Contents 

Acknowledgements 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 

The Price of Success 15

 Learning to Lose 45

 The Brain Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74 Strenuous Freedom 105 

The Reciprocal Altruist . . . . . . . . . . . .133 A Different River 161

 A Better Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190

 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 219

Chapter One 

The Price of Success

Argentina 2-1 Brazil FIFA World Youth Championship semi-final Tuesday 28 June 2005, Galgenwaard Stadion, Utrecht It is the summer of 2005, and the most talented young footballers on the planet have spent the last few weeks gathered in the Netherlands with dreams of winning the sport’s most prestigious junior tournament: the FIFA World Youth Championship. After 36 games of intense competition, they have been whittled down to just four remaining teams – and one of the semi-finals is being contested between South American neighbours Argentina and Brazil, the protagonists of perhaps international football’s most famous and heated rivalry, whose brightest emerging stars are now going head to head for a place in the final. With just six minutes played, the ball is passed to Argentina’s diminutive number 18, who receives possession slightly right of centre, around 30 yards from goal. His name, the whole world will soon know, is Lionel Messi. An attacking player for Spanish club FC Barcelona with a handful of first-team appearances already under his belt, Messi controls adroitly and looks up. Seeing space to run into, he cuts inside and dribbles towards the penalty area, always keeping the ball on his favoured left foot. Two, three, four little touches, using his body to shield the ball away from the Brazilian defender who is trying to close him down. Then, with the opposition players tracking back towards

their own goal to cover the danger, Messi decides to shoot. From 25 yards, he lets fly. The connection is sugar sweet and the ball rockets, without a trace of swerve or dip, straight into the top right corner, leaving Brazilian goalkeeper and captain Renan groping hopelessly at thin air. ‘Look at where he’s put that ball!’ gushes the Argentine television commentator in admiring tones. ‘Unstoppable for all the goalkeepers in Brazil’s history!’ It is certainly a sensational strike, even drawing applause from some of the Brazilian fans inside the stadium in Utrecht. But it is not enough to seal victory and progression to the final, because Brazil bounce back to level the game with 15 minutes remaining through a set-piece header from midfielder Renato. 1-1. With the clock winding down, extra time is looking inevitable. Deep inside stoppage time, however, Argentina have one more chance to attack as the ball goes out of play for a throw-in, midway inside Brazil’s half. Swiftly, midfielder Neri Cardozo gathers the ball on the left touchline and hurls it down the line into the path of Messi, who has already started his run into space. Messi gathers the ball on the left flank, level with the edge of the box. He drives towards goal, drops his shoulder to beat a challenge, reaches the byline and cuts back a low cross to the near post. Argentina’s substitute striker Sergio Aguero can’t connect cleanly, but the loose ball drops obligingly to the team’s captain, Pablo Zabaleta, who twists to shoot and sees a deflection wrong-foot Renan, sending the ball bouncing into the back of the net. Victory for Argentina, and a place in the final! And Messi, with a brilliant goal and an assist, is again the hero, just as he had been three days earlier – the day after his 18th birthday – in the quarter-final against a Spain team featuring his former Barcelona youth team-mate Cesc Fabregas and future full internationals David Silva, Juanfran and Fernando Llorente. In that last-eight encounter, with the game tied at one apiece midway through the second half, Messi had delivered a delicately weighted pass to break open the Spanish defence and release Gustavo Oberman, who finished well to make it 2-1. Two minutes later, Messi completed the job himself with a

superb solo strike, receiving the ball on the edge of the penalty area and taking two deft touches to create space for a low shot which he dispatched clinically into the far corner. Even now, though, with Spain and Brazil both defeated and a place in the final assured, there is still work to be done before Argentina can be crowned world youth champions. Next, they have to play Nigeria in the final. Messi, as Argentina’s star turn and most in-form player, will inevitably be at the heart of the Albiceleste’s efforts in the title decider against a Nigeria team which overcame Morocco and hosts the Netherlands to reach the final – and as soon as the game starts he’s in the thick of the action, snapping into a challenge to win theball and spark his team’s first attack after just 15 seconds. Predictably, Messi is the central character when the scoring is opened towards the end of the first half. Argentina launch a counter-attack and Messi receives possession on the halfway line, turning sharply to dribble past one defender, then another, and then advancing into the box before being felled by a reckless challenge from Nigeria centre-back Dele Adeleye. It’s a clear penalty, and Messi picks himself up to convert from the spot, coolly sending goalkeeper Ambruse Vanzekin the wrong way. But Nigeria fight back, levelling the game early in the second half, and tension rises as the game ticks into its final quarter. Then, with 20 minutes to play, comes the next big moment: Aguero breaks into the area from the right and is clumsily fouled by opposing full-back Monday James, giving referee Terje Hauge an easy decision: another penalty. After a long delay during Nigerian protestations, Messi again steps up to take his second spot-kick of the game. And again his aim is true, as he slides the ball into the bottom right corner while Vanzekin dives to the left. 2-1 to Argentina. This time there’s no way back for the African team, and 20 minutes later the final whistle is blown: Argentina are the world champions, and 18-year-old Lionel Messi is the hero. Two goals in the final, a goal and an assist apiece in the semi- and quarter-finals, and individual awards for the best player and leading scorer of the tournament. Superstardom beckons!

Chasing the dream Lionel Messi’s soaring success as a teenager with his national under-20 team that summer in the Netherlands, which he described at the time as the best moment of his life, can be seen as a reward for all the effort he had exerted to get that far. A pat on the back from the gods of football for a job well done, and a tantalising promise that even more exciting and rewarding glories would be forthcoming if he could stay on his current path. That path, though, had not been an easy one for Messi to tread. The story of his childhood is already well known. But it is worth recapping again here, to provide some context for the journey this precocious talent had to travel before he could hold aloft the world’smost prestigious trophy in youth football thatsunny summer day in 2005. As a young boy growing up in a middle-class family in Rosario, a medium-sized city in central Argentina, Lionel Messi (born on 24 June 1987) was like many others of his age: obsessed with football, always with a ball at his feet, and spending every spare second out on the street or in the city’s parks playing games with his cousins and older brothers – Rodrigo and Matias – or with the local club side, Grandoli, who he started to represent at the age of five before then joining the youth ranks of one of the city’s topflight clubs, Newell’s Old Boys. His parents, Jorge and Celia, were happy to support their sons’ shared infatuation with the round ball, and when they were unable to make the journeys to drop off and collect little Leo, Rodrigo and Matias, their much-cherished maternal grandmother – also named Celia – would always step in to ensure the boys could train and play, giving them endless supplies of moral and emotional encouragement every step of the way. All of this is perfectly commonplace. Nothing unusual so far. Boys who love football, show some talent for the game and enjoy the support of a doting grandparent – we’ve heard this one before. But the story for Lionel, who had always been very small, took a sharp deviation away from the norm at the age of ten, when he was diagnosed with a growth deficiency which could only be treated by the daily injection of hormones.

And that treatment was going to be very expensive – around £1,000 a month, more than half of his father Jorge’s salary. Without the treatment, he would continue to grow at an abnormally slow rate, which would also inevitably slow his progress on the football field, allowing opposition players to easily brush him off the ball as they grew into tall and strong teenagers while he remained underdeveloped. If Leo’s dreams of becoming a top-level professional footballer were to be maintained, there was no option: he needed those injections, plain and simple. Initially, Jorge’s social security benefits were able to cover the cost. And for two years, Lionel personally undertook the task himself, uncomplainingly injecting himself everysingle day without fail, alternating on a daily basisfrom left leg to right before he went to bed at night. When he was 12, though, problemsensued because the state welfare system would no longer pay for the treatment. Jorge approached Leo’s club, Newell’s, who made encouraging initial noises but then failed to be forthcoming with the cash. So Lionel travelled 200 miles from his home town of Rosario to the country’s capital, Buenos Aires, for a trial with Argentina’s most successful club, River Plate. They were impressed, but not enough to invest so much money in a player so young. The Messi family was running out of options. If Lionel’s treatment was discontinued, his chances of playing football at a decent level would almost certainly be over – he would just be too small and frail to compete with his peers, and it was highly unlikely that he would ever be able to catch up. Eventually, Jorge, Celia and Lionel decided together that only one course of action was open to them: they would move, all of them, to Europe, where they would find a club with a wellmanaged youth system and the necessary resources to pay for the hormone injections. It was their only choice, especially in the aftermath of a deep economic crisis which had wiped away the disposable incomes of millions of Argentines. So they jumped on a plane to Barcelona, where Lionel won 32 trophies, scored 600 goals and became the greatest player in history.

That simple? No. Far from it. Moving to Barcelona, which sounds so easy when it is reduced to those mere three words, was an extremely painful and complex process on many levels for the whole Messi family. It took months to plan, and meant uprooting four children (the boys had a younger sister, Maria Sol). It meant Jorge leaving his good job as a manager at an engineering firm. It meant Celia leaving her beloved extended family. The whole thing was an enormous risk for such a young boy, even more so because there was no guarantee of a contract, treatment or actually anything at all beyond a short trial waiting at the other end. Through the influential agent Josep Maria Minguella (who had also facilitated DiegoMaradona’s move to the Camp Nou many yearsearlier), the Messi family had been in touch with Barcelona, who were willing to offer a two-week trialafter liking what they saw on the video tapes of Leo in action. But a trial is only a trial, and that is a very long way from a commitment to a contract. Lionel was only just 13 years old, still very small, and in those days signing any players from overseas was extremely unusual even for the biggest of clubs – never mind a tiny youngster who needed expensive medical treatment and a relocation package for his entire family. Once the trial started in the summer of 2000, Lionel was painfully quiet off the pitch – one of his new team-mates, Cesc Fabregas, has since jokingly claimed he initially thought Messi was mute – but he was sensational on it, routinely dribbling past desperate challenge after desperate challenge to score sensational solo goal after sensational solo goal. Very quickly, his new team-mates and coaches were won over by his talent. The decision of actually signing him, though, with all the expensive complications that entailed, was not one that anybody at the Camp Nou was prepared to take. Finally, the club’s technical director Charly Rexach – who missed the first part of Messi’s trial because he was attending the Olympic Games in Sydney – was convinced. After witnessing the little young Argentine score a dazzling goal in a practice game on the artificial pitch in the shadow of the Camp Nou, Rexach made the commitment the family had

been waiting for: Barça would sign Leo, they would pay for his treatment, they would provide accommodation for the family to live, and they would find a job with a decent salary for Jorge. The Messi family, hugely relieved but still very nervous, returned to Argentina to prepare for the permanent move, with the promise from Rexach that everything would be sorted and Lionel would soon be presented with an official contract to formally sign for FC Barcelona. Even then, though, it was far from plain sailing. Rexach was confronted by serious internal disagreement from board members who were staunchly against making such a big financial commitment, breaking all the club’s budgets, to sign an under-sized13-year-old from thousands of miles away on the basis of a brief trial. It was weeks rather than days before Rexach was finally able to push the deal through, giving more sleepless nights to Jorge, who was understandably worried that the Spanish club would eventually refuse to honour the agreement and the family would be left stranded. Things became even harder for Leo when he finally returned to Barcelona in February 2001, five months after his initial trial, to sign officially and begin his new life in Europe. Firstly, as a foreigner, he was only allowed to compete in regional league games and mediocre-quality friendlies, severely limiting his initial playing time. And then, in just the second of those lowkey matches he was allowed to play, he suffered a broken leg – his first serious injury – to force him out of action for the rest of the season. In the meantime, Jorge was still failing to receive the agreed financial support from the club, and Leo’s younger sister Maria Sol was missing Argentina so badly that in the summer she moved back to Rosario with her mother and brothers, leaving Lionel and his father alone in Barcelona, splitting the family in half across the deep wide ocean. Leo, very much a vulnerable young teenager, was very close to his mother and missed her terribly, with their regular phone calls and web chats proving an inadequate replacement for seeing her every day. He cried himself to sleep on many occasions, and when he woke up his daytime routines were complicated by his lack of familiarity with the local Catalan

language, further slowing his integration process and making him miss the familiar comforts of home even more. All things considered, the shy and small Lionel Messi’s transition from the innocent happiness of childhood at home with his friends and family to a supposedly glamorous new life at one of the biggest and best football clubs in the world was anything but easy. Dream move? At times during those early days, it must have felt more like a nightmare. Talent is not enough Brendan Rodgers has spent the last two decades helping talented young footballers develop into successful senior professionals. After his own playing days were cut short by a chronic knee injury at the age of 20, Rodgers sethimself upon a new career path by taking a low-levelcoaching position within the junior ranks at Reading. Over the next ten years he gradually climbed up the club’s academy coaching ladder before, in 2004, he was hand-picked by Jose Mourinho’s assistant Steve Clarke to coach the youth team at Chelsea. He subsequently moved into senior management with Watford, before continuing his career with stints at Reading, Swansea, Liverpool and now Celtic. Even though it’s ten years since he last coached an underage team, Rodgers has never forgotten his roots and has always placed his trust in youth: at Reading, he launched the careers of Gylfi Sigurdsson and Ryan Bertrand; his hat-trick hero in Swansea’s Championship play-off final victory (against, ironically, Reading) was a young player he had previously worked with at Chelsea, Scott Sinclair; Liverpool came agonisingly close to winning the Premier League in 2014 with a pair of players in their early twenties, John Flanagan and Philippe Coutinho, and teenager Raheem Sterling, and Rodgers’ consecutive treblewinning teams at Celtic have prominently featured young stars such as Moussa Dembele, Kieran Tierney, Patrick Roberts and Odsonne Edouard. And after overseeing the progress of several hundred young players during the course of his long coaching career, Rodgers strongly believes in a simple mantra: talent is not enough.

‘The first thing you look for in a young player is talent, and as a boy Messi clearly had natural talent which could be nurtured,’ Rodgers explains in an interview for this book. ‘But there are thousands upon thousands of talents throughout the world of football, and if you can’t dedicate your life to becoming a player, talent alone eventually won’t be enough to make it. To become a successful professional, lots of different qualities are also needed. One of the first and most important is mental resilience.’ Messi, we have seen from the story of his childhood, certainly had that resilience. From the age of ten, he had to spend three years administering himself with hormone injections every single day. When themoney for that treatment ran out, Newell’s Old Boys would not pay. River Plate also rejected him. Barcelona offered him a trial but took months to follow it up with a formal contract. When that eventually came, his entire family had to uproot their lives and move 6,000 miles away from home. He struggled with the local language and was slow to integrate with his new team-mates. His sister hated Spain so much she moved back home, leaving Lionel in a new and strange city with no friends, no mother, no siblings and only his father for company.

How easy it would have been, at any stage during that long and arduous process, for Messi to have simply given up. To have decided that his childish fantasy of becoming a professional footballer, which had every chance of coming to nothing anyway, wasn’t worth the aggravation to himself or his family. To have taken the easy option, refused the injections, stayed in Rosario, carried on playing for Newell’s at whatever level he happened to reach and settled for that. But he did not give up. He took each obstacle and setback in his stride and carried on. When he was too small, when he had to inject himself every day, when he was effectively rejected by two clubs in Argentina, when he was kept waiting formonths by Barcelona, when he was desperately homesick, when he was unable to play for his new club, when he was badly injured, when he didn’t understand the language in his new city, when he was forced to live apart from his mother and his brothers … when all those things happened, he just carried on.

Messi’s mental fortitude during his childhood was really quite unconnected from his ability to play football. Yes, he could dribble the ball past a row of defenders. Yes, he could shoot with deadly accuracy into the bottom corner. But if he hadn’t also been able to handle the severe mental demands of suffering from a hormone deficiency, moving to a new continent and leaving behind his family and friends, those sporting skills would not have taken him very far. In fact, Rodgers believes a wealth of pure talent can even prove to be a drawback for young players when they suddenly become confronted by how competitive the professional game is, and by how much work they will have to undertake if they want to enjoy aprolonged career at the top. ‘Lots of players have natural ability,’ he says. ‘But that natural ability can sometimes even be a difficulty, especially in the modern world of sports science and psychology where everything is analysed and natural advantages can be challenged.

If you’ve got natural ability and that’s always been your greatest strength, it can become a problem because everything has always been easy, but then you reach professional level and it’s not easy at all. To overcome that, you need to have a capacity to learn and grow. How quickly can you learn? If you get a player who is naturally gifted but also has a capacity to learn, develop and grow, then you’ve got real potential. ‘But if you want to be successful, there’s always a price to pay. You have to continually test yourself. You have to make sacrifices. With Messi, at a very young age he was moved into a new culture, away from his family and friends, and he had to devote his life to football in completely newsurroundings. Lots of young players can’t cope with that, and having that ability to persevere when things get difficult is so important.’ Messi was mentally equipped to cope with the various challenges he faced, and that – as much as his brilliance with the ball at his feet – was an absolutely fundamental aspect of his continued development after he made the move to Barcelona. He soon flourished in the youth team at La Masia, the club’s famed football academy, scoring goals at a rapid rate and helping his team, which also included Fabregas and  Gerard Pique, win every trophy available.