The first time Rodolfo Borrell needed to test the new Argentine kid at La Masia, he put Cesc Fabregas on him. Three one-vs-ones. Three times, Fabregas was torn apart. Victor Vazquez watched from the side and told himself: I am not going to forget that name.
The name was Lionel Messi. He was 13.
Vazquez — MLS Cup winner with Toronto FC in 2017, a product of the same legendary Barca generation — has opened up about those years in Barcelona's academy, and what he describes is a long way from the polished mythology that tends to surround Messi's rise. This was a shy, introverted kid who barely spoke, changed in the corner of the dressing room, and arrived in a city where he knew absolutely no one.
Nothing came easy
The bureaucratic mess that stopped Messi playing competitive matches for his first five months in Barcelona. The broken fibula — a fractured left leg — suffered in just his second week of action after those paperwork issues were finally resolved. A return to Argentina. Real uncertainty over whether he'd ever come back.
And then, quietly running alongside all of it: nightly growth hormone injections, administered by his father or a club doctor at their apartment on Gran Via de Carles III. Messi missed training sessions because the injections left him dizzy. Some mornings he couldn't make school. Barcelona financed the treatment, but the physical toll was his alone to carry.
"What Messi had to go through was far from easy," Vazquez writes. That's an understatement from someone who saw it at close range.
The next day, Borrell ran the same drill again — this time with Gerard Pique as the defender. Same result. By the end of that trial week, the club had seen enough. Messi wasn't going back to Argentina. Not yet, anyway.
Five teams in one season
When Messi did fully hit his stride, the acceleration through Barcelona's system was absurd. In the 2003-04 campaign, aged 16, he played for five different Barca sides — Juvenil B, Juvenil A, Barca C, Barca B, and the first team in an unofficial friendly against Porto. Nobody has done it since. Barca C eventually moved him up not because he wasn't scoring — he was — but because veteran opponents in the fourth tier were targeting him physically week after week. A division above, the football was more technical. Safer, in a sense, for a teenager they clearly weren't going to let get broken again.
The first team brought its own adjustments. Muscular injuries. A strict diet. No fizzy drinks — something Messi apparently loved. The margins at the top are unforgiving even when the talent is generational.
What Vazquez keeps coming back to, though, isn't the football. It's the loyalty. No matter how many levels Messi had leapfrogged above his original age group, he kept showing up to watch them play. Standing by the corner flag. Cheering from the stands. Going bowling at Pedralbes. Walking around L'illa Diagonal like they were still 13-year-olds killing time before a 5:30pm training session.
Vazquez got one last look at all of it in 2023. Toronto FC, his final MLS season, away at Inter Miami. They lost 4-0. He walked onto the pitch alongside Messi and had goosebumps doing it. "I could see the joy of that kid in his eyes," he writes.
The kid who broke his leg at 15, injected hormones every night, and got torn apart in La Masia drills — first as the one doing the tearing.
