By Simon Cuper at LitHub [17 Aug, 2021]
One night in 2015, I sat beside a club official watching a Barça–Atlético Madrid game in the Camp Nou. When the game began, he said, “Watch Messi.”
It was a bizarre sight. From kickoff, Lionel Messi went on a stroll around the opposition defense, apparently ignoring the ball. “In the first few minutes he just walks across the field,” explained the official. “He is looking at each opponent, where the guy positions himself, and how their defense fits together.”
Messi was storing his observations in his visual memory. At one point in the opening minutes, Barça’s center-back Javier Mascherano passed to him, and Messi just let the ball roll into touch. He wasn’t ready to play yet. He performs the same routine every match. His old coach Guardiola explains, “After five, ten minutes, he has the map in his eyes and in his brain, to know exactly where is the space and what is the panorama.”
Messi is a curiously overlooked footballer. He has been predictably brilliant for so long that we have come to take his brilliance for granted, something to be dismissed in a phrase. He’s a “PlayStation footballer,” said Arsène Wenger; “Like a cartoon,” said Samuel Eto’o; “A magician!” shout commentators. I want to try to let daylight in on the magic.
One sun-drenched February morning at the Joan Gamper training complex, when it felt unfair that anyone was allowed to have a stimulating job in such a paradisial city, I watched Messi cruise past me into the players’ parking lot: a little man in a baseball cap, perched high in his luxury crossover SUV sponsor’s car, reporting for another day at the office. It got me thinking about how Barça has managed him day-to-day, and how he does what he does, week in, week out, ever since his debut for the first team in 2004. How did Barcelona transform a soloist into a team player? And how did they keep him on board for so long? The club’s Messi strategy—which entailed shaping the entire workplace around employee number one—was for fifteen years possibly the most successful long-term man-management project in football history. But it worked also because Messi’s career has coincided with the most star-friendly era of the game.
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I didn’t interview Messi. I was careful not to use up my bank of favors with Barça, and I understood that requesting fifteen minutes with him would have taken me over the limit, even presuming the club was able to produce him. (Nobody at Barcelona tells Messi what to do.)
It also probably wouldn’t have been worth it. Messi reached the age of thirty without ever saying an interesting sentence in public. My colleague John Carlin, who interviewed him twice, said that if offered a third opportunity he’d decline it. Even now that Messi sometimes talks, he still shows almost no inclination to explain either his art or his power within Barça. It’s not clear that he is able to. Instead, I’ve tried to understand Messi by watching him closely, and by listening to people who have watched him even more closely.
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Very unusually, Barça paid for Messi’s parents and siblings to move with him. The child’s salary of €120,000 a year—probably unprecedented in the Masia—was meant to support them all. The Messis retained their family structure at the price of inverting it: the thirteen-year-old youngest son became the migrant breadwinner. Like the twelve-year-old Cruyff after the death of his father, Messi experienced the sudden end of childhood, and the onset of responsibility. All the Messis cried in the taxi to Rosario airport, he would recall, yet taking the family with him may have made the difference. Living in a dorm room across the ocean away from his parents, having to inject himself with growth hormones every day, might have been beyond even him.
Unlike many Masia families, the Messis held together and resisted chasing quick money. They waited patiently for their boy to mature in Barcelona. A club staffer who is close to the player told me, “Messi had a structure. Good or bad, he had one.” But Messi’s older brother Rodrigo later admitted, “We didn’t adapt very well. We were united, but one person did something and the others did nothing. So we all suffered in different ways.”
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Messi is a more limited and disciplined figure than past greats largely because he has been a professional athlete since adolescence.
Whereas Maradona and Cruyff are products of Argentina and the Calvinist Netherlands, Messi grew up almost outside society, the joint creation of a family and a football academy.
Until he broke into Barcelona’s first team at age seventeen and encountered teammates who demanded the ball, he didn’t need to pass, recalled Pere Gratacós, who coached him in the Masia. As Messi recalled it, he kept “forgetting” to pass, adding, “Gradually I managed to play more for the team but I didn’t make it easy for them, because I have always been very stubborn.”
Barça had to try to teach a natural to play collective football. Twice coaches benched him for holding on to the ball too much, but the Masia never quite turned him into a Cruyffian ensemble player. On the Baby Dream Team, Messi scored his goals alone. That wasn’t a good omen. None of the Argentinian pibes who were supposed to become the next Maradona—not Pablo Aimar or Ariel Ortega or Marcelo Gallardo or Javier Saviola, who signed for Barça’s first team in 2001—ever fully transitioned from el fútbol de la calle, street football, to the collective European game.
There was also something worryingly childlike about Messi, recounts the German writer Ronald Reng. When Guardiola first spotted the tiny shy kid with his father in the Nike shop at the airport, he wondered, “Is this one as good as they say?” Messi practically lived in tracksuits, didn’t seem to own a pair of jeans, had only ever attempted to read one book, a biography of Maradona (which he didn’t finish), and was assumed by his teammates to be mute until one day he suddenly burst into speech during an emotional game of PlayStation. “The game was his means of communication,” Gratacós told me.
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After each training session, the squad went to the gym. Other players lifted weights, but Messi didn’t see the point. He played tennis football with the Brazilian fullback Sylvinho. Ten Cate said, “I saw little Messi playing with Sylvinho, and Sylvinho was beating the crap out of him every time, and soon Messi was beating Sylvinho, and then he was beating Ronaldinho.” When Rijkaard’s other assistant, Eusebio Sacristán, played tennis football with Messi, he noticed that the boy always tried to beat him 11–0. “He had a winner’s mentality,” said Eusebio. “Other players weren’t like that.”
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