Cristiano and Leo

For Messi, as for many millions of Barça fans, the era of Ronaldinho and Rijkaard ended not with a bang but a whimper.

The summer of 2007 had seen plenty of optimism, as Thierry Henry, Yaya Touré and Éric Abidal arrived with big fees and reputations. But their season began with a goalless draw against Racing Santander and never really seemed to recover. Especially in the away fixtures, they looked unfit, unfocused and increasingly lacking any kind of attacking impetus. Ronaldinho looked uninterested in playing with his teammates, and again and again he could be seen throwing his hands up in the air in frustration, as he seemed on a different wavelength to those around him.

Looking back on this era at the club, I remember reading a prescient online comment by Bruno Garcia, a Brazilian Barça fan who seemed to capture the essence of Ronaldinho as the loner who played for the crowd, not the team, and liked to entertain. As Garcia pointed out, in Portuguese there are different verbs that translate as ‘to play’ – for a competitive game like football it’s jogar, for frivolous clowning around it’s brincar:

Ronaldinho stopped jogar and started to brincar more and more. That came accompanied by drinking, smoking, chasing girls, late nights at the club – the lifestyle of a student or artist, not of a professional athlete.

Like everything in life, that had a cost: he could not run as much, he could not focus as much and could not perform at the same level any more. So, once he could not jogar to the same level, but was very admired for the way he did that, he started more and more to brincar – creating beautiful stuff, but completely useless.1

Messi himself, while promoted as the club’s new star, struggled to maintain fitness during the 2007–8 season, and the team’s overall performance reached one of the low points of his career. It frequently felt as if he was being patched up and sent out on to the pitch, such was his growing importance. Though his talent burned ever brighter, he still made the runs and scored goals. Indeed over the course of the season he played more games (40), scored more goals (16) and made more assists (13) than the previous one.

But it felt like a season defined more by the chances he didn’t take. So many times he was forced to create the chance himself, beating two or three opponents until he was taking the shot off balance, exhausted by the energy of getting there. Debates over his fitness, and the right way to handle him, seemed to overshadow discussions of his performances.

Indeed, in March 2008, even Rijkaard’s enjoyment of his side’s progression to the UEFA Champions League quarter-finals, after they had eliminated Celtic, was tempered by concern about Messi’s latest injury. A torn muscle in his left thigh forced the team’s new star to abandon the game in the thirty-fourth minute and miss the next six weeks of competitive football.

It was the third time in three years that Messi, aged only twenty, had suffered the same injury, the last occasion being the previous December against Valencia, which had ruled him out of the following week’s clash with arch rivals Real Madrid. Inevitably, the injuries raised questions over whether they might be in some way connected to the growth treatment that Messi had undergone as an adolescent.

There was no conclusive evidence of cause and effect one way or the other and, anyway, it was not an issue that FC Barcelona were prepared to discuss publicly, although Rijkaard after the Celtic match was forced, under intense questioning, to defend the club’s medical services. ‘To doubt that they are doing their best is an insult,’ he said. ‘The medical staff and the club in general are working to prevent these sorts of problems.’

Club captain at the time, Carles Puyol, criticized the media scrutiny, while unwittingly exposing the extent to which the Dutch manager may have also been to blame for the injury for not standing up to that scrutiny, and not adequately protecting the Argentine, on whose shoulders Barça’s eventual recovery from the doldrums seemed to rest. Whatever the cause, there were some in and outside the club who felt that Messi was somehow too fragile for the rigours of regular first-team football. Nobody doubted his talent, but was his to be a tragic story of a career let down by his body?

Rijkaard had left Messi out of Barcelona’s 4–2 defeat at Atlético Madrid in La Liga the previous Saturday, drawing widespread criticism from commentators. The club’s medical staff announced that they had advised Rijkaard to leave Messi out, but in the build-up to the Champions League fixture against Celtic, there was a unanimous call from the media for Messi to be recalled.

‘The doctors spoke and said there was a risk of injury and you [the media] put pressure on him to play, saying that he always has to play,’ Puyol said. ‘Now we’re all left to regret the decision. On Saturday there was more risk than today, but if he hadn’t played and we had got a bad result I’m sure you would have said it was because he wasn’t on the pitch.’

In the crossfire of blame and counter-blame, not one comment of criticism was aimed at Messi himself, indicating the special status of untouchable that the player had already achieved within the club, and which was destined to be reinforced in the following years as a succession of managers adapted their systems and squad rotation to suit his wishes.

The club’s anxiety over Messi’s wellbeing had been underlined months earlier, when senior club executives had become increasingly concerned with Ronaldinho’s private life in Barcelona. An internal investigation discreetly carried out for the board showed that Ronaldinho had drawn Deco and a rather more innocent Messi into some of his off-pitch partying, to such an extent that it was affecting their fitness and concentration when playing.

Senior club executives kept the full details of their findings secret, and allowed the media to focus on Ronaldinho and Rijkaard, as this offered some protection to Messi, a player in whom the club had real hopes for the future, but whose personality was judged not mature enough to be able to withstand the pressure of a media assault.

After limping out of the Champions League after not scoring against Manchester United, the end of the Rijkaard era and Messi’s personal experience of it had its most emblematic humiliation at the Bernabéu in May 2008, when Bernd Schuster’s Real Madrid, having already secured the League championship, thumped Barça 4–1. Worst of all, tradition in Spain dictated that Messi, along with his teammates, would be required to give the newly crowned champions a guard of honour, or pasillo, prior to kick-off.

For Rijkaard there was worse to come, as he faced a barrage of questions about his own responsibility in the subsequent press conference. He looked like a rabbit caught in headlights, any deference due to him as Barça manager lost completely, as if the success of the earlier seasons had belonged to someone else, to another club, to another century.

Though publicly he refused to say he was quitting, privately he admitted that his time was up. A few days later, Barcelona announced that he would not be the manager beyond the end of the season. He was to be replaced by untested B team manager, Pep Guardiola. Top of his agenda was sorting out the future of the misfiring Ronaldinho, and working out how to get the best out of Messi.

Meanwhile Messi was about to become embroiled in the very public club vs country tug of war that was playing out in various courts relating to his appearance at the Beijing Olympics later in the summer. As the European Championships in Austria and Switzerland loomed, it seemed as if both Cristiano and Leo had big decisions to make.