adminBARCELONA. — Charly Rexach grins a familiar grin. “I’ll go down in Barcelona’s history,” he says. Rexach joined Barcelona at the age of 12 and he has spent almost half a century there, on and off. He played for the first team for 17 years and has been coach, assistant coach, technical director and presidential adviser.
But that’s not why he says he will go down in history.
Rexach says he will go down in Barcelona’s history because one day he signed Lionel Messi – on a serviette. Horacio Gaggioli still has the serviette hidden away somewhere, although there have been calls to place it in Barcelona’s museum.
On Sunday, 17 September 2000, Gaggioli was waiting for Messi at El Prat airport in Barcelona. Messi, aged 13, was flying across the Atlantic with his father, Jorge, and Fabián Soldini, the player’s agent and Gaggioli’s partner.
Together with Josep Maria Minguella, they had arranged for Messi to have a trial at Barcelona.
Minguella had told Rexach, Barcelona’s technical director, that this kid was like Diego Maradona.
Minguella knew: he was the one who had brought Maradona to Barcelona 20 years earlier.
They put Messi up in the Hotel Plaza, at the foot of Montjuïc, where escalators head up the hill to the Olympic stadium.
The following day, Messi trained with the Barcelona youth team, Cesc Fàbregas and Gerard Piqué among them.
Messi did not reach five feet and he changed in silence.
In the dressing room, they looked at him and could not believe how small he was; on the pitch, they looked at him and couldn’t believe how good he was.
“We have to sign this kid right now. After two minutes, I knew,” Rexach says.
Rexach starts to explain how Messi came to find the perfect environment at Barcelona; how it all seems so natural these days.
But back then, it was not so simple.
Joan Gaspart had become president that summer, Luís Figo had left for Real Madrid, and Barcelona were in crisis.
And as for Messi, he was special, sure, a player they thought would make it to the first team.
But in 2000, you didn’t just sign a 13-year-old and certainly not a 13-year-old from Argentina.
They had to find work for his father. They had to pay for the hormone treatment that, painfully, Messi injected into his legs every day.
That was not cheap at almost $1,000 a month.
And the £40,000 they agreed to pay Jorge Messi annually was a lot of money; some thought it too much for a player so young about whom there could be no guarantees.
A foreigner, Messi could not play with the Juvenil A team and was initially able to play only in Catalan competition.
In the dressing room, they often referred to him as el mudo, the mute one.
Messi moved into the Hotel Rallye and from there to a flat on the Gran Vía de Carlos III with his family.
Rexach pulled out a serviette from the little plastic holder and started scribbling: “I, Charly Rexach, in my capacity as technical secretary for FC Barcelona, and despite the existence of some opinions against it, commit to signing Lionel Messi as long as the conditions agreed are met.”
The line that stands out is “opinions against it”; the line that reveals that some at the club were not convinced.
There had been arguments at boardroom level.
For now, he was a long way from the first team and a kid from Argentina was not the priority. But that very night the club’s director general laid out the agreement again – officially this time, on proper paper this time. And, as Gaspart insists, irritated at the popular and unfair image of him as an obstacle to Messi joining, the club he presided over did finally commit to signing the player who a decade later this week stands on the verge of becoming the all-time leading scorer in La Liga, aged only 27.
His competitive debut came on 16 October 2004, a decade ago against Espanyol at Montjuïc, a stroll up the escalators from the Plaza de España where Messi spent his first night in Barcelona.
He replaced Deco in the 82nd minute of a game that one headline paper described as “not much of a derby”.
Asked about the shirt he wore, he replied: “That’s for my mum, who is back in Argentina,” adding: “I will remember those 10 minutes my whole life.”
Others would not, until now. — Guardian.
Online Reporter