Growth hormone is a hormone essential to growth and development. It is produced in a gland at the base of the brain called the pituitary gland . . . If a child does not have enough growth hormone, then the speed of growth is much slower and final height is reduced.
Society for Endocrinology
Lionel Messi was nine years old when his parents realized that his only hope of following a lucrative career as a professional footballer was to follow the doctor’s advice. That the boy had immense talent no one doubted, but this boy wonder had also been diagnosed with a hormonal growth deficiency. If left in the hands of mother nature, his stature and build would remain diminished to such an extent as to put him at a distinct disadvantage to others of his age group, or older, when it came to adult competitive football.
Messi, aged nine, measured 1.27 metres tall, which was about 10 centimetres shorter than the average height for a boy of his age. If his size had been limited by genetics, there would have been little any doctor could have prescribed to alter his ordained adult size. But the fact that Messi had a hormonal deficiency meant that science had a solution.
At hand was Dr Diego Schwarzstein, an Argentine endocrinologist who had moved back to Rosario after working in a practice in Barcelona from 1989 to 1994. He was a long-term fan of Newell’s Old Boys, and was trusted by the club with overseeing the physical development of its child players. It was the club that first suggested a check-up for the child who seemed to be, by a considerable margin, the best among his peers, but who was also simply very small for his age. He was nicknamed ‘La Pulga’, the flea, because his size belied the enormity of his impact on the game, at least while it was played among kids.
‘Don’t worry, one day you will grow to be taller than Maradona. I don’t know if better, but certainly taller,’ Schwarzstein told Messi after he had first met him, accompanied by his parents, at his private clinic in Rosario. The date of that first meeting was 31 January 1997, never forgotten by the doctor, as it was his birthday.
Manufactured growth hormone, patented by a US drugs company, had been commercially available since the 1980s, but was still not widely in use in Argentina, and it was expensive. Schwarzstein had learnt more about the drug in Barcelona, a city that has always prided itself on its pioneering medical practices as well as its innovative art. The treatment involved a daily injection into the fat underneath the skin, normally in the evening, to fit in with the body’s natural cycle for producing growth hormone. Messi’s parents were assured that the treatment was a relatively straightforward one, with a positive outcome a great deal more likely than any lasting side effects. ‘Messi was one of about every 20,000 in the Argentine population born with a growth hormone deficiency,’ Schwarzstein would recall years later.
In fact, research into hormone treatment was far from conclusive, and other members of the Argentine medical profession would remain far more cautious in their approach to the issue. Seven years after the Messis had their first meeting with Schwarzstein, one of Argentina’s leading sports journalists, Julio Marini, worried that his young son was much smaller than most of his peers, and sought advice from a specialist in Buenos Aires. Marini never forgot the conversation that ensued. He was told that there were too many potential risks: problems with bone structure, with muscles, with ligaments; even a risk of tumours on skin tissues.
There and then, Marini and his wife made up their minds not to go for the treatment. The doctor’s words had shocked them both. For the sports journalist, the meeting would later raise thoughts of Messi, and the risk his parents had taken. ‘My first thoughts were of course about my son and having to accept the doctor’s advice. But later it made me think of Messi, and now I question whether the treatment was justified in his case simply because of the great football player he ended up being.’
It’s worth recording here that Messi was not the first Argentine football legend to count on medical assistance for his physical development. Diego Maradona was eight years old when Francisco Cornejo, his trainer at Cebollitas, the youth team of the Buenos Aires club Argentinos Juniors, took him to see ‘Cacho’ Paladino, a doctor of dubious reputation who specialized in building up the bodies of boxers with a mixture of unspecified drugs and vitamins. Paladino was also employed by another local football club, Huracán.
When Maradona visited him, he was put on a crash course of unidentified pills and injections, Cornejo told me: ‘Diego was so small when I took him to see Paladino that he didn’t seem strong enough. I wanted Paladino to round him off, get him fatter and bigger. So I asked the doctor to give him vitamins and other things to help him develop. “Cacho,” I said, “you fix him, this boy is going to grow up to be a star.”’
I remember meeting Paladino while researching my biography of Maradona. He was a large man with a gruff, no-nonsense approach to life that had endeared him to several players and managers. He had become involved with Maradona at a time when no specialized training existed for the profession of ‘sports’ doctor, and when the footballing and boxing authorities in Argentina had yet to develop an effective way of policing the methods and prescriptions with which doctors could treat athletes. Paladino didn’t blink when he told me: ‘When I finished with him [Maradona], he was like a racing colt.’
Maradona first saw Paladino in 1968. While Maradona’s later substance abuse as an adult is now widely known, the player himself always denied that he ever drugged himself to improve his performance. Two decades or so later, sports health had become altogether more sophisticated and, in Messi’s case, far more transparent. His growth hormone treatment required him to inject himself each evening with a pen-like instrument that was easier to handle than a syringe, alternating the location between arms and legs. Schwarzstein takes pride in his reputation as one of the people who helped facilitate Messi’s rise to stardom, insisting that the injections were unobtrusive and had less effect on Messi’s skin than a mosquito bite.
In an interview with Irish journalist Richard Fitzpatrick made available for this book, Schwarzstein remembers the young boy as initially introverted: ‘He was a very nice child. He wasn’t shy – when you broke the ice, when you started talking with him, usually football was the initial topic he talked a lot about – but he was introverted. It’s one thing if you prefer to keep things to yourself. Another thing is feeling anxious about expressing your feelings, being afraid about not saying the right thing. Then there is being introverted, preferring to keep things to yourself. Leo is not shy. He’s introverted. He’s reserved.’1
Messi’s youth teammates recall him as open and outgoing, but only among a close circle of friends. Beyond the football pitch he was less at ease with the wider world, distrusting it, perhaps. The treatment, never fully explained or justified at the time by his parents, beyond to those who needed to know, separated him more from his wider peer group, made him feel distinct and different. It would be surprising if he inwardly questioned the nature of his parents’ love for making him endure it. In fact, he engaged with the treatment, as if offered a magic potion, and the challenge it presented to his self-esteem seemed to nourish in him an even greater determination to focus on the thing he loved and could do well at – football. By undergoing the treatment, Lionel Messi drew on his strength of character, as well as the helping hand that science could provide.
The programme required regular dosage monitoring and review of the most appropriate injection device, up to and beyond the age of sixteen, the age at which growth ‘catch-up’ is expected to have been achieved.
Messi carried his hormone-boosting kit in a small case, which he would take with him on school trips and visits to friends’ houses. Some would watch with a mixture of disbelief and pity as the young boy injected himself. There were times when he cried and couldn’t train because of the pain. As Franco Falleroni, one of Messi’s boyhood teammates, recalled, the needle was very thin and the length of a fingernail. He would visit Falleroni’s parents’ house, put the pack in the freezer, take it out, and then inject himself in the thigh.
The decision to give the treatment the go-ahead was made by Messi’s parents after they had weighed up the hopes they had for the child against the health risks involved. The risks were also financial. The cost of a month’s supply of the hormone was $1,300, which Messi’s father initially covered with the medical insurance provided by his employers at Acindar, the metallurgical company, and with the help of two local friends, who worked as football agents in Rosario.
However, as the twentieth century reached its end, Argentina – a country rich in natural resources but historically prone to political and economic instability – sank into its deepest crisis in living memory, under centrist president Fernando de la Rúa of the Radical Civic Union party. A loss of confidence in the government’s ability to tackle a soaring public-sector deficit, plus high unemployment, led to a run on bank deposits, which in turn led to the highly unpopular corralito – an official ban on the withdrawal of savings.
In a climate of political disintegration, there was even briefly talk of Maradona standing for the Argentine vice-presidency on a joint ticket with his friend, the former Peronist president Carlos Menem, despite the latter facing prosecution over an illegal arms exports scandal.
The crisis left the Argentine working classes condemned to abject poverty, and middle-class households struggling to pay their bills. The latter group included the Messis, particularly when Acindar cut the medical insurance that paid for Lionel’s treatment, and threatened to make his father Jorge redundant.
Initially, Jorge turned to Newell’s Old Boys for support. The club was not a happy ship at the time. Its president, local businessman Eduardo López, had turned the club into a fiefdom since being elected in 1994.2
The needs of the Messi family were judged far less of a priority than those of the barras bravas, the violent fans who acted as López’s enforcers, and as less important than the shady deals struck for the transfers of older players. Jorge Messi’s request for financial support was granted grudgingly, with the club soon underpaying what the injections cost or missing payments altogether.
Increasingly worried for his son’s future, Jorge Messi approached Buenos Aires giants River Plate, to see if they would be interested in buying his son from Newell’s and paying for his treatment. According to Federico Vairo, one of the River Plate youth coaches at the time, Messi put on an impressive performance at a trial training session, nutmegging opponents much taller than him, showing off his dribbling skills, and scoring a goal just like the many he had got used to scoring in Rosario.
But the club’s youth department refused to see Vairo’s glowing description of Messi as a ‘mixture of Sivori and Maradona’ as a reason for taking the boy on, and the matter went no further. Senior executives claimed they could not afford the risk inherent in signing up this undersized boy, just because his father claimed he was a child prodigy.
The full reasons why both Newell’s and River Plate refused to give the Messi family a helping hand remain a subject of unresolved controversy to this day. Vairo blamed vested interests that ex-River players had in another club – Renato Casarini – that supplied young players to River’s academy. Veteran Argentine football writer Julio Marini believes that, despite the country’s financial crisis at the time, both Newell’s and River Plate had the resources to invest in Messi, including his treatment, but simply underestimated his potential: ‘The fact remains that no one at Newell’s or River Plate has ever assumed responsibility for letting Messi slip through their fingers. In Argentina, everyone wants to claim credit for a success story, but none will confess to a major error of judgement; no one has ever said “We made a mistake.”’3
Whatever the reasons for Argentina’s clubs rejecting Messi, by the turn of the new millennium, the Messi family were ready to consider an approach from further afield. Enter FC Barcelona, stage right.
Josep María Minguella brokered some of FC Barcelona’s most successful signings, including major stars like Hristo Stoichkov, Diego Maradona and the Brazilians Romário and Rivaldo. Now in his seventies, the media-savvy Minguella has lived and breathed Barça since he was aged five, when his father – another fanatic – made him a life member of the club.
I first met Minguella in the mid-1990s to talk about Maradona, whose contract with FC Barcelona he helped negotiate in 1982. We’ve kept in touch ever since, exchanging periodic notes about Spanish and South American football, with our conversation enlivened by the subject of the enduring legacy of Johan Cruyff and Lionel Messi.
In 2016, I visited Minguella at his home in the hillside Barcelona neighbourhood of Pedralbes, where live the rich and powerful of the Catalan capital. What was now his retirement home was more tranquil than when I had first visited it to talk about Maradona, when it had doubled up as an office, but the building retained its understated grandeur as it spread out across an overgrown tropical garden populated by parrots of different species.
Researching this book had prompted a personal invitation from Minguella to join him at a street-naming ceremony in honour of the late Johan Cruyff, who had died six months earlier. The event was the idea of a fanatical Cruyff fan, Francesc Llobet, the young mayor of the small village of Vallfogona de Riucorb, population ninety-six, which lies nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The date was 9 September 2016, in honour of the number 9 shirt that Cruyff had first worn when he joined Barça from Ajax.
‘Johan Cruyff changed a country and FC Barcelona. He taught us to lose our fear as a club and as a country and left an enduring mark as a player and as a coach,’ the young mayor told the gathering, attended by a group of Cruyff loyalists led by the former Barça president and pro-Catalan independence politician Joan Laporta.
After the ceremony, Minguella and I shared a lunch of snails and roast pork in nearby Guimerà, the medieval village where he was born, before driving back to Barcelona, feeling all the better for having honoured the legendary Cruyff, and discussing Messi, a player who owes part of his success to the Dutchman’s influence at FC Barcelona, and Minguella’s mediation.
Minguella shared his story thus: ‘When the financial crisis hit Argentina and the Messi family, I was working flat out as an agent, and had several top players on my books. A friend of mine, an Argentine lawyer called Juan Mateo Walter, rings me and says, “Look, there is this incredible kid from Rosario I have for you.”
‘I thought he might be sixteen or seventeen, but then Juan says, “He is twelve going on thirteen.” My first thought was, Fuck me, what I am going to do with a kid so young? But he showed me a video of a boy who seemed to have the ball attached to his feet and a huge hunger to get it into the net and I said, “OK, let’s see what I can do.” It was February 2000.’
In September of that year, Lionel and his father Jorge flew into Barcelona, their flight and accommodation paid for by Minguella. The agent had spent the intervening months preparing a plan, which he hoped would seduce both the Messi family and FC Barcelona, as it was tailor-made to reconcile the player’s and the club’s best interests.
The Messis were put up in the Catalonia Barcelona Plaza, a four-star hotel with a seasonal rooftop pool and terrace and panoramic city view. The hotel manager was the son of one Barça legend Domingo Balmanya, and had secured Minguella a special VIP deal for his Argentine guests.
The suite where the Messis stayed not only had twenty-four-hour room service and all mod cons, but also featured a magnificent view over one of Barcelona’s biggest squares at the foot of the picturesque Montjuïc hill and across to the city’s majestic Monumental bullring, whose neo-Mudéjar facade had been designed by Domènec Sugrañes i Gras, a friend and disciple of Antoni Gaudí. For the Messis, this first experience of the economically vibrant and culturally diverse capital of Catalonia, a region from where their ancestors had come, must have been incredibly attractive, and contrasted with the doom and gloom they had temporarily left behind in Rosario.
Minguella knew a lot about the power of football in Catalonia, and in particular FC Barcelona. He had also learnt much from his experience of handling other Latin American players, not least the fact that while they found the Mediterranean climate of Barcelona agreeable, they also found the more nationalistic among the Catalans too closed-minded, and easily grew homesick.
Maradona remembered his stay at Barcelona as ‘the unhappiest period of my career’, with particular misery setting in over the first Christmas he found himself away from Argentina. Minguella wanted, as only he could, to soften Messi’s landing into what was for him uncharted territory.
For Messi, the mere thought of stepping onto one of Barça’s training grounds for a trial was like an encounter with wonderland. However, Minguella remembers it as a personal gamble which got off to a bad start.
FC Barcelona had just elected a new president, the hotelier Joan Gaspart, who showed little interest in Messi when Minguella mentioned the boy to him. Despite Minguella’s track record as the man who had brought Maradona and other key players to FC Barcelona, Gaspart pointed out to him that when Maradona was signed in the summer of 1982, he was in his early twenties and had just played in a World Cup as a star player in Argentina’s national squad. Many of Minguella’s greatest hits had been of a similar age and had also had major club and international experience before their Barça signings.
By contrast, Messi was not even a teenager and was barely known outside Rosario, where the closest he had come to playing for the first team at Newell’s Old Boys was kicking a ball around at half-time as light entertainment.
Gaspart’s main concern was the poor form of his club’s first team when compared to Real Madrid, who appeared to have guaranteed themselves a golden period after embarking on an unprecedented spending spree, kicked off with the PR coup of snatching Luís Figo from FC Barcelona themselves, a defection which caused enduring chagrin for both Barça officials and fans.
With Real Madrid’s rich and politically influential new president Florentino Pérez boasting about the club’s new era of galácticos, Gaspart had little time to focus on an investment in an underage Argentine who was undergoing a growth hormone treatment programme.
‘I remember Gaspart saying to me, “Look, your job is to help me win La Liga, not try and convince me to pay for an underage, underdeveloped kid from Argentina I have never heard of. Anyway, if and when he grows up and plays for the first team, I won’t be president any more,”’ Minguella recalled.
As things turned out, Gaspart was right on the latter point, as his presidency proved short-lived – three years – a great deal shorter than the rule of his predecessor, the enduring José Luís Núñez, whom he had served loyally as vice-president for twenty-three years.
But Minguella felt frustrated and angry with Gaspart’s perspective, and thought it reflected the general bad governance and lack of vision then affecting FC Barcelona. Minguella’s doubts about Gaspart formed part of a widely shared view inside and outside the club that Barça had entered the doldrums after the golden years of Cruyff as a player and later manager, with allegations of dubious transfer deals and overpricing of certain players, and a relatively poor record in Europe under Louis van Gaal.
‘While they resisted the idea of Messi, Gaspart and his junta that summer went ahead with five disastrous deals, selling our star Figo to Real Madrid and buying de la Peña, Gerard López, and from Arsenal Overmars and Petit – a complete waste of money on overrated players who had no potential of improvement, of bringing added value to a team that was in crisis,’ says Minguella.
Gaspart was not the only person that Minguella had trouble with. There were others with influence on the club’s coaching and transfer policy – like the two veterans Migueli and Asensio – who told Minguella: ‘Sure this kid plays some beautiful football like Maradona, but they are going to kill him – he is only twelve kilos, they are going to kill him if he stays this size.’
And then there was a family affair. Jorge Messi was restless. He was without a job or prospects and the two clubs in Argentina he had trust in had betrayed him. As for his son, there was a risk that cutting off his hormone treatment – due to lack of funds – could be prejudicial to his wellbeing and damage him mentally and physically. While thousands of Argentines were escaping from their country’s crisis by emigrating to the then economically prosperous Spain and setting up new roots, his own son was holed up in a hotel without even an offer on the table.
Back in Rosario, friends and neighbours, feeling in the dark, were asking as to Lionel’s secret whereabouts. As his boyhood teammate, Franco Falleroni later told the Barcelona-based Irish journalist Richard Fitzpatrick: ‘A month passes without seeing Messi. We were training and there was no sign of Messi. We were asking, “What’s up with Messi?” My dad rang up the Messi house. Messi’s mother answered. My dad asked, “What’s up with Leo? He is not coming to practice.” She said he couldn’t because he was ill. Another week went by and then another. They kept saying he hadn’t recovered.’
After a month or so of waiting for a decision from FC Barcelona which wasn’t forthcoming, Jorge Messi packed his bags and flew back to Argentina with his son, to await better news and formulate another plan. As meetings continued without any formal resolution, Messi continued playing for Newell’s youth team, winning the Apertura championship (a competition lasting the first half of the season), and finishing as the top scorer.
As Falleroni remembered it: ‘He came back, looking a little more developed. It was strange. We were asking him, “Leo, are you OK?” and he said, “Yes, I’m better.” Sometime afterwards we were training, and his mother came and said, “Let’s go, Leo. We have to go.” “No,” he said, “I want to stay a little longer with the guys, with my friends.” But his mother grabbed him by the arm and took him away. He never showed up again. A week later we found out he was in Barcelona.’
After the Messis’ first departure from Barcelona, Minguella felt the whole situation disintegrating in his hands, and urged Jorge to be patient. Then he decided to play a final card. He approached FC Barcelona’s sporting director, the veteran player and coach Charly Rexach, who agreed to watch Messi play in a trial with some of the other youth coaches. The Messis returned to Spain.
One of the coaches, Xavi Llorens, thought he recognized a young version of Maradona as he watched Messi. ‘You could see that the ball was attached to his foot like a claw. He was very fast, and he ran with his head down, and looked as if he didn’t know where he was going, but of course he did know. He showed he had peripheral vision already in those early days. He could see the move he had to play in advance.’ But other observers were worried that the boy still had to develop Maradona’s natural strength and self-belief. There was no majority opinion, but there was Rexach, cast in the role of deus ex machina.
‘Charly (Rexach) watched Messi and was converted to his cause. Charly said: “I don’t know what we are going to pay him but we have to make sure we keep this kid,”’ Minguella told me. ‘That was the first step towards having Lionel Messi at FC Barcelona, although quite honestly none of us then could have ever imagined just how far the kid was going to go or the trouble we were going to face in getting him signed up.’
Bringing Messi to Barcelona from Argentina, and keeping him there on terms his father and Argentine agents would accept and which the club felt it could afford, proved a logistical and financial challenge.
FIFA regulations stipulated that when a player under eighteen was transferred from his native country, he had to be accompanied by his parents. Jorge also insisted that in Barcelona, Lionel must live with his family rather than board at the youth academy where he was to be trained up to first-team level. This meant the club paying for an apartment and helping Messi’s parents find work, in addition to funding Lionel’s training and school lessons.
By December 2000, there was still no decision from Barça, and the Messi camp issued an ultimatum. Ruben Horacio Gaggioli, a businessman from Rosario who had been living in Barcelona since the late 1970s, was representing the young player together with his colleagues in Rosario. They allowed rumours to reach FC Barcelona that other major clubs, such as AC Milan, Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid, were showing some interest. Although there was more bluff to this than substance, the ploy succeeded in focusing minds in Barcelona.
Just before Christmas 2000, Rexach met Gaggioli and Minguella for lunch at the private Pompeya tennis club. There the following was written, in Spanish, on a paper napkin: ‘In Barcelona on 14 December 2000 in the presence of Minguella and Horacio, Carles Rexach, technical director of FCB, commits to the signing, in spite of opinions to the contrary, of Lionel Messi, as long as the figures previously agreed are respected.’
Or so the legend goes. A photograph of the alleged napkin was shown to Richard Fitzpatrick by Gaggioli, who says he kept the original in a bank safety-deposit box. It is scribbled informally, by hand, with the full names of those allegedly present not given and no countersignature from a notary to give it legal status. Contractually, the napkin is worthless, but mentally it proved an invaluable stopgap.
Then, in early January 2001, the club’s youth director, Joan Lacueva Colomer, and Joaquim Rifé, the director of La Masia, FC Barcelona’s youth academy, drafted between them a contractual note, under which the player would have his hormonal treatment paid for, earn a decent wage plus additional payments for image rights, and that guaranteed an annual wage for Jorge. While the contract specified that Jorge would be employed by Barna Partners, a company that supplied security staff for the club, Jorge would in effect become self-employed, spending as much time as he wanted near his son, representing his interests, and, in the early days in Barcelona, doing occasional admin working at Minguella’s agency’s office. The Messi family relocated to Barcelona in February 2001, but the contractual situation was still unresolved.
A formal agreement between Messi and FC Barcelona was not drafted until March 2001, and its implementation was delayed by several weeks, much to the despair of Jorge. The first payment due to Messi and his father was triggered only after Jorge had written a pleading letter to Gaspart in early July 2001.
So what was happening all this time between the legendary napkin memorandum and the final contractual signature? Not a very pretty story, but perhaps a predictable one, of protracted wheeling and dealing. The majority of the FC Barcelona board, including Gaspart and some of the coaches, had still to be convinced by Minguella and Rexach that the boy was worth it, especially after demands from Jorge that he and his family would be given better terms and conditions than those offered to other entrants of La Masia.
The demands weren’t limited to the stipulation that Leo would not live at La Masia like many other youngsters, but in a comfortable flat paid for by the club, large enough to accommodate father, mother and siblings. There were also travel expenses to be paid for the Messis’ comings and goings from Argentina, and the cost of Lionel’s continuing hormone treatment.
In contrast to Gaspart’s early reticence, Minguella and Rexach’s key ally at the highest level of the club was Joan Lacueva Colomer. Colomer lobbied hard for the Messi deal, while Gaspart and his faction fixated on signing another rising Argentine star, nineteen-year-old Javier Saviola, from River Plate. Continually introducing the subject of Messi to a board whose president had eyes focused on Saviola was like throwing a hand grenade into a picnic. Or, as Colomer put it, ‘The club was fire-fighting and we were starting another fire.’
Colomer found himself rounded on by other directors, who rained insults on him and alluded to his former employment by Espanyol, the rival Barcelona team that historically had been considered anti-Catalan. But Colomer was persistent and argued passionately: ‘If you don’t support me,’ he told the doubters, ‘you will be committing the biggest mistake in the club’s history.’ He prevailed.
In 2010, four years before he died, Colomer was asked in an interview by the Spanish newspaper El País how he saw his role in the history of Messi. ‘I did my job. That is what I was paid for. There were things that had to be done or else Messi would have left us,’ he recalled with typical modesty.4