Argentina almost lost Messi to Spain. A payphone hunt saved him

Barcelona and Messi are as inseparable as Argentina and Messi. (FIFA/Reuters/AP Photo)

Andrés Iniesta knows Lionel Messi. He knows Messi more than most. He was his source of goals, his best friend, and the man he turned to when he needed a brotherly hug. He knew his moments with telepathic intuition. They were comrades in 489 games. Yet, one afternoon in Buenos Aires, two months after Spain were crowned world champions and the universe in awe of their style, Messi showed little mercy to Iniesta, the goalscorer in the final against the Netherlands, or his other Barcelona friends.

Just eight minutes had passed when they came up against each other: Messi striding upfield, Iniesta crouched like a sumo wrestler to stop him. Messi dropped his shoulder, shifted his body to the left, but slithered to his right, leaving Iniesta still like a statue. When he turned back, he saw Messi slipping away from three markers, sliding into a pocket of space no one had spotted until it was too late, and lobbing the ball over goalkeeper Pepe Reina. The game ended with Argentina battering Spain 4-1, a near full-strength Spain. It was the last time Messi confronted Spain, the country where he spent most of his years from 13 to 34, the La Masia Academy of Barcelona that moulded and nurtured his ideas and ideals of football, the club that gave him an identity, where he made friends and bonds of a lifetime. Barcelona and Messi are as inseparable as Argentina and Messi.

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Years later, Iniesta recalled that night to Canal television: “Thank god, he is my teammate, I don’t want to suffer such embarrassment. I can sympathise with others.” Manager Vicente del Bosque said jokingly in the press: “I wish he played for us. He could have been a world champion, yeah, a European winner.” But Messi’s loyalties were clear. In his heart was always Argentina, even though for much of his career, until he lifted the World Cup, he had to show his Argentinian-ism every time he put on the jersey.

Messi opened the scoring in Argentina’s 4-1 win against Spain in their last meeting in 2010. (Reuters Photo)

And it’s not that Spain didn’t try to coax him away in his early years at Barcelona, far away from the gaze of Argentina’s youth scouts and consciousness.

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Just months after Messi joined La Masia, youth coach Alex Garcia wondered why Argentina were not showing enthusiasm in tracking Messi. He decided to call then Spain’s youth coach Ginés Meléndez. “There’s a kid here, an Argentine, but they (Argentina) don’t call him up. Maybe there’s a possibility he might want to play for Spain.”

Most of Messi’s teammates were part of the youth squads, the scouts constantly monitoring them. No one checked on Messi. His blossoming genius was hidden in his country. Meléndez dropped by, watched him and excitedly instructed him: “Convince him, his parents, or maybe agents. He is the future.” Meléndez later told ESPN Spain in a documentary: “All I was missing was Leo. I imagined him with that team. I imagined my national team being completely invincible.”

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The club presumed that the mission would be straightforward. For, Messi and his family were indebted to Barcelona. They found a job for his father and paid him around $70,000 annually; they paid $1,000 a month for his hormone injections, an impediment for several Argentinian clubs to sign him. But they had to convince him first, because the ties were cordial between the two federations. Garcia had a way with his students. He asked him playfully: “You mates are playing for their country. Wouldn’t you like to play for Spain so you don’t end up here all alone when everyone’s away?”

Messi was indeed lonely. He missed his home and friends when they were in national camp. “At the start, the truth is that it was tough, it was hard. My brothers had gone to Argentina, my sister’s adaptation was the toughest of all, she was the smallest and it was hard for them, with school and everything. They decided that my mother would go to Argentina with her. I was alone.” But his mind, even at 13, was firm. He would only play for Argentina. “There were informal contacts to see if I wanted to play for Spain, but I always said that I wanted to play for Argentina and I only feel these colours,” he wrote in La Nacion.

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The Barcelona coaches took a different route: to try through his agent Horacio Gaggioli. He played along diplomatically. “We have to talk to his family.” Deep inside, though, he didn’t want Messi to slip away from Argentina’s net. He spoke to coaches, but nothing concrete manifested.

But a year later, he heard that Argentina coach Marcelo Bielsa and his assistant Claudio Vivas were in Spain to watch the senior players. Gaggioli sniffed an opportunity and asked Messi’s father to give him a VHS tape of Messi’s skills he had videographed. Through his sources, he ferried it to Bielsa and Vivas. But they were so busy that they didn’t watch it immediately. It took a prompting from Messi’s academy for Vivas to watch it. The U-17 squads of both teams were staying in the same hotel for the World Cup. After Spain beat Argentina, the latter’s youth coach Hugo Toccalli met the Spaniards to congratulate them. Fabregas told a Marca reporter: “You lost because you didn’t play your best”. Intrigued, he asked: “Who?” “Lionel Messi”.

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Then the VHS tape struck him, and he showed it to Bielsa. The legendary coach’s first response: “But don’t play it at fast speed, play it to me normally.” The video was at normal speed, only that Messi was quick.

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What followed was a manic run to find his parents. The task fell on national team manager Omar Souto. Sensing the urgency in Toccalli’s tone, he straightaway went to a payphone booth, and called everyone with a Messi surname. He didn’t even know his first name. After an hour and burning hundreds of pesos, he connected to his grandmother. “I called his grandmother. Then his uncle. Then, finally, Jorge [Messi] in Spain. ‘He’s Lionel,’ Jorge told me, ‘And he’s been waiting for Argentina to call.'”

In days, the AFA sent a fax to Barcelona requesting them to release him for national duty, but funnily with a wrong spelling “LEONEL MECCI.” A year later, he made his youth debut against Paraguay. When Souto died in 2025, Messi penned a touching tribute: “You were always present, and you were the person who paved the way for the AFA to spot me.” It’s a quirk of history: Argentina almost let him go. The heart, Messi insists, was always here. But hearts can be fickle.

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Is Messi’s game fundamentally Spanish or Argentinian? It’s both, as Spanish as Spain and as Argentinian as Argentina could be. He blends the freedom and fight of the Argentina game and the refined rigour of the Spanish school. The magic of his feet is from Argentina, the feet dance to an indecipherable tune. It’s more tango than sardana. He cares for it like a father would an infant. Watch him in set pieces, he doesn’t perceive it as an inanimate instrument of fame. It’s his love.

Messi (10) reacts as he leaves the ground after Argentina’swin in the World Cup semifinal against England. (AP Photo/Jacob Kupferman)

The wits are founded in Spain: the spatial awareness, how to make space, harness it, and find space that others don’t. As is the minimalism of his movements, the lack of flourishes. Maybe, he thinks like a Spaniard and plays like an Argentine. He dwells on the outer reaches of both schools, and lays a bridge between two supposedly antithetical sporting tenets. One that glorifies the height of individual expression, and one that emphasises collectivism and ideology above everything else.

Messi has a rogue spirit like Maradona. In a different era, the Hand of God could have been his. In the last two World Cups, he has at times been nasty on the field, picking up fights with referees and instigating rivals. But unlike Maradona, he is largely reclusive off the field.

In the final, Spain could find shades of themselves in their chief nemesis, just as Argentina could sense Spanish riffs in their talisman. Messi belongs to both.