Messi

by Guillem Balague

  This, then, was Leo’s street, just 200 metres from an uneven piece of fenced-off land covered with rough, wild grass where football was played; next to it, the kiosk where Matías worked when Leo was already in Barcelona, is still there, right next to the house where Matías lived and that he later gave to a relative. Go to the top of the street and there you will see Grandoli. Grandmother Celia lived around here and a little further up were the cousins. And close by are the paternal grandparents, Rosa María and Eusebio Messi Baro, who, at 86, and years after retiring, still gets up every morning to open the humble bakery he installed in a room in the house that they have lived in for the past 50 years.

  Everything starts and finishes in that neighbourhood. The family unit is the fertile ground on which the Messis and the Cuccittinis were raised. Leo is devoted to his parents, his brother, his cousins, his uncles. To his mother, above all to his mother: he has a tattoo of her face on his back. ‘He did it without saying anything to anyone. He came around one day and showed us. We almost fainted with the shock. We didn’t have a clue that he was going to do this. But it’s his body and there’s nothing we can say to him,’ his father said in Sique Rodríguez’s book Educados para ganar (‘Educated to Win’) in which the parents of the best-known graduates from FC Barcelona’s La Masía give their side of the story.

  From here also come Leo’s best friends whom he still sees whenever time permits. For Messi, Rosario, La Bajada, or whatever you want to call it, represents his childhood, ‘a man’s true homeland’ as the poet Rilke would say. The place where he wants to return (where he returns constantly), the place he has never left; the place he has recreated for himself in Barcelona to make everything easier.

  That’s why he returns home to his family whenever he can. It is to Rosario that he escapes when there is a sufficiently long break at any time in the summer, or at Christmas. You don’t see him in the neighbourhood so much now, not since he bought a larger property on the outskirts of the city, but at other times he has been seen cycling there. Sometimes he travels around neighbouring regions, as in the summer of 2013 when he was seen in a supermarket pushing a trolleyful of muffins, wine and breadsticks; he was spending the day in Gualeguaychú, in the south-east of Entre Rios, a sleepy town where, despite the cap he was wearing, he was easily recognised and asked to pose for photos. He’s had to get used to being photographed in the street. He never has any protection.

  He even has a long-term girlfriend from his home town. Antonella Roccuzzo, is, like Leo, from Rosario, and is the cousin of his best friend, Lucas Scaglia, who plays for Deportivo Cali in Colombia. He has known her since she was five and today she is the mother of his son, Thiago. But things could have worked out differently. Antonella and Leo stopped seeing each other for a while, when he was just another boy trying to attract her attention and she was a cute little girl who wasn’t interested. Leo went to Barcelona and, on a trip back home for the holidays, the romance blossomed.

  Make a note of this: Roccuzzo, Scaglia; Leo is a Messi and his mother’s maiden name is Cuccittini. The family are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Italian immigrants who came to Rosario from Recanati and Ancona, in the Marche region of Italy. Lionel also has Spanish blood. Rosario attracted Europeans, mainly the Spanish and Italians who made up half the population in the first decades as the city grew. One of Leo’s great-grandmothers, Rosa Mateu i Gese, came from Blancafort de Tragó de Noguera, an area in the Pyrenees near Lleida, and emigrated to Argentina as a child. Crossing the Atlantic she met a man from Bellcaire d’Urgell, José Pérez Solé. When you leave home, new relationships are strong and long-lasting; they are the life raft of the immigrant. This is the real New World, the foundation of a new life. Rosa and José supported each other throughout the transition to a new beginning in a foreign land. They eventually married in Argentina and had three children, one of whom was Rosa María, wife of Eusebio Messi, the parents of Jorge Messi.

  Recently, Corriere della Sera carried out an interesting exercise with Leo, reminding him of the Messi family roots.

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  They were from Recanati, like Giacomo Leopardi.

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  Who was he?

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  A great poet: Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle / e questa siepe, che da tanta parte / dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.

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  I’ve never heard of him. I’m sorry.

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  Maybe you’ve heard of the Virgin of Loreto. It’s close.

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  No. I’m sorry. Where is it?

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  La Marche. Central Italy. Have you never been curious to go and see where your grandparents came from?

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  No. I think my father knows the place. He has been there and has seen our relatives. Maybe one day I’ll go as well.

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  Have you at least seen the ‘Hotel of Immigrants’ in Buenos Aires? It’s where most of the Italians who first arrived in the country based themselves.

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  No, I don’t know it.

  Then the journalist showed him some old black and white photographs of those who’d gone in search of their fortune on the Pampas. ‘Stern-looking women with shawls and long, black skirts. Skinny, barefoot children. Enormous casseroles for food. The men in dark jackets, white shirts and felt hats. The eyes gazing into the void of the unknown, the kind of look that ought to be described in the lyrics of a melancholy song.’

  Leo looked at them with some curiosity, but little else.

  For Leo, everything starts and finishes in Rosario.

  The Messi/Pérez family settled in Las Heras. Close by lived the Cuccittini Olivera parents of Celia, who were also of Italian descent. In the neighbourhood the spark of love between Jorge and Celia was struck and they wasted little time: aged just 15 and 13, they realised what was happening and didn’t fight it. Five years later, when Jorge returned from his military service, they married.

  Soon they were planning to go and live in Australia. Would an Australian Leo have been a footballer, or a footballing star? We’ll return to that later, but as it turned out the Messis preferred to carry on living in their parents’ neighbourhood. Celia worked for years in a workshop producing magnetic coils for industrial use and, like everyone else in the migrant community, Jorge was prepared to do any job that would provide an income – whether it be making screws in a metal workshop from six in the morning or as a door-to-door collector of monthly medical insurance premiums. But he knew that to better himself, to guarantee a future for his family, he had to work hard. He didn’t make it as a footballer after four years at the Newell’s Old Boys’ academy, so he started to study in the evening, from five until nine, after he had finished work, to become a chemical engineer. It took him eight years to finish the course. He was 22 years old and had his priorities in order: his efforts reaped their reward.

  Jorge joined Acindar, one of the main pressed-steel production plants in Argentina, in 1980, the year his first son, Rodrigo, was born. To get to the factory in Villa Constitución, some 50 kilometres from Rosario, he had to catch a works bus. Competition was encouraged and Jorge rose swiftly in the company, finally becoming manager. His salary made keeping a family of three no hardship. Or, rather, four: Matías arrived in 1982. ‘My father,’ says the second Messi/Cuccittini, ‘was a worker, we never wanted for anything, but he was always, as now, humble. We always worked for a better life, my old man, my old mum … and all of the brothers were able to study in the best schools. We wanted for nothing.’

  Theirs was a house in which food was always good and never wasted, always a good reference point: Leo corroborates this, telling Corriere della Sera, ‘we eat Argentine or Italian cooking: spaghettis, raviolis, chorizo sausages … My passion is for beef “milanesa”. My mother makes it like nobody else. Exceptional. Normal or with sauce, tomato and cheese on top. Ours was a modest family, but we weren’t poor. Honestly, we wanted for nothing.’

  There i
s a common misconception about the origin of most Argentinian footballers: the overwhelming majority come from that section that would be classified as middle class, that in Europe would be known as working class, but not lower class or poor. The same as the Messis, in fact. There are not many examples of footballers who have emerged from poverty to become successes in Argentinian football. At least, that is, not since Diego Maradona was born in the slums of Fiorito to the south of Buenos Aires.

  The truth is that the poor rarely get to trial for football clubs, sometimes because of lack of contacts, or sometimes of resources, that prevent them from going to training, buying kit, being properly fed or getting into a football school with all its corresponding costs: without this last step hardly any of them become professionals. And those from the lower classes that do manage to get into a club are not accustomed to having continuity and perseverance in their lives because of the absence of a family structure, and because they live in villages and communities where discipline and sacrifice are not encouraged, where drugs are a distraction. Few professional footballers therefore emerge from poverty. There are some, like René Houseman (World Cup 1978), Maradona (even though he never went hungry), Carlos Tévez, perhaps Ezequiel Lavezzi or Chipi Barijho, a player with Carlos Bianchi’s Boca of 2000 who these days dedicates himself to giving back to football what it gave to him: taking kids from the street, feeding them and training them at Bajo Flores. But very few others.

  Argentinian footballers are, in the main, middle class, a section of society that experienced great difficulties in the last decade of the twentieth century when inflation caused the peso to lose value daily. Argentina stopped growing.

  The future looked bleak.

  The face of Argentina in the eighties was changing. The Falklands War of 1982, the military reclamation of the islands occupied by Great Britain, was intended to distract attention from the continual and progressive failure of the economic policy of the military junta then running the country. Social tension was palpable and inflation unstoppable. Argentinians were dying and their hopes with them. But the military failure united indignation that was finally converted into the definitive action that would finally overthrow the regime. In December 1983, democracy returned.

  Four years later, the country was on the brink of civil war following the rise of a group of young army officers known as the Carapintadas (‘Painted Faces’), under the leadership of Colonel Aldo Rico. The army could not take any more humiliation and resolved to put an end to judicial processes against the military regime that sought to prosecute them for violations against human rights. Even though Argentinians took to the streets to defend democracy, and despite national strikes across the country, including in Rosario, President Raul Alfonsín bowed to pressure and finally passed the Due Obedience Law that exempted military personnel below the rank of colonel from responsibility for crimes such as forced disappearance, illegal detention, torture and murder. The Argentinian government was covering their recent past with a very thick coat of paint.

  Up to 15 explosive devices caused chaos in various cities between 1984 and 1985, including Villa Constitución, close to the factory where Jorge Messi was working: this was the soundtrack of outraged Argentinians unwilling to accept the obligation to forget the dark past, or to submit to military blackmail. In the following months the streets of cities and towns throughout the country were filled with protestors demanding higher salaries and a fairer economic policy.

  On 24 June 1987, in the middle of an economic and political crisis and almost a year to the day since Maradona had lifted the World Cup in Mexico, and on the fifty-second anniversary of the death of composer and actor Carlos Gardel, Lionel Andrés Messi was born.

  After a scare.

  Doctors feared that they might have to induce the birth with forceps because they diagnosed a foetal distress. Jorge feared the consequences for the baby who was ultimately born naturally, even though he was a little redder than usual and had one bent ear. ‘No, no, it won’t be for ever, wait and see; tomorrow it will be all right,’ the parents were told by gynaecologist Norberto Odetto.

  The third son of the 27-year-old Celia Cuccittini and 29-year-old Jorge came into the world at the Italian Clinic in Rosario, weighing in at 3.6 kilograms and measuring 47 centimetres.

  Leo. Leonel? That’s what the parents decided to name the baby. But it was not Lionel Ritchie who inspired the name, despite popular legend, even though the singer, much admired in the Messi household, was then at the height of his fame.

  Jorge made his way to the register office, having agreed with Celia that Leonel was to be the infant’s name. Sounded nice, but not quite right, he thought. On arrival he asked for a list of other names he could use: he didn’t want his child to be called Leo. The list included Lionel, which was the name in English. He liked that, so Lionel would be entered in the records. There was a row at home because (in the name of God, Jorge!) that was not what was decided! It was a fleeting row, but a row none the less. As it was, fate was to get its own back on Jorge for today the whole world knows his son as Leo. Fortunately for his father, in Argentina that becomes Lio.

  Leo started to walk at nine months and was often found chasing a ball that his brothers had left around in the house. Just days after getting himself up on two feet for the first time, the child dared to go out into the street. The front door was often left open, cars seldom passed. That, remember, was the type of neighbourhood they lived in.

  As he tottered out, a bike went past and knocked him over.

  Leo cried, naturally, but it seemed that he hadn’t been hurt. As he slept, the boy made little noises. His arm was swollen. Indeed, more than that. A cracked ulna of the left forearm was the hospital’s diagnosis. The first sign of a weak body. And also of an extraordinary resistance to pain.

  For his first birthday he received his first NOB shirt. The whole family are ‘leprosos’.

  Except for the most rebellious one, Matías: he was Central, of course.

  The new Messi/Cuccuttini was already playing with the ball with his brothers, a child more fascinated by watching football than he was cartoons, and who on his third birthday received as a present a ball with a pattern of red diamonds. ‘Look after him!’ shouted his mother when he went out, aged just four, for kickabouts with the older boys. ‘My mother let me go out to play football, but as I was younger than the others she was always there on the sidelines to see if I started to cry. This influenced me a lot,’ Leo told the Colombian magazine Soho.

  The following will be familiar to many, especially those who grew up wanting to be footballers, and, more especially by those who actually made it.

  In bed, Leo did not sleep well without a ball, if he couldn’t feel it close by, normally at his feet. And he was in despair when they took it off him when he went to bed. For him a football was like bread at meal times, an ever-present. When his mother sent Leo to do some shopping, the ball went him. If not, then he didn’t go. And if he didn’t have one handy he made do with rolled up bags or football stockings, whatever he could find. ‘Leo left the house with a ball, lived with the ball, and slept with the ball. He only wanted the ball,’ remembered Rodrigo Messi in a video played during the gala presentation of the 2012 Balon d’Or. Jorge insists that he used to do other things with his friends – he went out on his bike, played marbles or PlayStation with his neighbours, watched television. He was a normal boy, his dad repeats. But as Jorge also admitted in the German magazine Kicker, ‘since I can remember, always close to a ball’.

  Jorge, who himself showed promise as a central midfielder in the lower ranks of NOB, admitted to Ramiro Martín in his book Messi: Un genio en la escuala del futbol (‘Messi: A Genius in the School of Football’) that one day Leo surprised everyone.

  ‘It was during a rondo that we were doing with all my sons in the street … My son Rodrigo had the ball at his feet and Leo was in the middle chasing it. In a flash he threw himself at the feet of his brother and took it off him. We all looke
d at each other, surprised. No one had told him how to do this. It came naturally.’

  From that moment all eyes were on the boy and his talent. The plaudits fell on the child who felt happy at their happiness, happy with himself. And, like all youngsters he wanted more: more of the ball, which meant more attention, more enjoyment. In El Gráfico, Jorge remembers that ‘at four years of age we realised that he was different. He did little plays and the ball slept on the point of his boot. We couldn’t believe it. A bit older, he played with his two brothers who had seven and five years on him and he used to dance around them. It’s a gift, something he was born with.’

  That small child, that quiet boy, who would spend his time either at home or at his Aunt Marcela’s, ‘who only liked football’ as remembers his friend and neighbour Cintia Arellano, soon began to attract attention in the narrow Calle Estado de Israel. Cintia’s house – she is a month and a half older than Leo – was next to the Messis’ house in La Bajada. They shared the same first school years, and he sat next to her in the classroom or behind her if there was an exam. With Cintia, el Piqui (‘Titch’) spoke more. (‘That’s what they called him. One day a boy shouted out, “Come here, Titch” and the name stuck,’ remembers his best friend, today a qualified psychologist and teacher of children with learning difficulties.) Cintia was the one that would go to his house and persuade him to go to school. The one who would sometimes explain to others what he was trying to say. The one who would pass him the crib sheets, the little notes, either on a ruler or a rubber. The one who wrote on the small pieces of paper that she passed to Leo during his exams. The one who brought him his afternoon snacks. The one who told him, you’re going to be sorry if you don’t learn things now, and the one who heard him reply, yes, I’ll regret it, but I can’t do it. The one who explained his absence if he skipped class one day, which occasionally happened. The one who told the little white lie that she was his cousin.