It is 14 years since the Argentine made his
debut against Porto and here, some of his ex-
team-mates look back at his early days at the
Catalan club
Never had Barcelona's Cadete B team beaten
Espanyol's Cadete A in the first few years of the new
millennium. The Blaugrana, obsessed as ever with
technique, had not been able to overcome their rivals,
who were physically stronger and more experienced.
But one day, that changed. "We went to their place and
we scored three," Marc Valiente, a defender with KAS
Eupen in Belgium and one of the captains of that team,
recalls to Goal . It was 2002 and Barcelona's raw
diamond was a tiny Argentine aged 14. He was the
difference in an almost unbeatable team.
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Hailing from Rosario, he had arrived in Barcelona just
two years earlier and turned up in the Infantil B (Infantil
is the Under-12 youth category in Spanish youth
football) dressing room "without us even hearing him
say hello", another defender, Robert Franch,
remembers.
In the youth teams at Barcelona, the new arrivals are
always asked the same question. "Where do you play?,"
Rodolf Borrell asked Messi in front of the whole team in
February 2002. Without lifting his look from the floor,
Leo replied in a quiet voice. "As a forward," he muttered,
before taking him off to a corner where he sat in
silence.
"I was amazed by him," says Roger Gribet, who joined
Barcelona the same day as Messi. "I was conscious that
my physical development had opened doors at the club.
I was 1.70m at the age of 12, but he wasn't even
1.50m," he exclaims to Goal, still surprised, 15 years
later.
Borrell explained to the boys that Messi was a number
10 "who had come from far away" and who was "very
special", says Valiente, who adds: "Back then, there
were no players who came from far away to join La
Masia". Messi was an exception, even then, and that
was when the players still hadn't seen him with a ball at
his feet.
The Infantil B side soon saw him in action and Valiente
remembers that, "on the first day, they played him as a
partner to Cesc Fabregas in attack". There was nothing
random about that. "Cesc had a gift," he adds. "He was
a master at reading the game, because he was never
well positioned in the rondo (a training drill where a
larger group of players tries to keep possession of the
ball from a smaller group of defending players), but he
always managed to steal the ball somehow."
That day, however, the players saw something
completely new. "We were always shown to play with
one or two touches," Valiente explains. "From a young
age, we had been taught about control and passing, so
the ball moves quickly. But suddenly, here's a guy who
can move the ball in four or five touches at the same
speed it took us to pass it."
Nevertheless, they still needed to see it in a proper
match. And Albert Benaiges, legendary head of football
development at Barcelona for more than two decades,
recalled in his book, LÃbero : "We had to hurry, because if
he didn't play in those two matches, he wouldn't have
been able to play in a national category until he reached
the age of 18".
His first match came on March 7, 2001 against
Amposta and he scored a goal. However, his career
looked under threat a week later when he suffered a
broken fibula away to Tortosa. To this day, it remains
the only fracture he has ever had. But at such a young
age, it set off alarm bells at Barcelona and one thing
was clear: Messi would not play for the Infantil B team
again.
When he recovered from injury, he began to play for the
Infantil A side and there was no trace of his injury. And
again, he only featured in a handful of games because
Borrell and Benaiges quickly promoted him to the
Cadete B side (Under-16 youth category) in 2002. It was
in that group where he left a real mark.
"Up until then, he had gone largely unnoticed in the
dressing room where we had been together for so long,"
explains Roger Franch, brother of Robert and
goalkeeper in the Cadete B team. "We were a very lively
group, but he was always in a corner, alone and quiet."
In training, however, things were different. "He often
made us angry because it was frustrating to play
against him," Roger adds. "You asked yourself if you
were good enough to do this." And his brother Robert, a
defender, reveals to Goal: "After seeing that the guy was
three gears ahead of us all physically and mentally, we
decided, with the other defenders, that we would give
him a couple of hits to see what happened. But it didn't
matter... he was so quick that we weren't even able to
kick him."
Desperate, Robert explains that "you would go for him
and when you wanted to bring him down, he had
already left you behind and was taking on the next
defender". And he adds: "He was a machine and he
always was - in the training, his technique, in recovery
and in the matches." He and the other centre-backs
always sought to avoid him in the one-on-one
exercises. "Because we knew we wouldn't even get a
sniff of the ball, whatever we did."
Pau Torras, Cadete B goalkeeper, now with Cartagena,
could not believe it. "He would come to training without
opening his mouth, leave us all speechless and then go
home, all in the most natural way," he told Goal.
Robert sums it up. "Sometimes you thought that the
only way to stop him was by getting out a gun and firing
a shot, but even then you had the feeling that the guy
would swerve the bullet with the ball under his c
ontrol,"
he says. That was Messi at the age of 13.
Nevertheless, he was still extremely reserved. Until the
team went to Venice to play in a tournament and there,
Messi broke the ice. "He started to make his first jokes,"
Valiente remembers. "He was so shy that he hadn't
spoken to anybody before that." He then began to hang
around with Victor Vazquez, one of the jewels of La
Masia and a great partner for the Argentine in the youth
teams. They were also class mates.
It was in Venice where his team-mates started to call
him "enano" (dwarf). "Even though we called him that
for a long time, we didn't start to do so until we had the
mutual confidence which came in that trip to Venice,"
Roger Giribet, a striker, explains. "Even when he had
made his debut for the first team, he came to see us at
La Masia and we said to him: 'enano, how did you get
on with the older guys?' and we cracked up laughing.
"Maybe in private he complained about us, but he was
always a delight with his team-mates and I think he is
still the same," Giribet adds. "I have the feeling that if
we saw each other tomorrow, we would give each other
a hug and it would be as if these 15 years had not gone
by."
The generation of 1987 graduated to the Cadete A
category almost all together in 2002-03 and came to be
known as one of the best teams ever seen at La Masia,
working with the late Tito Vilanova and also Alex Garcia.
However, nothing lasts forever and at the end of the
season, Cesc left to join Arsenal, and a year later,
Gerard Pique set off for Manchester United.
For his part, Messi kept on moving up, jumping from the
Juvenil A (Under-19s) side to Barcelona C (which no
longer exists) and then to Barca B, all in the space of a
year. At 16, he made his debut with the first team and at
17 he was already a fully-fledged member of the senior
squad, under the wing of Ronaldinho, the world's best
player at that time.
Giribet, now technical secretary at Balaguer, says: "All
of us that knew him and played with him were not
surprised by the wonderful technical ability he has but
by his ability to adapt so quickly to any given situation."
And he adds: "Messi 10 years ago was able to
accelerate and get up to speed in a very small space
without losing the ball and as the years have gone by,
he has readapted his game to carry on being decisive
but with other qualities, such as his finishing or that
ability to give the final pass, which he has shown more
recently.
"In every stage of his career, he has been able to
determine what his best virtue is and adapted that for
the collective, to keep on being the best for more than a
decade. Because from the youth teams until now, he
has always been the best."
Giribet also believes that Messi, unlike other players, is
unaffected by pressure. "He doesn't know what
pressure is," he explains to Goal. "There are many
talented players who don't make it because they can't
handle the pressure. My legs were trembling when I
played against 1,500 people and he plays the same
whether he's in a Champions League final or in his back
garden."
Valiente agrees. "Those of us who knew him weren't
surprised to see him in the first team at such a young
age, but by the way he adapted to each new stage of his
progression," he says. And Torras adds: "He was
always an unstoppable player and there was never a
formula to stop him."
Some 15 years on, sides in Spain and most members of
Europe's elite will know all about that. He was
unstoppable then, he is unstoppable now, and he has
changed the history of Barcelona. The legend continues.
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