taken to the top – and with nobody to tell him what he
had to do to live at those heights. Instead of people looking after him, he had to look after lots of them. Leo has always been protected.

Maradona was educated on the street, in Villa Fiorito, surrounded by his brothers, on streets where the one who succeeds is the strongest, the most macho, although the poor districts (
villa miserias
) of the more affluent Seventies were not the abandoned shantytowns of the Nineties, where, for instance, Carlos Tévez grew up to the sounds of gunfire. Still, Messi is a city boy and Maradona, will always be a
villa miseria
boy, a shantytown boy. And the one from a shantytown always carries with him the misunderstood ambition to want to show the world that he was not born in one.

Leo left Argentina not because he wanted to, but because the crisis at the time forced his family to look for a way out. However, young Maradona’s Argentina was, as well as being more colourful, fiercely protectionist, and this allowed Diego to stay at home, at Argentinos Juniors and subsequently Boca Juniors until 1982. The player who reaches the top league and then leaves to conquer Europe is admired. But in order to gain the status of national hero, Maradona needed the 1986 World Cup – it was a source of joy for a country waiting for Paradise, scarred by dictatorship and the devalued austral (the former monetary unit of Argentina).

And afterwards Maradona’s story was seen as the ‘attractive’ tragedy of the hero’s rise and fall. ‘In that sense, for our history and our personality, Maradona represents us better. He doesn’t put us in a good light, but he represents us better,’ says sociologist Sergio Levinsky. Maradona loves living life on the edge, challenging death. Messi, on the other hand, embraces life, he challenges it.

In an age in which the loudmouths who react to everything are praised and those who sit in the corner patiently doing puzzles are disregarded, it is normal that Diego is spoken about in such laudable terms. And that is why he has a religion – the Church of Maradona. Leo will not have even a small crypt. Let’s hear from Jorge Valdano talking to
Jotdown
: ‘It is not at all easy being Maradona. I went to Bariloche, Argentina, recently, and I found myself with a flag with Che Guevara, Evita, Gardel and Maradona on it. Of course, if you are dead you get away with it, but being a living legend is a real burden.’

If Messi is
cumbia
(his favourite music), Maradona is Latin rock (Charly García, Javier Calamaro), melancholic and excessively sweet pop (Pimpinela) and
cuartetazo
(Rodrigo) – complex, then, with many faces.

In any case, neither is tango, the glum music of the loss, the absences, often the song of the defeated who wallows in defeat. Although Messi had to create a Rosario in Barcelona to survive, he does not miss a better life or a love. Only a space.