The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  His soccer club, the local professional powerhouse Newell’s Old Boys, agreed to help pay for the drugs, but, as costs mounted, it eventually stopped. Frustrated, his father found someone who would pay: Barça. So when Leo was 13, after the Machine of ’87 won its final championship, he and his dad, Jorge, moved to Spain. Before Messi left, he stopped into his doctor’s office to say goodbye. Schwarzstein wished him luck, and Messi handed him his Newell’s jersey, tiny, with the number nine on the back. He autographed it, then rode with his father to the Buenos Aires airport, trading his old comfortable life for an unknown new one.

  His mother ultimately stayed behind with his siblings, dividing the family, and Messi, always shy, struggled. When he cried, which was often, he hid. He didn’t want his father to see. His whole family revolved around his future; Barça even agreed to employ Jorge while Leo trained at the club’s famous youth academy. He went to class, reluctantly, but really he was a professional athlete by the age of 13. Four years passed. During this time of loneliness, when he was a child supporting his family, he changed from Lionel into . . . Messi. He grew. Schwarzstein was right. Maradona is 5-foot-5. Messi is 5-foot-7. The next time people in Rosario heard his name, he was a star. “It is difficult to be a hero in your own city,” explained Marcelo Ramírez, a family friend and radio host who showed us text messages from Messi. “He didn’t grow up here. It’s like he lost contact with the people. He is more an international figure than a Rosarino.”

  The Argentine national team coaches found out about him through a videotape, and the first time they sent him an invitation to join the squad, they addressed it to “Leonel Mecci.” In the 2006 and 2010 World Cups, playing outside the familiar Barcelona system, he struggled, at least in the expectant eyes of his countrymen. His coaches and teammates didn’t understand the aloof Messi, who once went to a team-building barbecue and never said a word, not even to ask for meat. The people from Argentina thought he was Spanish, and in the cafés and pool halls, they wondered why he always won championships for Barcelona but never for his own country. They raged when he didn’t sing the national anthem before games. In Barcelona, Messi inspired the same reaction. People noticed he didn’t speak Catalan and protected his Rosarino accent. He bought meat from an Argentine butcher and ate in Argentine restaurants. “Barcelona is not his place in the world,” influential Spanish soccer editor Aitor Lagunas wrote in an email. “It’s a kind of a laboral emigrant with an undisguised homesick feeling.”

  In many ways, he is a man without a country.

  “He is fully Argentine in Barcelona but not completely one in Buenos Aires, since he came to Spain as a child,” continued Lagunas, whose magazine Panenka devoted an entire issue to exploring Messi and Rosario, “and the contrast between his amazing games with Barça and the not-so-good with his national team also helps this strange vision of the Argentine people. Unlike Maradona, who shows an ultra-typical Argentine personality, Argentine people find it difficult to recognize themselves in this little, shy, introverted, silent boy.”

  Messi never reveals anything. When Sports Illustrated sent star profiler S. L. Price to interview him, Price got 15 minutes of bland, semi-annoyed answers. An Italian journalist named Luca Caioli wrote an entire biography of Messi that contained basically one revelation: friends and family admitting that Messi is unknowable even to the people closest to him. “When he’s not doing so well,” close friend Cintia Arellano told the writer, “Leo is a little bit solitary. He retreats. He withdraws into himself. He was like that even with me sometimes. It was like drawing blood from a stone trying to find out what was going on inside.”

  WITNESSES

  Messi’s old youth coach slipped an off-brand cigarette from a pack and pinched the filter. He smiled wistfully, a look layered with happiness, wonder, and regret.

  “Messi is guarded in a crystal box,” Ernesto Vecchio said.

  He led us through the Newell’s Old Boys football school, past picnic tables of parents watching children in baggy shirts. Newell’s is the most historic professional club in Rosario, and like most soccer teams it has a vibrant youth system. Messi trained on this pitch, on days like this one. The skies were tall and blue, a late-winter chill in the air. Off to the side, kids kicked a ball, dodging the row of leafless trees between the bleachers and a fence of sawed-off highway guardrails.

  “They all want to be like Messi,” Vecchio said with a sigh.

  For years, he resented his former player. Something happened here at this school, a bit of magic, and Vecchio played a role. Many people did. There should be some acknowledgment. Instead, they’re known as the short-sighted fools who let a legend walk away. The former Newell’s team official in charge of Messi’s growth hormone payments still carries around receipts, which seem like forgeries, trying to prove that he didn’t make the dumbest decision in the history of professional sports. Burn scars remain. Vecchio couldn’t even see his former player. Two years ago, talking to a reporter from a London tabloid, he offered the lament of all jilted launching pads: Messi forgot his roots.

  “It’s over 10 years since we spoke,” he said then. “It’s a shame kids forget some things when they find success. In 2006 I heard he was in Rosario and I went to his house to catch up with old times. They told me he wasn’t there, but it was a lie. He must have been afraid I would ask him for something. Money changes people a bit.”

  We sat down at a table in the school’s café.

  “When was the last time you spoke to him?” I asked, fishing for the expected answer. He didn’t give it.

  “One year ago,” he said.

  Once again, he had heard Messi was in town, holding court at VIP. By now, Vecchio surely knew the truth. He hadn’t been a shaper of Messi’s talent, merely a witness to it. Vecchio went to the bar and found a local policeman guarding the door. “When I arrived,” he said, “there was a world of people of all ages, trying to get close to him, trying to get photographs taken, looking for autographs. I told the guard who I was and that I wanted to speak with him.”

  Vecchio waited for an answer in a crowd of sycophants.

  Messi said yes. The guard escorted him to a table with Jorge and Leo, who smiled and stood to give his old coach a hug. Messi did not mention the old newspaper quotes. Vecchio kissed his cheek and said how much pride he felt every time he watched a Barcelona game. He thought his former player was happy to see him, but he didn’t know for sure. Messi said little. Jorge dominated the table. Vecchio felt the clock ticking as he spoke, surrounded by a jockeying crowd. Little distinguished Messi in Barcelona from Messi in Rosario. He lived in a bubble of fame. It had been this way for years; he’d gone from being alone to always surrounded, which are sort of the same thing. Vecchio asked Jorge if they imagined it would ever get like this. Jorge said no. Vecchio’s five minutes ended, and he worked back through the chaos, replaced by another supplicant.

  Sitting with us in the café, Vecchio said he hadn’t asked for anything. But three months after those five minutes, Jorge Messi hired him to work for the family’s foundation. Vecchio’s job is to discover the next Leo Messi.

  A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE WALL

  With each person we met, Messi’s inner circle came more into focus.

  “It is small and very closed,” explained the radio host Ramírez when Paul and I quizzed him one afternoon about the particulars. There is a group of people in Rosario with whom Messi speaks, by phone or text, almost every day. There is another, larger group who hear from him less often, on holidays or special occasions. He spends his time with his aunts and uncles, with his cousins, with his brothers, and with a small group of friends. His mother will excommunicate anyone seen to be taking advantage. Messi is fine with friends bringing other people to hang out with him, as long as they don’t ask for anything. He hasn’t made a new friend in a long time. Most of his confidants were teammates on the Machine of ’87. He texts them before they play big games in Argentina.<
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  The goalie from that youth team, Juan Cruz Leguizamon, one of Messi’s oldest friends, met us one evening. He chose a local café called El Cairo, a faded, literary place, an airy room with tall glass windows and a high ceiling. It’s one of those time machine bars you find in South America. A Brazilian band played, a 10 piece, and we shouted at one another over the noise. Finally, they took a break and we could talk. Leguizamon is athletic, a goalkeeper now for Central Córdoba, a small local club. He’s got blue eyes and delicate eyelashes. I asked him what part of Messi’s life he wouldn’t want. He laughed. “As I just said to him, the only thing I wouldn’t want is his face.”

  When Messi is home, we’re told, he likes to play soccer, both in backyards and on video games.

  “Is Messi always Messi?” I asked.

  “He is always Barcelona,” Leguizamon said, smiling, “and he makes himself the captain.”

  Messi’s friends are a little in awe of him. Years ago, he was better than them, but the difference now is exponential. Leguizamon saw a photograph of Messi screwing around at Barça practice, playing keeper. His form was perfect, naturally, like he’d been playing the position forever. Leguizamon even called and asked if the picture was real. “Yeah, he’s Messi,” he said. “We are conscious of the fact that we have the best player in the world in front of us, but there is a certain confidence in the feeling we are all equal. We speak about the lives of everyone. We mess around. There are jokes.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Many things,” he said, grinning. “His ears, for instance.”

  Messi, he of the goofy ears, knows what is going on in their lives, and the conversation picks up easily, no matter how much time passes between trips. Usually, Messi and his friends hang out at one another’s houses. When they want to go out—he likes a restaurant on Pellegrini called Club de la Milanesa, and a few nightclubs—Messi calls ahead to alert the place. Hearing the stories, it’s clear his friends love going out with Messi in part because he attracts so many beautiful women. Sometimes they travel with guards. Leguizamon laughs thinking about the funny moments—the things that happen when your boyhood friend becomes rich and famous. “He asked the security guys to accompany him as he had to go to the bathroom,” he says, describing a night out at a bar. “He asked me to go with him. So all the security guys were protecting him, and I was behind, and then another group of security guys protected me, and well, for me, it was silly. They were protecting me—and I’m nobody.”

  CLOSING IN

  We circled the city, moving from address to address, knocking on doors, looking for members of the family. We searched for hints at whatever might be going on inside Messi. Nobody who is great at something is normal. They are all pushed, or pulled, by things that rarely break the surface. Often those things are memories of who they used to be, and where.

  On a recent trip to Buenos Aires, to give an example, I wanted to visit Maradona’s boyhood house. That sounds simple, but it took days of logistical planning, trying to find someone who could guarantee safe passage into Fiorito, which is home to some of the world’s largest cocaine kitchens. Basically, he grew up in New Jack City. Finally, I agreed to pay a local charity $60 to walk me there. The hotel arranged a car to the woman’s house. Rolling through the outer slums, the black Mercedes-Benz felt like a spaceship. “It’s like going on vacation to Syria,” the driver said.

  We parked and walked through the streets. A workers protest echoed through a tinny bullhorn a few blocks away. Finally, we stopped in front of a blue-brick hovel, the front yard filled with semi-organized trash. A huge bin of cardboard boxes, a barrel of broken Heineken bottles. The fence sagged. Maradona’s distant relatives lived here, squatters, really, making a living by digging through dumpsters. A neighbor told me to leave. She knew Diego as a boy, was friends with his grandmother. “No viene,” she spit. He never comes here.

  What about Messi? What’s his connection to the neighborhood, and the house, where he grew up?

  His dad spends a lot of his time in Barcelona, but they have a family compound outside of town. He moved his mother out of their old, simple home, buying her a place in the fanciest building in Rosario, a tower of mirrored glass and buffed metal called Aqualina. It looks like a skinny cruise ship standing on its stern. Messi’s mom lives on the entire 26th floor, we’re told, with four bedrooms, two terraces, and a small apartment for servants. She just left, the doorman said.

  The drive from his new life to his old one took us down along the riverfront, past the port. We turned right off the highway toward the south of town. On Sunday, men built a shanty on the sidewalk off the exit. On Monday, children’s clothes hung from a washline outside. Grain elevators peeked above rooflines, out of place, like oil pumpjacks in the middle of West Texas parking lots.

  His aunt and uncle still live in the same house. There was a sleek black Audi sports car parked inside the gate. The garage area looked familiar; then I remembered. I saw a video of Messi playing soccer here with his young nieces and nephews, dodging and feinting, moving the tiny ball with his feet, the kids unable to take it away. The look on his face is the same as when he plays in front of millions of fans. There’s something innocent about him with a ball. His friends laugh about how Messi seems somehow less than himself without one. Leguizamon told us a story. The last time Messi came to visit, they hung out in a backyard, and they watched him, uneasy, antsy. Finally, without even realizing he was doing it, he pulled a lemon from a tree and juggled it mindlessly with his feet, whole again.

  The Internet is full of tribute videos with some version of the title “Messi doesn’t dive,” a trait rare in a sport where players roll around on the ground like gunshot victims when an opponent so much as breathes on them. Theories abound about why Messi won’t fall, about his character or his respect for the game, but I think it’s much simpler. If he dives, he loses the ball. The boy forced to grow up fast is only happy at play. He laughs when he scores. He pouts when he loses. He gets moody. When he was young and got kicked out of practice, the coach saw him with his face pressed against a fence, the longing palpable even from a distance. When he got ejected from a match as a pro, he wept. A common adjective emerged: childlike. He acts remarkably like a 13-year-old boy.

  We pressed the buzzer. The street was middle-class. A man answered, probably Messi’s uncle, and said his aunt would be back in a few hours. We left a note. I stood outside a bit more before heading back to the car. This is the house where, on Christmas Eve a few years ago, a fan from Sweden stopped by and was greeted by Messi himself, who invited him inside. They talked in the hallway for a half hour. Messi sometimes seems oblivious, like he doesn’t realize he’s famous. There are videos, taken on shaky cell phone cameras, of him waiting for his own luggage at baggage claim, or walking toward the taxi line, followed by fans. He makes millions of dollars a year and waits for luggage and usually flies commercial, and you get the sense that it isn’t because he is trying to stay humble but rather because he doesn’t know any better. He seems to sleepwalk until a ball is at his feet. Then he comes alive.

  LIONEL IS NOT HERE

  We learned the Messi family never sold the old house.

  It’s on Estado de Israel Street, hidden in a maze of one-ways. After turning at the blue Laundromat painted with the white bubbles, we followed the numbers, counting to 525. The first time, before we figured out how to drive here, we parked and walked. The street seemed to dead-end into a house, and we followed a narrow alley off to the left that led back onto the street. The Messis’ yard backs onto the home of Cintia Arellano, who was quoted about blood from a stone. She still lives there. A block away, Argentine funk, called cumbia, bumped out of an open window, heavy with bass thuds and loud horns. It’s Messi’s favorite music. An iPod and earbuds can take him home.

  The house looked basically like the other houses on the block, just a little bigger, with a few modifications, including a tall
fence, a security camera. It was white, in need of a paint job. The awnings over the small terraces on the second floor were made of sheet metal. Wood shutters covered the windows, which were mirrored. We stood at the gate and listened. It sounded like someone was home. Paul rang the bell. A woman answered.

  “Lionel is not here,” she said. “He is in Spain.”

  The woman said she was a cleaning lady and that nobody lives in the house anymore. The Messis have all moved up in the world, but they like the house to remain clean, as if they might all return to this street and resume the life abandoned when Leo left to become a star. The music echoed off the concrete houses. The cleaning lady wouldn’t tell us why a family maintains an empty house. As I stood there listening to the music, an idea began to take shape.

  Maradona grew up poor and has spent his whole life running from the blue-brick hovel, never looking back, never able to escape. Maradona has done his best to forget Fiorito, but Messi has done the opposite. He, or maybe his family, clings to the past, as if preserving the modest house at 525 Estado de Israel will preserve something more important and harder to define.

  A PILGRIMAGE

  Messi isn’t known as a deep thinker, or even really as a thinker at all, so it’s fair to wonder if he’s capable of existential longing. Many recycling bins of column inches have been devoted to the debate about his bland public persona. Is he incredibly well managed? After all, many thought Tiger Woods was unknowable too. Is Messi—how should I put this?—stupid? An idiot savant? What if he’s not guarded so much as empty? All those debates are just different ways of asking if he lives a second, interior life. Are there things inside Leo Messi—fears, desires, hopes—that he doesn’t share?

  There is a European newspaper story I read that strikes me as relevant. A few months ago, he took a private jet to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where a car took him across the Bosnian border into the town of Medjugorje. There’s a shrine there, drawing pilgrims from around the world, because in 1981, six local youths claim to have seen the Virgin Mary, and some of them claim to still communicate with her. Messi was the guest of one of the visionaries, as they are known.