While Messi’s play on the field has made people forget about his lack of height, it’s hard not to notice it when he is next to his former teammate Ronaldinho.
In countries like Argentina, soccer is almost as important as school and jobs. Soccer is like life.
There was a tradition around the Messi household and actually in just about every soccer family home throughout the area. The Messi clan was involved in club soccer. This meant that every male member of the family was expected to play soccer for Grandoli, the local club.
This soccer club wasn’t just for children. Adults played too, including Messi’s uncle who played on a senior team. So, as soon as Messi decided it was OK to use the soccer balls he had been “saving” and started playing with his friends, his family planned on signing him up for his first club team.
While Messi’s play on the field has made people forget about his lack of height, it’s hard not to notice it when he is next to his former teammate Ronaldinho.
“It wasn’t just me. The whole family was involved at the club; all of us played there at different age levels, and my dad was one of the coaches,” Messi said in an interview. “We used to spend the whole day of Sunday at Grandoli because we would have a member of the family playing in every different age category, from me through to my uncle in the senior team. We’d be there all day.”
It was 1991 when Salvador Aparicio, a well-known old coach with Grandoli, first noticed Messi on the pitch. He was messing around with the ball, just kind of playing by himself. Aparicio needed one more boy to be able to have a seven-on-seven game. It was nothing official, just a friendly practice game.
He asked Messi’s mother if her boy would be able to play the game, but she said no. Messi was smaller than all the other boys, and she was worried that he would get hurt. Luckily, Messi’s grandmother was there and she urged the boy’s mother to let him play.
“Without my grandmother, I wouldn’t have been able to start playing so young,” Messi told The Independent newspaper in 2008.
Aparicio had coached thousands of soccer players over the years. But what he saw that day changed everything for him.
“The play went on and the ball came to him,” Aparicio said during a televised interview in 2008. “The ball rolled toward him and basically hit his left leg. Then he controlled the ball and started running across the pitch. He dribbled past anyone crossing his path and I was screaming ‘shoot, shoot,’ but he was too small to do it. Since then, he was always part of my team.”
Because he has such great ball control, Messi has the ability to move the ball in ways his opponents cannot defend.
Aparicio knew from that moment that Messi was destined to become a very special soccer player. He would do things on the pitch that Aparicio had never seen before. One example of how Messi played was that he would never wait for the other team’s goalkeeper to kick the ball once he placed it on the ground.
Messi would dart forward with blazing speed and take the ball away from the keeper.
“He would score six or seven goals every match,” Aparicio said. “He was supernatural.”
Messi was put on the most talented and most competitive team for six-year-olds because he was so talented. It was a team that regularly produced players that went on to play for Argentina’s national team. There were other coaches—in addition to Aparicio—who were involved in teaching Messi the game.
They’ve all said that one of the main things that set him apart was that he really wanted to learn. He was a quiet boy and never disruptive during practice time. He truly took the time to listen to his coaches and try to do everything they said.
No matter where his team is playing, Messi fans travel the world to watch him. This sign held by his Argentinean fans reads: “Messi we believe in you!”
Messi’s ballhandling skills became so amazing that he would sometimes go onto the field and perform his “tricks” in front of the crowded stands waiting for the professional teams to take the field. Because he was so young—and so small—some people thought they were being entertained by a circus dwarf.
They gave him the nickname “Enano” which is Spanish for dwarf. Other people nicknamed him “the flea” because he was often the smallest player on his team.
But Messi and his family never worried about his height. They felt he would surely grow when he got older. All he cared about now was soccer. He loved it, he lived it, and he breathed it. He spent every waking minute thinking about it.
“I’d go to school, come home, and straightaway, go out with a ball,” he told Tom Watt for his book. “Then I might go to training at Grandoli, come home, have something to eat and then be back out in the street again. I was always out in the street and always playing (soccer). I even kept a ball with me when I was indoors. My brothers didn’t have to worry anymore: the other kids in the neighborhood sort of looked after me.”
It seemed as if everything was going Messi’s way. Clearly, he was a budding soccer superstar in the making. But a visit to the doctor a few years later would throw his family’s world into a spin.