ROSARIO, Argentina (AP) — The breeze off the Paraná River brings a chill to the afternoon in Rosario. As the kids warm up, the clatter of their tiny cleats intensifies until the referee signals for the players to enter the pitch.
They’re wearing the orange and white-striped jersey of Abanderado Grandoli, the neighborhood club where Lionel Messi’s soccer journey started 34 years ago. From a nearby building, a mural of a young Messi watches over the children
as they chase the ball.
Just maybe, years from now, one of them will be compared to Rosario’s most famous son, arguably the best soccer player of all time.
“I watched him when I was little and it made me want to play like him,” said Julián Silvera, an 11-year-old who particularly admires Messi's free kicks.
The final chapter of Messi’s glorious soccer career has yet to be written – in a few weeks, the 38-year-old Inter Miami captain is expected to play in his sixth World Cup for Argentina, though he hasn’t officially confirmed it. That story began here, in a lower-middle-class district of Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city and an industrial hub that was also the birth place of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
It was in 1992 when his maternal grandmother, Celia, took 5-year-old Lionel to watch his older brother, Matías, play for Grandoli in one of Rosario’s youth leagues.
How Messi ended up on the pitch has become part of the club’s lore: One player was missing for a seven-a-side match for 6-year-olds, and Celia saw an opportunity for her tiny but gifted grandson. She argued with the coach, Salvador Aparicio, to put him on.
“Aparicio didn’t want him to because he was too young for the age group,” Ezequiel Assales, who was Messi’s teammate at Grandoli in those early years, told The Associated Press. “The grandmother insisted. They put him on, and everyone said, ‘What a player!’ That’s how it all started.”
According to Spanish journalist Guillem Balagué, author of the only authorized biography of Messi, the coach thought the game would be too rough for the little boy, who already was showing signs of the growth impediment for which he would later seek treatment. He decided to put Messi on the right wing, where he could be close to his grandmother.
“If you see him cry or get scared, take him out,” Aparicio told the woman, according to Balagué’s account.
Aparicio, who died in 2008, described in several interviews how Messi failed to control the ball the first time it came his way. But the next play, he received it with his left foot and dribbled past a series of opponents. A legend was born.
In Argentina, so-called “baby fútbol” clubs serve as training grounds for kids between the ages of 4 and 13.
Unlike youth teams for teenagers, they don’t receive a cut of the transfer fees when players change clubs later in their careers. Those so-called solidarity payments are an important source of income for clubs around the world that developed talented players before they turned professional.
Instead, they depend on monthly fees paid by families and ticket sales on match days. In Grandoli’s case, the club has been able to leverage Messi's fame to generate additional income from advertising for energy drink and beer brands.
In the club’s small locker room, a display case with trophies and photographs of Messi’s youth team chronicles the left-footed maestro’s time at the club and serves as inspiration for the hundred or so children who train there.
“He was a different kind of player; you just had to give him the ball and support him. You could already see he had a future,” recalled Assales, who now has two sons playing for the club. “He’d leave three or four players in his wake. We’d wait for the rebound, or he’d finish the goal.”
As the goals added up, growing numbers of spectators came to the pitch on weekends to watch the “new Maradona,” born a year after Argentine soccer icon Diego Maradona lifted the World Cup trophy in 1986.
“What everyone else got to see as an adult, we were lucky enough to see from the very beginning. He was fantastic,” said David Treves, one of Grandoli’s coaches and its president for 17 years until 2023.
“He had incredible speed and ball control. Back then, the pitch was nothing special, just dirt. His technical skills made his physical limitations invisible,” Treves said.
At 7, Messi moved to Newell’s Old Boys, one of the most popular clubs in Rosario. When the club declined to finance treatment for his growth hormone deficiency, which was threatening his career, the Messi family moved to Spain where soccer giant Barcelona welcomed the 13-year-old prodigy to its academy and offered to pay his medical bills.
During his trophy-laden career with Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and now Inter Miami, Messi has never returned to Grandoli. But some of his gestures hark back to his beginnings there.
Messi points to the sky with his index finger during goal celebrations as a tribute to his grandmother, who died in 1998 and whom he gives credit for pushing him to start playing soccer.
After winning the World Cup with Argentina in Qatar in 2022, Messi posted a heartfelt message on social media: “From Grandoli to the Qatar World Cup, almost 30 years have passed. Nearly three decades in which the ball has given me many joys and also some sorrows. I always dreamed of being a World Champion and I didn’t want to stop trying.”
The message was not lost on his childhood club. The phrase “From Grandoli to the Qatar World Cup,” is written on the jerseys of the kids playing soccer on a brisk afternoon in May.
The referee blows the final whistle. The children rush off the field toward the club’s snack bar, drawn by the smell of french fries and chicken cutlet sandwiches.
With the World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada fast approaching, the Grandoli youth players — like the rest of Argentina — are counting on Messi to be there, leading the defending world champions one last time.
“There will never be anyone like him,” said 11-year-old Valentín Enríquez. “I feel sad because the best player on the national team is leaving.”
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AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup
