Free Messi by Guillem Balagué

For her, football was where her grandchildren played. And for the grandchildren, life revolved around their grandmother, a definitive point of reference for this matriarchal unit of Italian origin in which mutual respect and family support formed the cornerstone. If Leo is asked to define some of the best moments of his life, his illuminating answer will be ‘the birth of each one of my nephews’. That was asked, mind you, before the birth of his own son.
    Leo and his grandmother walked from home to Grandoli and back again, and when he started school Grandma would collect him there at five o’clock in the afternoon, they would have a refreshing drink, and then, along with Matías, go off to training. ‘The fact is that it was a beautiful period in our lives, we really enjoyed Leo because as a kid he was already showing what he was made of.My grandmother died later, but everything started with her,’ says Matías Messi.
    ‘Pass it to Lionel, pass it to the little feller. He can score goals,’ she would shout. Grandma knew about football.
    And because of her roots – she had more Latin blood in her than the others – she was less able to control her emotions, showing her hand more often than not. Like every club in the world Grandoli has its eternal rivals, opponents who go back to the beginning of time; sometimes it seems even earlier. These are the games that they just cannot lose. Playing Alice was one of those. Hard, physical encounters that would sometimes end up with fathers exchanging words and the occasional slap. At one of these matches that got out of hand, Celia struck one of the Alice supporters over the head with a bottle. ‘Stop messing around,’ she screeched. No great harm was caused. That day, needless to say, Grandoli won.
    Shortly afterwards, it was discovered that Celia had Alzheimer’s.
    The journalist Toni Frieros reveals this in his early biography of Messi, Messi: El Tesoro del Barça (‘Messi: The Treasure of Barcelona’): ‘Celia gradually began to lose her memory, to have speech difficulties and to confuse people, so for the last months of her life the family watched helplessly as her vitality was slowly consumed by a degenerative and incurable disease. For Leo, it was like losing a part of himself.’
    It was like watching a living death.
    Leo’s grandmother died on 4 May 1998, shortly before his eleventh birthday.
    Celia never saw him play at the top or at Barcelona.
    ‘For everyone it was a huge loss and all of us without exception felt such great pain. To this day I still get emotional remembering Leo grabbing onto the coffin, weeping uncontrollably,’ recalls his Aunt Marcela.
    ‘It was a dreadful blow,’ says Leo now.
    Since then, when he celebrates every goal Messi looks to the sky and points to the heavens. ‘I think a lot about her and I dedicate my goals to her. I would like her to be here but she left before she could see me triumph. This is what makes me most angry,’ he confessed to El Mundo Deportivo in 2009.
    ‘The poor woman, she never saw him triumph but she was thecatalyst,’ says Alberto Arellano, father of Cintia and neighbour of the Messis.
    ‘When he was forging his career, he always told me that at night he spoke to his grandmother and asked for her help,’ remembers Leo’s mother. ‘It’s a shame that today she cannot see him. Who knows whether from up there or from wherever she may be, she can see what he has become and is happy for the grandson she loved so much.’
    Leo believes in God, even though he is not a practising Christian, like all the other Messis. But he owes gratitude to his grandmother for accompanying him in the formative years of his life. And because, surely, she is still with him. The only time he didn’t raise his fingers first in salute to his grandmother after scoring was just after his son Thiago was born, when a thumb went into his mouth. But after that one instance he would once again acknowledge Celia in the usual