Messi (66 page)
Authors: Guillem Balague
As Joan Laporta recalls, Eto’o surprised Pep in training: he showed himself to be humble, hardworking and willing to fight for his place. Messi realised that Ronaldinho had been the best player in the world thanks in large part to Eto’o making the most of his passes. ‘Leo told us that he wanted to play with Eto’o that season,’ remembers Laporta, ‘which made me very happy because I also wanted Eto’o to stay.’ The senior players suggested to Guardiola that Eto’o could be very useful if he was handled properly. In the first two friendlies (against Hibernian and Dundee United), an outstanding Leo scored four goals. In the second match, Messi and
Eto’o played together in the second half and scored four between them. The combination appeared to be working.
But, speaking of necessities, Leo still wanted to go to the Olympics that summer. His story with the Argentina team had started very well and he wanted to add to the gold medal his country had obtained four years earlier. Barcelona decided to oppose him going. ‘On the one hand we thought: we have no reason to let him go,’ explains Txiki Beguiristain, the director of football at the time. ‘We had got rid of Ronnie and Deco, and the national team then wanted our best player. At that time, the most important match in the history of the club was the Champions League qualifier which was to be played around the same dates. But on the other hand, we knew that he would be happier if he went to Beijing. There was a great deal of tension.’ The issue dragged on for weeks.
Leo did not feel comfortable with the situation. And when that sort of thing happens, it is impossible for him to hide his feelings.
In the first training session, Pep discovered that he had made the right decision to select Leo as the team’s centre of operations: he had a special spark, was effective in front of goal, displaying the same form that he had shown the previous season, when Ronaldinho had given up being professional. But away from the training pitch, Leo was distant and Guardiola feared that without winning him over, by contradicting him and not having him on board, life at the club was going to be much more complicated. He took him by the arm at the end of a training session and asked him what was going on, but Leo did not respond. Guardiola witnessed for the first time the hostile stare of the boy from Rosario.
Pep was making attempts to penetrate Leo’s armour during those early days in Scotland, but the Argentinian preferred to avoid his gaze and refused to speak openly about what was troubling him. He remained taciturn and would not even discuss the subject with his team-mates, even though everyone knew what it was about – he was desperate to go to the Olympics. ‘The club is not talking to him about the case, it is a negotiation between Barcelona and the Argentinian federation,’ his mother Celia said at the time. ‘And Leo doesn’t talk, doesn’t ask. He is just waiting to be told what to do.’
The days went by without any resolution and he began to look tense in training. During one session, Rafa Márquez tackled him
from behind with surprising force, uncommon in practice matches. Leo bounced off him, got up, faced up to him and said a few angry words. Under normal circumstances a dirty look would have sufficed, and then, back to the game. But Leo was angry. He got to the showers before anyone else that day.
‘There is a clear conflict of interests and my son is right in the middle,’ Jorge Messi declared at the time. ‘They are using my kid as cannon fodder. You cannot and should not put a twenty-one-year-old footballer in that situation because it can create all sorts of problems. It is crazy that a player has to take a decision. It’s ridiculous that the powers that be can’t agree among themselves. We don’t know what to do.’
Pep Guardiola’s right-hand man, Manel Estiarte, called Jorge on various occasions. ‘Look, Jorge, this is not a good situation. Your son is not okay. What can we do?’ Estiarte, who had years earlier been the best water-polo player in history, realised that Leo was very similar to himself: if he wanted to win him over, Pep had to make an effort to show him, subtly, that he was on his side, that he supported him and that he was going to help him. Pep and Manel conversed at length on the subject, while plans were laid to find a satisfactory answer.
Tito Vilanova, who had coached him as a teenager, got the ball rolling by telling him that both Pep and he were there to look after him. If he wanted Juanjo Brau, his personal trainer, to travel with him, it would be arranged. But Vilanova knew that it was not just about that. ‘What else do you need?’ he asked him. ‘Whenever you want anything, come to see me and you’ll have it.’
During those first few days during pre-season, Leo noticed that Pep was a demanding, meticulous coach with very clear ideas of who was going to help them win. But it was necessary for Pep to intervene in the Olympic Games issue, in order to convince Leo that he was indeed, as he said he was, ‘on his side’.
Messi hardly ever made public statements about his situation, but without revealing too much he had made it very clear what he wanted. He joined the Argentina squad in China waiting for news. Barcelona were continuing the fight to keep him, but in the meantime they let him go: ‘If we get what we want, you’ll have to come back.’ Leo accepted the conditions.
Barcelona, meanwhile, left on tour to the United States while Argentina prepared for the imminent Olympic tournament in Beijing.
‘Jorge, I have to speak to your son and I can’t find him anywhere.’ Guardiola had made the decision but wanted to tell Leo first. ‘He is at the training camp in Shanghai,’ Leo’s father told him. ‘Get him on the phone for me,’ the coach asked him. Pep organised a meeting in his New York hotel room. President Joan Laporta, Txiki Beguiristain and Rafa Yusté, the sporting vice-president, were called in.
Guardiola had convinced Laporta that the best option was to let Messi play in the Beijing Games.
Pep dialled the number that Jorge Messi had given him and he and those present heard Leo’s emotional request for the first time. He definitely did not want to come back. They all sensed in his words the tension that he had lived through that summer.
Pep told him of his decision: ‘Play in the Olympics and win the gold medal,’ he told his player.
GB: At St Andrews you and Leo had to adapt.
PG: He already seemed to me to be a different footballer just from watching him on television. This type of player always observes you on the pitch, he observes you, to see what you do and what you don’t do, to see if what you do is good for him … They are different from us. You have to adapt to this type of player, history turns up very few of them and you have to adapt to understand, more than the other way round. They are not stupid; they are more intelligent than your average Joe. Maybe intelligent is not the word, but more intuitive than average. We noticed that he was a bit depressed at the start, but you tried to understand him and talk to him … I spoke to everyone a lot in the first few days at St Andrews, not just to him. You had to meet the people, discover what had happened to them in previous years. And I also talked to him a lot, but to the others, too.
GB: During that time you also got rid of three of his adopted ‘brothers’. And his sporting ‘father’ is suddenly not there either. And after, there was the whole Olympics saga. I don’t know if Leo’s mind was on training.
PG: I remember that he always trained really well in the early days.
We always aimed to make him comfortable. If we could not manage that with a player of his quality, then he would be better off being coached by someone else – if it didn’t work, I would have to go or he would. Faced with that prospect, we decided that we had to give him that comfort, we had to give him what he needed. He had to enjoy himself, that was key. This is more or less the idea I’ve always had, since I started with the reserves, up to my present position in Germany, too: it only makes sense if you always enjoy yourself. If you only enjoy it when you win a match, this job doesn’t make sense. But the club, Txiki, myself, decided to let him go to Beijing. We were clear that we had to take his discontentment seriously because we knew we had a very special player in our hands.
GB: How do you speak to Leo? Is he one of those you can ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ and who replies, ‘Well, look, x, y and z’?
PG: Some days, yes. It depends on the day. He always says, ‘when I shut myself away, I shut myself away and don’t speak to anyone, and have to get better alone’, and it must be respected. At the start I found it hard to understand him but you gradually get to know him better over time. You realise he is a different person. Just like everyone, he has his private moments and on those days you leave him alone, and when you notice he wants you to speak to him, you go and speak to him. As for the Olympics: Laporta was the key. Naturally I had the last word, but he knew Leo much better than I did at the time. I remember that he said to me: ‘We will make a mistake if we make him come back. If he wants to go to the Olympics, he must be allowed to.’ I already knew what the Olympics meant; I knew what that event signified. At that moment you think, ‘We will play the Champions League qualifier, we are new here, without the best player we have, let’s see how it goes.’ But at the end of the day, what use is a player who wants to be at the Olympics to me? If his mind is at the Olympic Games and not here, why do I want him to be here for the Champions League qualifier in our first season? I have never believed in impositions in football. That is to say, however much we say play this way, if I don’t convince them, it will not work. Then we spoke to him on the phone and, with president Laporta, we decided that it was best to let him go to the Olympics.
GB: And that was one of those ‘you owe me one’ decisions.
PG: No, no. At that time, I understood that it was best for him to be able to go and enjoy it; going to the Olympics is something that happens once in a lifetime. That was the only argument and the only reason behind the decision. Evidently, it could also have gone wrong, and if we had not got enough out of him it wouldn’t have worked. Nor do I think he is like that. I thought that when he got back, he would try to play well today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But not because he had to give anything back to me.
Leo Messi will always be grateful to him: ‘Guardiola always tells me that I don’t have to thank him for that, but it was his decision, he thought it was best for me,’ he explained that summer. The first match in the Olympic tournament was on 7 August. Ivory Coast were the opponents. Leo scored the first goal of the game and assisted Lautaro for the second in a tight 2–1 victory. Three days later, Argentina scraped past Australia. Having already qualified, Sergio Batista left Leo on the bench in the third game so that he would be fresh for the quarter-finals against Holland. He scored the first goal in that round but Holland equalised and the team needed one of his assists so that Di María could score the winning goal. In the semi-finals, Argentina would face Ronaldinho’s Brazil.
Ronnie had already sealed his transfer to Milan, and Messi insisted in a press conference that his former team-mate was the best footballer with whom he had ever played, that he would always be the best. ‘It is perfectly natural that he missed such an outstanding presence,’ admits Barcelona winger Pedro Rodríguez. ‘When you have very strong support, as Ronaldinho provided for Leo, and he leaves, you end up a little bit alone. But he found himself with players who had been here for many years, such as Víctor Valdés, Andrés, Xavi and Puyol, who were prepared to shield and protect him.’ Players with the club’s DNA running through their veins would be positioned around Leo. And so with those players the Guardiola era began: or the Messi era. Call it what you will.
Argentina convincingly beat their eternal rivals 3–0 in the semi-finals, and the much-remembered hug that marked the handing over of the baton from Ronaldinho to Messi. Messi had accepted
the challenge to replace him and, regardless of the reluctance he would show in public, privately he felt himself capable of it. ‘He wanted to succeed at Barça,’ says Cristina Cubero, who would keep Messi informed about how things were going in Barcelona and with whom he spent many hours in Beijing. ‘He said to me: well, I want to succeed and I’m going to win the medal, and then we’re going to win everything with Barcelona, I want to be the leader of the team.’ Thus spoke a 21-year-old-boy who had grown up before his time and who thought he had achieved his first triumph: the fact that Barcelona, in search of glory, had chosen him to show them the way.
‘I think he was very clear about it in his head: “I know what I want, I want the Champions League, I want the World Cup, I want titles, I want records … I want all of this because I can achieve it”,’ explains Ferran Soriano, financial vice-president who resigned that summer, disillusioned with Joan Laporta’s style of leadership. ‘I’ve always seen very clearly that, without saying a single word about these things, Leo had no doubts about it: because of his attitude and behaviour, he was convinced he could go far and reach the heights. Things would happen to him and he was still up for everything.’
Argentina played in the Olympic tournament final on 23 August. The 1–0 win over Nigeria saw the gold medals hung around their necks. ‘It was an incomparable prize,’ declared ‘the Flea’, who returned to Barcelona soon after. The club had all but secured qualification to the Champions League group stage following a 4–0 win over Wisła Kraków. The return leg, played three days after the final in Beijing and watched on TV by Leo at his home in Castelldefels, ended in an irrelevant 1–0 defeat.
Leo joined up with the squad when they got back from Poland. The Spanish league was about to start and the foundations upon which the group would work had been laid. Messi had worn the number 30 in his first games with the Barcelona first team, and later the number 19. From that summer, the number 10 shirt became his. ‘When they gave me the number ten, obviously I felt very proud and happy to be able to wear it,’ he explained in the Audemars Piguet advertisement. ‘It is a shirt that many great players have worn at this club, Ronaldinho used to wear it, a man who has done so many things for this club. It was a fantastic responsibility for me.’