![]() The idea that Barcelona wanted to pay for Messi’s hormone treatment when no other club would do so is arguably the crucial piece of his origin story. What he expected from the trial, I have no idea Horacio Gaggioli, the agent who helped connect the Messi family with the club, has said that the first time he saw Leo, he was “ open-mouthed” - not with awe, but because “he was so small and skinny that the notion of him playing football seemed impossible.” But - well, here’s a video of Messi as a kid, footage from before he signed with Barcelona. Rexach had spent 22 years as a winger for the club and served as an assistant under manager Johan Cruyff, himself one of the greatest attacking players ever I bring this up only to give you an idea of what it might take to make Rexach flip out over a soccer talent. The Messis had relatives in Catalonia, through whom they were able to get the tiny Leo a trial in front of Barcelona sporting director Carles Rexach. Career Arc Tracking your favorite actors, athletes, and public figures. They hoped a soccer team might cover the cost. How his mother did some cleaning part-time. How his father worked in a steel factory. That’s the detail that still jumps out, no matter how shopworn the mythos of his childhood becomes - the upbringing in Rosario, Argentina the local-club youth team (“the Machine of ’87”) that lost one match in four years the diagnosis with a growth-hormone deficiency at 11. His first contract was written on a napkin. 1 Those 10 years have both defined this era of soccer and stood completely outside it in fascinating ways. It would take a few years, and one earth-shattering wondergoal, for the murmur around Messi to gather into a roar. I understood what was happening the whole time. It’s an early glimpse of the slow-blooming wonder that, among both viewers and defenders, would be his calling card over the next decade. At these moments your reaction as a viewer exactly tracks what those beaten players must have been thinking. A few times in his debut he gets the ball past Espanyol defenders who thought they had him covered - he breaks through toward the goalkeeper or whatever. When he does the surprising thing, it looks normal, because you already felt a steady-state, low-level surprise watching him do the normal thing. It’s as if your brain is registering microdegrees of movement that your eye can’t really see. When he cuts to his right, he has this weird ability to sort of counter-lean to his left - and sometimes not even to actually do it, but (and this is where it gets impossible to talk about Messi) just to seem like he’s doing it, to give the impression that he’s tilting in a way that defies the basic arrangement of masses and forces in play. You notice, in the video of that Espanyol match, that when he’s running straight ahead over the ball he’s also leaning fractionally to his right. It has something to do with balance, this quality, with the way the planes of his body intersect the x-axis of the pitch at just slightly odd or unexpected angles. The next two refer to “a portentous event : OMEN” and “something extraordinary or inexplicable.” And maybe that’s the right frame for appreciating early Messi - that you have to go three numbers deep in the dictionary before he even starts to exhaust the word. The top-line definition of “prodigy” in Webster’s is the standard one about a gifted child. He’s not ready yet, not quite, but he already has that strange quality of slant directness, that mysteriously straightforward elusiveness, that would later make him seem magical, insoluble. Still, if you watch the video now, it’s pretty clear, even allowing for the benefit of hindsight, that at 17 Messi was a frightening talent. He was already famous, of course, among the hardest-core coterie of Barça fanciers, the types who write forum posts about training-academy gossip to the rest of the world, his eight scoreless minutes at the end of Barcelona’s 1-0 win over Espanyol didn’t do much to make him a household name. Lionel Messi played in his first competitive match for FC Barcelona 10 years ago this month, on October 16, 2004.
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