21. THE BEIJING OLYMPICS AND MARADONA
Argentina’s campaign for an Olympic title in Beijing in 2008 was notable for three things: confirmation of the extraordinary talent of the Barcelona youngster Leo Messi, a controversy over his participation that suggested he might not be as shy and retiring as everyone thought, and the looming presence of living legend Diego Maradona.
Messi’s talent might never have got a chance to shine if Barcelona had had their way when, on 6 August, just days before Argentina’s opening fixture against the Ivory Coast, Barcelona won a decision against FIFA in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which said they were under no obligation to release their players for the Olympics. This was just the final turn in a saga that had unfolded as claim and counterclaim for the IOC, AFA and FIFA about who held the power. In the end it transpired it was Messi, who quietly forced through his participation, having long harboured ambitions of winning a gold medal, as the team had four years before in Athens.
During the Argentina under-23s squad’s first match against the Ivory Coast, Messi scored the opening goal and assisted another in their 2–1 victory. Following a 1–0 win in the next group match against Australia, ensuring their quarter-final qualification, Messi was rested for the game against Serbia, which his side won to finish first in their group. Against the Netherlands in the quarter-final, he again scored the first goal and assisted a second strike to help his team to a 2–1 win in extra time. After a 3–0 semi-final victory over Brazil, Messi assisted the only goal in the final as Argentina defeated Nigeria to claim Olympic gold. Along with one of the permitted over-age players, Juan Román Riquelme, Messi was singled out in the official coverage as the standout player from the tournament’s best team. And yet the person who saw Messi as his natural dauphin was not about to take a low profile.
It was during these Olympics that Maradona took a symbolic step towards realizing his dream of managing the national squad. When Argentina won gold, he rushed down into the changing rooms and joined in the high-profile celebration with the players, as if he was already their coach, even though the hero of the hour was actually Sergio Batista, the manager of the squad.
And yet for Batista, a veteran of the 1986 World Cup, who had recently taken over the responsibility for the youth divisions of the Argentine Football Association, Maradona was not so much a potential rival as a useful ally and scout.
In the aftermath of the Olympics, while Batista for a period faded into the background, Maradona kept in touch with several of the gold-medal-winning players, including Messi, thanks to his friendship with Gabriel Heinze and his personal ties with Sergio ‘Kun’ Agüero, the then-partner of Maradona’s youngest daughter Giannina, and father to her child.
The relationship between Maradona and Messi was an interesting one.
The first time Maradona ever spoke to Messi was in 2005, during his first season with FC Barcelona’s first team, when he scored his first La Liga goal against Albacete. Messi was at home having lunch when he received the phone call, during which Maradona congratulated him for playing well in a string of games and encouraged him to look to the future and keep on scoring.
Then, in August of that year, Messi found himself in Buenos Aires, participating in the rather whacky, unpredictable La Noche del 10, a hugely popular TV show that Diego presented. Maradona had embarked on a financially lucrative career in TV a year earlier, after recovering from the latest of a series of near-death health scares related to his cocaine use and overeating. He had re-emerged in public after having gastric bypass surgery, having his stomach stapled by a Colombian doctor, and being put on a strict diet of lightly mashed, easily digestible foods, and no alcohol.
Diego’s opening TV show had him and the Brazilian legend Pelé exchanging personally autographed national shirts, heading a ball at each other for a minute and playing and singing a tango song – Pelé on guitar, Maradona on vocals.
The ratings had subsequently flagged after Maradona had veered from light entertainment into politics, calling George W. Bush a murderer and doing a fawning and wordy interview with Fidel Castro – mercifully cut from its original five hours.
Then the producers thought of the young Messi. No matter that – in contrast to Pelé and Castro – he had nothing much to say. They set the programme up so he could do the one thing he was passionate about, which was play football – and what’s more against Maradona. The programme almost always featured Diego playing football-tennis with his guests. On this occasion it was him and Enzo Francescoli, the Uruguayan-born River Plate star and a veteran of Diego’s vintage, against Messi and Carlos Tévez, the emerging young thoroughbreds. Once again it made a great show, with the two sides growing in their determination to win, although characteristically the most heated moments – contesting rules and points given away – involved the bullish Tévez and Diego.
Diego’s team ended up losing 10–6, his only loss in the whole run of the series, yet there was no sense of humiliation or gloating displayed on one side or the other. One can only imagine how Ronaldo might have reacted in the same circumstances, beating Di Stéfano or Eusébio or even Raúl. But this was Messi, who had always looked at Maradona not as his nemesis but as his mirror (when it came to playing), and Maradona, whose resilient sense of self-belief had survived worse setbacks in his life and who, even in 2005, saw his own future in Messi’s, not competing for the title of best player in history – for Diego felt beyond such comparison – but as his coach.
‘I’ve seen the player who will inherit my place in Argentinian football and his name is Messi,’ Maradona said. ‘He is beautiful to watch – my kind of player in our blue-and-white jersey. He’s a leader and is offering classes in beautiful football. He has something different to any other player in the world.’1 One might note the emphasis on eventual succession, rather than dethronement. For Maradona, his own personality would always be unsurpassable.
As Fernando Signorini, the physical trainer of the Argentine national squad who worked with both Maradona and Messi, told me: ‘Physically and technically there is much in common but there is a gulf between the two when it comes to personality. Messi was not born like Diego was in a shantytown, nor did he have to fight for survival from an early stage. As a young teenager Diego was playing for the youth team of Argentinos Juniors, getting up at four in the morning to go and play in an away game across the country, on pitches that had no decent changing rooms, let alone hot water or lighting, and where you had to face growing violence from the fans. Messi, at the age of twelve, was taken to Barcelona where he was put in a glass house and protected.’
On the pitch, on their best days, Maradona and Messi produced football as a sublime art form of individual creativity. As Jorge Valdano, retired footballer turned brilliant wordsmith, puts it: ‘For Diego, the ball was a painting brush; for Leo, a high precision tool. Diego loved the ball and played with an emotion that made him and those who watch him happy; Leo loves the ball like a surgeon his scalpel, and when he finishes his work we marvel at the efficiency, precision and imagination with which he transforms the game. Any game. Almost all games.’
And yet compare Maradona and Messi off the pitch, and they are no longer part of the same coinage but as different as heat and cold. ‘In this territory,’ Valdano goes on, ‘Maradona is born into a time of great social demands, who goes on crying out his rebellion, feeling himself a representative of those who do not have a voice. He divides the world between friends and enemies with an expressiveness that leaves no one indifferent.’2
But Messi, by contrast, ‘does not switch on the loudspeaker of fame to express his rebellions, if he has any. For him, all that matters is football, because he was born in a time when capitalism anaesthetized everyone and because his personality is far from being, at least publicly, volcanic.’
Although he might not have been volcanic, Messi’s quiet determination to play at the Olympics was a clear marker that he was determined to do things his way, and left Barcelona in no doubt of who held the power when it came down to it.
As the summer went on, another indication of just how powerful elite players were when it came down to deciding their futures was playing out halfway around the world.