In much of Argentina, where Lionel Messi lived until he was 13, native speakers replace the “y” sound with a “sh” sound. Yo, the personal pronoun for “I,” becomes “sho,” and calle, which other Spanish speakers would pronounce “ka-yay,” becomes “ka-shey.” The sound gives Argentine Spanish a slurry softness that resembles aspects of the Portuguese spoken in Brazil. More important to this story, that “sh,” and the fact that Messi has retained it all his life, has at times been the sole lifeline between the greatest soccer player in the world and the country he plays for.

Over the past nine years, Messi has led F.C. Barcelona to national and international titles while breaking individual records in ways that seem otherworldly. In 2012, he scored 91 goals in 69 games — a ridiculous number — for club and country, and he has been chosen by FIFA, soccer’s governing body, as the best player in the world an unprecedented four of the last five years. He is something of a freak, a blazing left-footer whose legs and spatial intuition operate at electrifying speed, and his performances in Europe have already put him, at age 26, on the short list of the greatest players ever.

And yet, for all of that, Messi has never won widespread devotion in Argentina. The main resistance to him, beyond his uneven play for the national team thus far, is that he isn’t Argentine enough.

Last month, I spent time in Buenos Aires and in Rosario, Messi’s hometown, where I heard versions of this critique nearly everywhere I went, from cabdrivers to coaches to professional commentators: Messi left Argentina too soon; he didn’t come up through the club ranks and play for a first-division side in Argentina, as other heroes like Diego Maradona and Carlos Tévez have done; he hasn’t sung along with the national anthem before games; he has no passion, no personality; he doesn’t “feel the shirt” of the national team the way other players do. The attacks have at times been so personal that Messi has reportedly considered quitting the national side. But the one thing nobody has ever denied is that when he speaks, Messi still sounds as if he’s from Rosario, and this small fact has kept the fragile connection alive. An Argentine soccer journalist, Martin Mazur, said: “The greatest gift for Messi during these years is that he never lost the Argentine accent. You can’t imagine what it would have been for him if he hadn’t had it. They probably would have killed him.”

Exiting customs at Ezeiza International Airport, just outside Buenos Aires, you are greeted by Messi’s image, in an advertisement covering the glass doors that separate weary travelers from the scrum on the other side. Along the highway into town, he is there again, in an ad for an Argentine electronics manufacturer, and in downtown Buenos Aires, several enormous billboards bear his likeness. As a viable commercial entity, Messi is everywhere.

And he is also nowhere. All it took was a single mangled pidgin Spanish description of why I had come — to try to understand what Messi means to Argentina — to get the kind man driving my cab to tell a different story. “We’ve always liked how Messi plays,” the driver, Dario Torrisi, told me, “but we don’t know who he is.” Everybody throughout the Americas loves Diego Maradona, Torrisi said, but “it’s not the same for Messi.”


In Argentina, you cannot escape this comparison. Maradona is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest players in history; he had a successful club career in Europe, but, most important, he led the Argentines to a World Cup victory in 1986. The two goals he scored against England in the quarterfinals are among the most famous in the history of the sport, for very different reasons. The first was an illegal handball, the second a solo run from midfield that has become canonical as one of the greatest individual efforts in soccer. The high and the low, inextricable: This is Maradona, and to some extent Argentina, too. Maradona is bombastic, larger than life, loves to party, got heavily into drugs, makes questionable decisions and is always boiling over about something and making headlines. Argentines love him, even if they get weary of him. The taciturn Messi loses that competition before it starts.

Some think Messi has already outdone Maradona on the field — he has scored more goals at the club level, at a much younger age — while others think he won’t be Maradona’s equal even if he brings home the cup this year. The writer Martín Caparrós told me, “Maradona had the enormous advantage that he didn’t have to be like anyone else, and Messi has to be like Maradona all the time.”

As a small boy, Messi was a fussy eater. His favorite dish has always been the milanesa a la napolitana — a breaded beef cutlet with tomato sauce and melted cheese — that his mother cooked for him several days a week, but otherwise it could be hard to get him to eat. One of his early youth coaches in Rosario, a man named Carlos Marconi, discovered that Messi also enjoyed alfajores, a kind of chocolate cookie. According to an old TV interview with Marconi, they struck a deal: a cookie for each goal. The trouble was that Messi routinely scored four or five goals a game for his club, Newell’s Old Boys, and so, to motivate him, Marconi had to make it harder. Messi was tiny at the time, the best player on the field with the ball at his feet but shorter than everybody else by a long shot. To push him, Marconi announced a new regime: two alfajores for every goal Messi scored with his head. The next game, Messi dribbled through the entire opposing team, including the goalkeeper, then stopped at the goal line to flick the ball up into the air with his foot so that he could head it into the empty net. When he found Marconi’s eye in the stands, Messi smiled and held up two fingers.

There are all kinds of stories like this about little Leo in Rosario, like the time he was locked in the bathroom for the first half of a game, broke his way out and then netted three goals in the second half for the win. The stories about the adult Messi aren’t actually that different — an epic solo goal against the Spanish team Getafe when he was 19, the miracle problem-solving, touch and change of direction in tight space against Atlético Bilbao last year, which reduced the famed commentator Ray Hudson to involuntary screams and an ill-considered attempt at Spanish. (Hudson is celebrated for his verbal flights, and Messi is his greatest muse. Over the phone, he described Messi as “a brilliant stardust footballer” and “a surgeon’s scalpel that would cut you to pieces in the most merciless way.”)
From a technical perspective, Messi’s greatest asset is his ability to run at speed with the ball stuck to his left foot — la pelota atada, as one Argentine described it. That dominion over the ball, combined with a furious top speed that he seems to summon from a dead stop, creates time and space that even other elite players can never hope to enjoy. When he’s on form, there is an inevitability to his play that transcends everything around him, like something foretold. The whole stadium knows he’s going to go to his left, and yet nobody can stop him. (To say nothing of the calmness and coolness and only-what’s-necessary technique with which Messi deposits the ball into the net, once it’s time for that.)

But the real root of Messi’s genius is that he’s still the boy who made the goals-for-cookies deal. He plays like a boy: instinctive, free, with an acceptance of his own ability that would be arrogant if it weren’t so undeniable. When he first came to Barcelona as a 13-year-old, he was already himself. In training, he would score epic solo dribbling goals and then walk back as if nothing happened, to the astonishment of his new coaches. He expected such things, having never known any other way. Asked many years later whether he considered himself more Argentine or Spanish in terms of his style — a significant question, considering that legally he could have played for either national team — Messi said, “Argentine, because despite the fact that I have grown here and learned a lot in Spain, I never changed the way that I play, the way I have done since I was very small.”

The city of Rosario is 180 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, tucked into a bend in the Rio Paraná. It is the birthplace of Che Guevara, the site of the first raising of the Argentine flag in 1812 and, according to an informal and often unsolicited survey of urban Argentine males, the prime breeding ground for Argentina’s most beautiful women. It was sunnier in Rosario, and warmer; a different feeling right away.

Driving in, Jonathan Gilbert — an excellent journalist and my translator and savior in Argentina — pointed out the yellow-and-blue colors of Rosario Central, the local rival of Newell’s Old Boys, painted on the concrete traffic barriers along the highway. There are two premier-division teams in Rosario, and you’re for one or the other. We stopped at a restaurant called Comedor Central, run by a Central fan named Juan Yacob, who took on an expression of great physical bereavement when asked to speak about Messi. “Messi’s footballing life was developed in Europe,” Yacob said, with a dismissive sniff. The only story he wanted to tell was that at one point over the last year, an image of Messi in the Argentine national uniform had come onto the big screen in the Central stadium, and the fans were so annoyed that they booed until it came down. “No one can doubt his ability,” Yacob said. “But with Messi, you’re not going to sell anything to a Central fan.”

The idea that club allegiance so far surpasses allegiance to the national team surprised me, though maybe it shouldn’t have. In my American ignorance, I tend to view the best national soccer teams as monoliths, connected to one another and to the game in ways that Americans can’t understand or replicate. But in reality they’re just like us, federated and disparate, coming together for a brief period of time and, under immense scrutiny, trying to make it all work. Old loyalties die hard, and new ones require a kind of heroism that Messi hasn’t yet supplied.

Even at the youth training ground of Newell’s, Messi’s old club and the place where he used to terrorize young prepubescents, the comments about him were pretty lukewarm. A couple of dads watching an evening practice said that they liked Messi well enough and felt some pride that he was from Rosario, but that they would rather see Newell’s win the first division than the national team bring home the cup. (The journalist Martin Mazur cautioned me not to take these claims too seriously. “That’s what they say now,” he said, “but just wait until the World Cup comes, and that’ll be the only thing they care about.” )

The treatments were expensive, and for two years they were covered by his father Jorge’s job at a steel plant outside Rosario. When that coverage began to change, the Messis asked Newell’s for help, a request to which the club agreed. Accounts of what happened next differ, but after several months the Messis began to look for other ways to pay for the treatments. When a family friend with a contact at the rich and storied F.C. Barcelona offered to set up a tryout, the family went for it. Charly Rexach, the technical director at Barcelona at the time, happened to be gone, at the 2000 Olympics in Australia, when the Messis arrived. Messi worked out with the club for nearly two weeks, but it was Rexach’s final decision that the family awaited. As the story goes, upon returning to the training facility, Rexach asked the staff to put Messi on a field with older, taller boys. In the time it took him to walk three-quarters of the way around the field, Rexach decided that they would sign Messi, medical bills and all. Leo and his father soon moved to Barcelona, where Messi essentially went pro at 13. He would go to school, then to training at La Masia, F.C. Barcelona’s famed youth academy, come home, give himself a growth-hormone injection and then sometimes lock himself in his room so his father wouldn’t see him crying from loneliness. He didn’t come from the slums. But to say that he hasn’t suffered isn’t true.

Messi is still suffering, in his way. For years it was because of his underwhelming performance with the national team and the grief that came with it. But since the lows of the Copa América in the summer of 2011, when Messi was openly jeered by Argentine fans after the team was bounced in the quarterfinals, he has been playing better for his country. The tide turned in a World Cup qualifier against Colombia in November 2011, and since then the goals have finally started to come — including a hat trick against Brazil in a 4-3 Argentina victory the next year. (Brazil and Argentina could meet in the finals in Rio.) There is a sense that the new coach, Alejandro Sabella, has finally figured out how to build a team around Messi.

Oddly enough, the suffering this year has mostly been at Barcelona, where Messi hasn’t been his best. For a club accustomed to winning titles, this past season has been a relative disaster. Messi’s friend and former coach at Barcelona, Tito Vilanova, died from throat cancer; Messi was hurt early in the year, sat out two months and seemed never fully to recover; Barcelona added the Brazilian star Neymar in a messy process that distracted attention from play on the field; and the team did poorly in national and international competitions, exiting the Champions League in the quarterfinals and losing the Liga title to Atlético Madrid on the very last day of the season. In that game, as in several others over the past few months, Messi looked uncharacteristically lost. (Keep in mind that he still played better than just about everybody else on the planet, scoring 41 goals in 44 games for Barcelona, but Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon D’Or — the player of the year award — for 2013, and it was deserved.)

 “Right now, Messi doesn’t feel good on the ball,” Marcelo Sottile, a writer for the soccer magazine Olé and author of a book about Messi, told me. “It’s like he’s tied up.” Nobody really knows why. Is he still hurt? Was he dissatisfied with his contract with Barcelona, which he recently renegotiated for the staggering net sum of more than $27 million a year? Did the birth of his son distract him? In Argentina, there has been a furtive hope that he’s simply saving himself for the World Cup. “We all hope that he’s a bastard,” Martín Caparrós told me, “betraying all that he held dear [at Barcelona] just in order to be good in the World Cup. Because if not, if he keeps playing like he has played the last two months, we’re gone.”

Ray Hudson told me: “The World Cup is coming at a time when there’s a question mark, suddenly and strangely, about one of the greatest footballers the game has ever seen. This is the last thing he needs now, after the year he’s had. And yet the weight of his country is on him. And he isn’t just going to a World Cup. He’s going to a World Cup in Brazil! As an Argentina player! That Argentina shirt that he’s worn, it’s always been heavy. This time it weighs 10 tons.”

And Messi is expected to represent that shirt without any real backing at home. As Sottile put it, pounding his hand on the conference table at Olé's offices in Buenos Aires, “No tiene hinchada,” meaning “he has no fan base,” no homegrown support. “There’s less room for forgiveness for Messi,” Sottile said. They’ve built the team around him, all hopes are pinned on him and yet nobody outside his teammates has his back. Leading your team to a World Cup championship is hard enough to do in a team game, even when everybody in your country loves you. The bar for Messi is so high — it’s not just if Argentina wins, but how — that it’s basically impossible for him to meet it.

While we were in Rosario, we made the pilgrimage to the place where Messi was born, 525 Estado de Israel, a house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Messi doesn’t live there anymore — apparently nobody does — but his family still owns it, and it clearly means something to him. Next door, we ran into a neighbor who has lived on Messi’s street for more than 40 years. When we asked if Messi was always out in the street chasing a ball around, he held his hand at his waist to indicate Messi’s height and then gave us a Bronx cheer to signal the general inanity of our question. Of course he was. For some reason, that one short moment made Messi’s existence feel real in a way that we hadn’t yet experienced in Argentina. He lived here, he played in these streets before anybody knew who he was. Now it has become this complicated psychological puzzle: Argentina needs him, he needs Argentina and the debts seem unsatisfiable. Messi rarely says anything revealing, but for an instant we could feel him here, this tiny boy with a talent so big it could fly him across the ocean at the vulnerable age of 13. This boy who rejected the advances of Spain’s national team to choose Argentina, the land of his birth, only to find that he could never really come home.

There are always surprise stories at the World Cup, but Argentina has an easy draw in the group stage and should make the round of 16 without trouble. Barring injury, Messi will have his moment. On the field, he handles adversity well. When he gets hit, he gets back up, and he rarely makes a show of it; in a game sometimes disdained for operatic dives and melodramatic appeals to the referee, Messi rarely avails himself of either. Often, during his long arcing runs toward the goal, defenders come at him with the clear intention of cutting his legs out from under him, only to have the attempt somehow absorbed by the low-slung churn of Messi’s stride. He doesn’t want the foul to be called, because he is feeling it and wants to keep going. At times, he seems almost to grow new legs in midair.

Off the field, he’s not as nimble or resilient. Some of the criticism clearly gets to him. When he arrived home to begin training for the World Cup in May, he couldn’t make it out of the airport before people started questioning his knowledge of Argentina. He has always preferred to let his play speak for him, and this month may be his best and final chance to show the skeptics at home that he is worthy of the shirt. His place in history depends on it. “Here, we justify or condemn based on whether the ball went into the net or not,” the writer Eduardo Sacheri told me. “Messi is incognito, incognito until the result speaks.”

Source: New York Times

BDST: 1845 HRS, JUNE 07, 2014