He's the little man with the biggest possible reputation. With the FIFA World Cup beginning tomorrow, Simon Kuper asks whether Lionel Messi will flourish in South Africa.
Opinions differ as to who first put Leo Messi on a football field. His dad says the boy’s grandma forced Don Salvador Ricardo Aparicio, a coach at small club Grandoli in the Argentinian city of Rosario, to let the tiny five-year-old play with his older brothers. Aparicio’s version was that he only had 10 players and, spotting the titch kicking a ball against a wall, asked Messi’s mum: “Will you lend him to me?”
Opinions converge on what happened next. Messi’s mum dressed him in the team’s kit. The first ball came to his right foot, but nothing happened. Then a ball fell to his left. “He came out dribbling as if he’d played all his life,” ‘Apa’ later recalled.
A foreigner witnessing the moment in the fading river town of Rosario, birthplace of Che Guevara – a town that time forgot – might have gasped. Argentinians didn’t. They recognised Messi at once: he was the pibe, the ‘boy’ they’d been waiting for.
Usually, the main suspense before a World Cup concerns who will win it. This year, people are just as eager to know whether we will see the full Messi in action in South Africa.
If he can match some of the moments he has given us with Barcelona, but in football’s ultimate setting – well, the game doesn’t get better than that. This World Cup is, in large part, about Messi. But to understand him, you have to understand his Argentinian footballing ancestry.
It was the sociologist Eduardo Archetti who explained the pibe to me, one day in Buenos Aires in 2000. He is a figure, Archetti said, who Argentinian football fans have had in their heads at least since the 1920s. He learns his football on the potrero, a bumpy, sloping surface, where only those who can dribble can keep the ball. He plays the creative game that Argentinians call la nuestra or “ours” – a style that they say comes from a child’s imagination.
'When Maradona came along, Argentinian football fans had been expecting him'
In 1928, the journalist Borocotó proposed in the great Buenos Aires football magazine El Grafico that Argentina build a monument in “any walkway” to the inventor of dribbling. The statue, Borocotó wrote, would depict: “a pibe with a dirty face, a mane of hair rebelling against the comb; with intelligent, roving, trickster and persuasive eyes and a sparkling gaze that seem to hint at a picaresque laugh not quite managing to form on his mouth... a mouth full of small teeth that might be worn down through eating ‘yesterday’s bread’.”
You might recognise the description. Indeed, when Maradona came along years later, Argentinian football fans had been expecting him. A tango, El Sueño Del Pibe [Dream Of The Boy] had been written about him in 1943. In the song, which Maradona has sung before in public, a young pibe likens himself to former legends:
Dearest Mamita,
I will earn money,
I will be a Baldonedo,
A Martino, a Boyé
And the song ends with the pibe’s dream:
He took the ball, serene in his action
Ran past everybody to the keeper
And with a firm shot he became the scorer
The song anticipates not just Maradona’s great goal (generally referred to as the “Goal of the Century”) against England in 1986, but England’s revenge by little 18-year-old Michael Owen in 1998 (Argentinians nodded sadly and said, “the English have found a pibe”), as well as many of Messi’s goals.
The point is that, to their compatriots, Maradona and Messi are quintessentially Argentinian. A football fan Archetti interviewed in the late 1990s told him: “Now our problem is that we have had Maradona, and we will always expect to get another one.” The fan himself knew the expectation was absurd, but nevertheless, he had it…
Read more of Simon Kuper’s article on how the sublime Messi has come to live up to those expectations on the Red Bulletin website, where you can download the Print 2.0 and PDF versions of the latest June 2010 issue of the magazine
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