Visca Barça 1.3: Messidependence

Visca Barça is a weekly column here at Forza Futbol where we tap into what´s happening at FC Barcelona, the player´s of the week, the quotes of the week and most importantly the week´s top stories.

At first this started out as a book review, an exploration of the book by Luca Caoili: Messi: The Inside Story of the Boy Who Became a Legend, but the focus was too narrow and the book suffers from the same problem that any biography or autobiography suffers from when the subject is so young: perspective.

There is a lot of information and some of it is worthwhile, certainly his life in Argentina as a child is something that is barely given any coverage in the English press. It is as if the kid magically materialized fully formed as a youth-team product at La Masia and that couldn't be further from the truth. He was certainly talented, and he was touched by genius with an uncanny affinity for the ball, but as he grew he learned how to function with others, both on the pitch and as a person. He grew into his talent and he built for himself a place where his teammates were just as important as his own talent or the public's expectations. It's what makes him our greatest player, but we need perspective and honestly we aren't there yet with either Messi's story or where his story fits in the tapestry of other's footballing achievements.

Maybe the shadow of Diego Maradona is too large over any Argentine player coming through the pampas. There's the obvious legacy of small, compact play-makers who play close to the ground, but so many youngsters have been forced to take on an even larger burden, that assumed Maradona persona, a giant of football, the genius icon who not only led the albiceleste to World Cup glory, but whose out-sized personality fit in a lineage with the other flawed Argentines with names like Eva, Diego and El Che. Maybe that´s the book that awaits us in the future, where we place Messi after his career is over and we can see how much he accomplished as a player and how much he gave back to his people, but this one is not that book.

It covers the classic signposts of a very short career so far: moving to Barcelona, receiving the growth hormone therapy, debuting for the first team and then a series of goals both memorable and not so memorable; it reads like a kids adventure novel by the way. If you´ve paid any attention over the last 8 years, you´d have read all of it before, except told by the first hand-accounts of people who were there: Rijkaard, Guardiola, Basile, and even Maradona himself. There are gems by the way. A clear picture of Don Diego appears giving the same treatment to Messi what he himself received from a territorially unimpressed Pelé two decades earlier, but even that is diffused by Leo himself.

If anything, the story hinges on a quiet kid who left South America early on to seek his fortune in Europe and against the odds he has. The one thing I won´t compare him to is to Diego even though practically everyone in the book does. There´s this section that covers Lionel being injured for a time and it covers the ¨secret¨ per se of his talent, the ability to instantaneously warp past an opponent with the ball stuck to his foot, and ease the ball comfortably into the net. One of the interviews mentions that in exercising his talent, Messi isn´t choosing his opportunities like Diego did- varying his approach. He´s always on at a million miles an hour. At that rate he says his body will fail him sooner rather than later. I scoffed at first but then I remembered the case of Ronaldo, the Brasilian Ronaldo, whose game early on functioned at that same rate of attack that Messi´s does. Yes, I know that most people think of him as the tubby ball of fun that camped out in front of the opponent´s goal at the Bernabeu just a few years ago, but in his prime, before the knee injuries he suffered in Italy, he was the most explosive footballer I had ever seen; think of the PSV Ronaldo or the one pictured here at the Camp Nou instead. With age his game changed, he slowed, and his lifestyle brought on the inevitable decline sooner rather than later. I hope it doesn´t end that way for Leo. It shouldn´t but nothing is forever.

People talk about Barcelona´s dependence on Lionel Messi, but I would say that to the neutral even (let alone the culé), our dependence as fans of the beautiful game and its best players is even greater. I´ll enjoy watching him while I still can.