I remember the first time I heard this story and always wondered how can one legend know so precisely when he has met the player who will succeed him.
For Lionel Messi, that moment was a phone call he didn't make and almost certainly didn't know about. The man dialing was the best footballer on the planet. The subject was a sixteen-year-old who barely spoke.
This is the story of that call.
The kid at the edge of the circle
Barcelona, the 2003–04 season. Ronaldinho has just arrived and the Camp Nou is remembering how to smile. Frank Rijkaard is in the dugout. And down in the youth teams there is a boy from Rosario whose name keeps drifting up the stairs.
The senior players had done more than hear the rumors. Ronaldinho would later say that he, Deco and the rest of the squad used to go and watch the kid's youth games. In his telling, it was the players themselves who went to Rijkaard and asked him to bring Messi up to train with them.
So he came. In November 2003, at sixteen, he got a run-out in a friendly at Porto, and after that he became a regular face at first-team sessions. He was small. He was silent. He stood where new boys stand, at the edge of things, waiting to be told where to go.
Then somebody gave him the ball.
What happened next has been told by nearly everyone who was there, and they all tell it the same way: with a kind of laughing disbelief. Ludovic Giuly, a Champions League finalist who had seen plenty of prodigies, put it in four words: "He destroyed us all." Grown professionals started kicking him, Giuly admitted, just to avoid being embarrassed by a child. The child said nothing. He got up and asked for the ball again.
The phone call
Ronaldinho watched all of this from close range. And when the session ended, the story goes, he did not wait.
He picked up his phone and called Cristina Cubero, a Barcelona journalist and a close friend. As Guillem Balagué recounts it in his biography Messi, what Ronaldinho told her was this:
"I've just finished training with someone who is going to be better than me."
Cubero didn't believe him. Why would she? Stop and consider who was talking. This was Ronaldinho at the start of his reign, the man who would lift the Ballon d'Or in 2005, the player other players paid to watch. Footballers at that altitude do not usually go looking for their replacements. They certainly don't phone the press to announce them.
And the kid hadn't played a single official minute.
Like all good legends, this one shifts a little depending on who is holding it. Cubero herself has since told it with different scenery: in one version the words come on a preseason tour of China; in another, she is the one who rings Ronaldinho, asking him to look after a shy boy, and he agrees before adding his warning. The room changes. The sentence never does. He is going to be better than me.
A seat at the Brazilian table
A prediction costs nothing. What Ronaldinho did next is the part that mattered.
He adopted him. The Argentine teenager was pulled into the dressing room's Brazilian circle, alongside Deco, Sylvinho and Thiago Motta. The loudest, happiest corner of the club suddenly had a quiet kid sitting in the middle of it, listening.
Messi has never forgotten it. Years later he told Barça TV that the Brazilians accepted him from the first moment he walked in, and that Ronaldinho, as the star of the team, made everything easier. Ronaldinho remembers that the two of them lived on the same street, and that he got to know the whole family.
Just last month, in Oviedo to collect the Princess of Asturias Award, Messi went back to that dressing room one more time. He told a room of students how hard it had been, at sixteen and painfully shy, to walk in among those names. The advice the veterans gave him was simple: forget who is standing next to you, and play the way you always have.
The chip
The official debut came in October 2004, a few minutes at the end of a derby against Espanyol. The proof came the following spring.
May 1, 2005. Albacete at the Camp Nou. Late in the game Ronaldinho scoops a pass over the defense, and the seventeen-year-old lifts it over the goalkeeper. The flag goes up. Offside.
So they do it again. Same scoop from the master, same lob from the apprentice, and this time it stands. Messi's first goal for Barcelona, and he celebrates it on Ronaldinho's back, carried across the pitch like a little brother.
You know the rest. Ronaldinho left in 2008. The kid took the number 10 and went on to win eight Ballons d'Or, the kind of career that makes "better than me" sound like an understatement.
Ronaldinho has always waved away the credit. Messi, he says, never needed anything from him. Maybe so. But every shy genius needs one person to say it first, out loud, before there is any evidence to hide behind.
One did. He said it into a phone, after training, to a friend who didn't believe him.
"Better Than Me": The Day Ronaldinho Met Messi
I remember the first time I heard this story and always wondered how can one legend know so precisely when he has met the player who will succeed him.
For Lionel Messi, that moment was a phone call he didn't make and almost certainly didn't know about. The man dialing was the best footballer on the planet. The subject was a sixteen-year-old who barely spoke.
This is the story of that call.
The kid at the edge of the circle
Barcelona, the 2003–04 season. Ronaldinho has just arrived and the Camp Nou is remembering how to smile. Frank Rijkaard is in the dugout. And down in the youth teams there is a boy from Rosario whose name keeps drifting up the stairs.
The senior players had done more than hear the rumors. Ronaldinho would later say that he, Deco and the rest of the squad used to go and watch the kid's youth games. In his telling, it was the players themselves who went to Rijkaard and asked him to bring Messi up to train with them.
So he came. In November 2003, at sixteen, he got a run-out in a friendly at Porto, and after that he became a regular face at first-team sessions. He was small. He was silent. He stood where new boys stand, at the edge of things, waiting to be told where to go.
Then somebody gave him the ball.
What happened next has been told by nearly everyone who was there, and they all tell it the same way: with a kind of laughing disbelief. Ludovic Giuly, a Champions League finalist who had seen plenty of prodigies, put it in four words: "He destroyed us all." Grown professionals started kicking him, Giuly admitted, just to avoid being embarrassed by a child. The child said nothing. He got up and asked for the ball again.
The phone call
Ronaldinho watched all of this from close range. And when the session ended, the story goes, he did not wait.
He picked up his phone and called Cristina Cubero, a Barcelona journalist and a close friend. As Guillem Balagué recounts it in his biography Messi, what Ronaldinho told her was this:
Cubero didn't believe him. Why would she? Stop and consider who was talking. This was Ronaldinho at the start of his reign, the man who would lift the Ballon d'Or in 2005, the player other players paid to watch. Footballers at that altitude do not usually go looking for their replacements. They certainly don't phone the press to announce them.
And the kid hadn't played a single official minute.
Like all good legends, this one shifts a little depending on who is holding it. Cubero herself has since told it with different scenery: in one version the words come on a preseason tour of China; in another, she is the one who rings Ronaldinho, asking him to look after a shy boy, and he agrees before adding his warning. The room changes. The sentence never does. He is going to be better than me.
A seat at the Brazilian table
A prediction costs nothing. What Ronaldinho did next is the part that mattered.
He adopted him. The Argentine teenager was pulled into the dressing room's Brazilian circle, alongside Deco, Sylvinho and Thiago Motta. The loudest, happiest corner of the club suddenly had a quiet kid sitting in the middle of it, listening.
Messi has never forgotten it. Years later he told Barça TV that the Brazilians accepted him from the first moment he walked in, and that Ronaldinho, as the star of the team, made everything easier. Ronaldinho remembers that the two of them lived on the same street, and that he got to know the whole family.
Just last month, in Oviedo to collect the Princess of Asturias Award, Messi went back to that dressing room one more time. He told a room of students how hard it had been, at sixteen and painfully shy, to walk in among those names. The advice the veterans gave him was simple: forget who is standing next to you, and play the way you always have.
The chip
The official debut came in October 2004, a few minutes at the end of a derby against Espanyol. The proof came the following spring.
May 1, 2005. Albacete at the Camp Nou. Late in the game Ronaldinho scoops a pass over the defense, and the seventeen-year-old lifts it over the goalkeeper. The flag goes up. Offside.
So they do it again. Same scoop from the master, same lob from the apprentice, and this time it stands. Messi's first goal for Barcelona, and he celebrates it on Ronaldinho's back, carried across the pitch like a little brother.
You know the rest. Ronaldinho left in 2008. The kid took the number 10 and went on to win eight Ballons d'Or, the kind of career that makes "better than me" sound like an understatement.
Ronaldinho has always waved away the credit. Messi, he says, never needed anything from him. Maybe so. But every shy genius needs one person to say it first, out loud, before there is any evidence to hide behind.
One did. He said it into a phone, after training, to a friend who didn't believe him.
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