8. THE DWARF: MESSI

On 16 November 2003, FC Barcelona played a friendly match away against Portuguese club Porto, for which the Catalan club was paid €250,000. The match marked the inauguration of Porto’s new Estádio do Dragão, built to be ready for the European Championships the following year, just like Sporting’s new José Alvalade.

Having worked under two managers at Barça, Bobby Robson and Louis van Gaal, José Mourinho had taken Porto to Portuguese League, Portuguese Cup and UEFA Cup glory during the 2002–3 season. A game between this rising force and a traditional continental powerhouse seemed a fitting inauguration for the stadium, but it would also produce an even more important debut.

Lionel Messi had much to prove as, aged sixteen years and four months, he stepped out in the seventy-fifth minute to play for the first team of FC Barcelona, one of the world’s great sporting institutions.

Messi would later reflect on this game as a major breakthrough in his career, calling it a ‘childhood dream come true’ in a Barça TV programme specially made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his debut. That season, he played for a record-breaking four other Barcelona teams at various youth and reserve levels on his way to the first team.

Playing alongside him that day was an earlier product of FC Barcelona’s youth team, Xavi Hernández, a player who was to have a major influence in mentoring Messi’s professional development at the club. Xavi had not long met Messi at the time, since the two had never overlapped at La Masia, and the two were barely on first-name terms, moving in different social circles. But Messi had been given the best of references by a close friend of Xavi’s, a long-term coach of the youth teams called Sergi Alegre. A few weeks earlier, over a lunch they had together, Alegre had told Xavi: ‘You know there are some really good young players coming up, but there is a young Argentine lad among them and you can’t imagine how good he is. He is spectacular. You will see.’1

Years later, Xavi would recall the first time he and Messi shared a training pitch: ‘I realized he was different from the first training rondo we played together. Leo seemed to have something which is really difficult to achieve: he understood the game, he could pass and dribble regardless of who he had by him or in front of him, even the best defender that faced him understood that.’2

In a personal tribute to Messi on receiving his fifth Ballon d’Or in January 2016, Xavi wrote a growing tribute in El País about the first season they played together in the first team. He describes him as ‘educated, respectful’, a ‘humble lad’. He said that though you could tell Messi knew inside that he would be a good player, Xavi knew there were all sorts of ways it could go wrong.

The decision to bring Messi into the first team regularly was taken by Frank Rijkaard, Barça’s new manager, who had been appointed that season as part of a major shake-up at the club, aimed at rescuing it from the doldrums into which it had sunk at the start of the new millennium, going four seasons without winning any title.

A native Amsterdammer, as a player Rijkaard had distinguished himself during two golden eras of European club football. He built his reputation as a great defensive midfielder during the 1980s playing for Ajax and the Dutch national team under Johan Cruyff. In the early 1990s he played for Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan during one of the Italian club’s many glory periods, when it won the League title and two European Cup crowns. He finished his playing days back at Ajax, where over two seasons he helped lead them to a League title and European Cup.

In the European Championships of 2000, the Dutch team he coached delighted the crowds with fluid and attacking football, but were beaten on penalties by Italy in the semi-finals. Rijkaard resigned immediately afterwards. He was next appointed manager of the Netherlands’ oldest professional club, Sparta Rotterdam, for the 2001–2 season. Questions were raised about Rijkaard’s relaxed manner against a backdrop of tightening financial constraints. Sparta were relegated for the first time in their history and Rijkaard departed soon after. He spent the next few months on his second sabbatical in three years, working on a book about how to run a football club, which he never finished.

While the new president of FC Barcelona, Joan Laporta, had promised during his 2003 election campaign to bring back some of the joyful, Dutch-inspired creativity and success Barça fans had enjoyed with Cruyff, first as the Flying Dutchman player and then as manager of the ‘Dream Team’ that won the club’s first ever European Cup in 1992, the choice of Rijkaard to deliver on the promise, on Cruyff’s recommendation, was a gamble.

In many ways, Rijkaard as player and coach had come to personify the ‘neurotic genius’ of Dutch football, as its chronicler David Winner describes it in Brilliant Orange; seemingly forever poised between brilliance and a penchant for self-destruction, with the capacity to reach great heights but also to tumble without fulfilling their potential.

When Rijkaard arrived at Barça, the club was in a mess. Louis van Gaal’s second spell in charge had gone spectacularly wrong and caretaker managers in Antonio de la Cruz and Radomir Antić had guided the club to the embarrassingly low final League position of sixth in 2002–3.

The tired presidential regime of Joan Gaspart had come to an end and a new, reforming president, Joan Laporta, had been elected. The latest South American star, the Brazilian Ronaldinho, had been signed from under the noses of Man United in a €30 million deal with Paris Saint-Germain, but it was hard to imagine what was to come.

Laporta was a young lawyer who had helped found a movement of fans determined to bring about a radical reform of the club after decades in which it had been under the authoritarian control of a construction magnate, José Luís Núñez. Laporta had campaigned for the presidency with the support of one of the club’s most enduring icons, Cruyff, on a pledge to greater accountability and transparency in the running of the club’s affairs and of reviving the club’s fortunes by investing in both homegrown talent and foreign players capable of competing with the stardom of Real Madrid, and with style. Youthteam star Messi, of course, ticked every box; if you wanted to find a player who was the antithesis of a galáctico, Leo was your boy.

In that friendly in November 2003, Messi immediately caused Porto problems with a series of dazzling dribbles which showed off his Argentine skills as well as the extent to which he had yet to mature as a Barça player. He fluffed two chances at goal. The first involved him losing the ball to the keeper after overrunning it. The second had him choosing to pass the ball in front of an open goal after beating the keeper. Porto ended up winning 2–0.

Journalist Cristina Cubero recalled seeing Messi walking past the press area after the match with his head bowed, crouched, almost too embarrassed to look anyone in the eye. ‘I have always said that he has all the strength he needs on the pitch, but off it he shrinks,’ Cubero told Guillem Balagué.3

Rijkaard praised Messi at the post-match press conference: ‘He’s got a lot of talent and a very promising future,’ he told journalists. Watching the game from the dug-out, the Dutch coach felt that Messi was still on a learning curve, and would have to adapt himself to the style of play he was developing at Barça.

For his part, Ronaldinho famously told his teammates that Messi would go on to be a better player than him. The two became friends, with the older Brazilian referring to his protégé as ‘little brother’, which must have helped as he made the move into the first team. Later, the flamboyant playboy’s influence would be more problematic, but it was key in this early period. Messi would never forget how generous Ronaldinho was with him: ‘The first day I was in the dressing room with the first team, Ronaldinho made me sit next to him and that made it all easier,’ he recalled.4

When Messi first arrived in Barcelona he was so small that his feet didn’t touch the ground when he sat on the bench. Gerard Piqué recalled he was so small that he was initially relegated to a lower category – the B Juniors, where his teammates gave him the affectionate nickname of enano, ‘the dwarf’. It seemed to make him even more determined to score goals, even if he suffered physically when he was caught by players bigger than him. Injuries in his early days included a broken leg and the broken cheekbone for which he refused a protective mask.

Thanks to the growth hormone treatment, by the age of sixteen he had grown to 1.70 metres, at which point his treatment and growth stopped. He had reached the height projected for him at the start of the treatment, and was two centimetres taller than Maradona. To have carried on the treatment as an adult would have put his heath at risk, and raised the potential of him being engulfed in a doping scandal.

It is worth recording here that Human Growth Hormone (HGH) – both in and out of competition – is listed under section S2 of the Word Anti-Doping Agency’s list of prohibited substances and methods. As the WADA website points out, the major role of HGH is to stimulate the liver to secrete Insulin-like Growth Factor – IGF-I – which in turn stimulates production of cartilage cells, resulting in bone growth. It also plays a key role in muscle protein synthesis and organ growth.

‘Some of the effects attributed to HGH, which may explain the attraction for its use as a doping agent, especially in power and endurance sports, include the reduction of body fat (lipolysis), the increase in muscle mass and strength (anabolic effect), as well as its tissue-repairing effects (recovery) on the muscular-skeletal system,’ the website states.

The agency goes on to warn that side effects for HGH abuse can include diabetes in prone individuals; worsening of cardiovascular diseases; muscle, joint and bone pain; hypertension and cardiac deficiency; abnormal growth of organs; and accelerated osteoarthritis. If untreated, many of the symptoms described can significantly reduce life expectancy.

The use of HGH is banned in almost all sports, amateur and professional. Although Section 46 of FIFA’s anti-doping code contains provisions for a therapeutic use exemption of a banned substance when that substance is considered medically essential, it remains unclear whether FC Barcelona ever felt it necessary to ask for such a waiver.

After the treatment had been discontinued, Messi followed special diets to help maintain his fitness, and focused his training on building up the muscle mass in his legs and strengthening his body generally in order to compete against players taller and stronger than him – but his skill showed an increasing refinement, as the star player in him matured.

‘I’ve seen games where for ninety minutes it looked as if he was playing one against eleven, and he kept getting kicked, but we only won 1–0, or drew 0–0, or we lost 1–0. He’s a fantastic dribbler, but he was making leaps forward by seeking variation in his game: one time you dribble, another time you give the ball back and go deep. He was becoming more effective by doing less,’ Rijkaard told football journalist Simon Kuper in 2008.5

The pibe, or native Argentine boy, who had learnt his dribbling techniques in the street and on rough open spaces in Rosario, would go on to absorb some European passing and tackling techniques on his path to becoming a complete player.

On the personal front, his main reference point remained his father Jorge, with whom he continued to share the four-bedroom flat in the Gran Via Carles III. As well as overseeing him as a parent, Jorge was now becoming increasingly involved in representing Leo in all dealings with the club and outside agencies.

His mother Celia travelled to Barcelona twice a year, but still lived in the family’s home in Rosario with her second son Matías, five years older than Leo, and her daughter María Sol, six years younger. Leo remained in daily contact with his mother via the internet and mobile phone, and always looked forward to her next visit – he had struggled to come to terms with his parents’ living in different cities, however amicably it presented itself. His idea of a good dish was the Argentine-style breaded veal Milanesa his mother cooked him, as she had done from early childhood, and drinking the traditional green tea, or mate, she brewed for him.

The oldest of the four Messi siblings, Rodrigo (seven years older than Leo) abandoned his dream to become a football star early on, and instead settled with his girlfriend Florencia in Barcelona, where he was to take an increasingly key role, together with his father, in handling Messi’s affairs.

Back in Rosario, it was Matías who seemed destined to be the black sheep of the Messi family. He had been born in 1982, five years and a day before Leo, whose face he later had tattooed on his left arm. Matías’s early promise as a footballer had crash-landed after he was dropped from Newell’s Old Boys’ youth academy after a season. An unstable working life had followed, during which he had become best known for his alleged connections with Rosario’s violent radical football fans, the thuggish local barras bravas, whose organized criminal networks pervaded Argentine football.

The public record of Matías’s alleged involvement in criminal activity dates back to 2000, when he was allegedly involved in a robbery. That was followed by an alleged assault a year later and an accusation of threatening behaviour in 2002. The charges were dropped in each instance, but Matías would continue to get into trouble.

It was not easy to grow up in your kid brother’s shadow, as Leo’s brother Rodrigo, another failed footballer, admitted. ‘We didn’t adapt very well,’ he told Spanish TV’s Informe Robinson in 2011. ‘It was a problem, we were united [as a family] but one person did something and the others did nothing. Therefore we all suffered in different ways.’6

By contrast, Messi’s life as it developed in Barcelona was a life less ordinary, meaning that he lived it on his own terms, not how others might have expected, and remained undaunted by the success of others, still less by his own achievements.

The generation of 1987 spent two and half years together before Cesc’s departure to Arsenal in September 2003 and Piqué’s to Manchester United the following year. Despite his growing reputation as one of the best young players that Barça had ever had in its history, and while showing enormous respect for the senior players, Messi remained both far from star-struck and eager to keep out of the lime-light.

When not indulging in his lengthy daily siesta, Messi’s favourite habit was playing video games. His best friends from La Masia were Victor Vázquez and Luís Calvo. They would tease him, calling him enano – dwarf – whenever Messi beat them at PlayStation, which was almost always. He played with a focus and passion that only his own real-world football could emulate. Messi would tease them back by breaking into the Argentine slang they found difficult to understand.

Messi was still a little big man, a teenager growing up, not remotely interested in the business of football yet but with star potential – a tempting target for exploitation by Argentine agent Rodolfo Schinocca, a one-time player with Boca Juniors who was handling Leo’s image rights in 2004, at the behest of Jorge, before the player shot to fame.

‘Was it difficult to sell Messi’s image then?’ the Argentine journalist Leonardo Faccio asked Schinnoca years later. ‘I had to reinvent the business. In those days the image of a successful footballer was David Beckham,’ Schinocca replied.7

In 2004, the English international was twenty-eight, in his first season at Real Madrid following his record-breaking transfer deal, and widely regarded as the biggest marketing phenomenon in the history of the sport.

In the same year, Messi was still ‘an adolescent with acne’, as Faccio puts it, and Schinnoca might have thought of airbrushing his image to make it more attractive. Instead, he promoted his adolescent traits. The first advertisement to feature him was shown in Argentina, not Spain, and had him promoting hamburgers, fizzy drinks and video games.

‘He was very humble,’ Schinocca told Faccio. ‘He always used to tell me: “The only thing I want is to have a house in Barcelona, and another one in Rosario.”’8

In 2007, Schinocca would have a widely publicized falling out with the Messi family, and Leo’s image rights were eventually wrested from the agent in a move subsequently contested in court. In 2004, however, there was nothing controversial about Messi’s life. He retained his essence: shy of publicity but confident in his own talent.

As Jorge Valdano would reflect long after Messi had come to dominate football headlines, ‘Messi only produces headlines with his feet.’9

In the spring of 2004, with just twenty-three minutes of first-team football under his belt, those headlines were yet to come. But the clamour for ‘the dwarf’ to take a starring role was becoming ever louder.