He would spend the next two decades at Barcelona breaking every conceivable record. Three years later, Messi made his Barcelona debut at age 16 in a friendly against a Porto team coached by the legendary Jose Mourinho. As legend has it, young Messi signed his first contract on a restaurant napkin after Barcelona’s sporting director Carles Rexach made the offer. His parents could not afford to continue the treatments for an extended period, but when Messi was 13, he was invited to try out for FC Barcelona’s famed La Masia youth academy, and the Spanish club was so interested in him they offered to cover the costs of the remaining hormone treatments. Messi shocked the world on June 7 when he announced he was rejecting a $500 million deal from Saudi Arabia and a sentimental pull to return to FC Barcelona, where he spent the first 21 years of his career, to join Inter Miami of Major League Soccer. Nor would he have landed in South Florida this week to embark on the most unexpected chapter of his career. He would not have won a record seven Ballon d’Or World Player of the Year trophies. Were it not for his doting grandmother shaming a coach into putting the diminutive kid in a game and FC Barcelona offering to pay for his $900-a-month growth hormone treatments, Messi would likely not be a World Cup champion. Long before Lionel Messi was a larger-than-life soccer icon with 468 million Instagram followers, before he became one of the world’s richest athletes and immortalized on giant murals from Buenos Aires to Barcelona to Calcutta to Miami, he was the tiniest boy on the field at Grandoli, the neighborhood soccer club in his hometown of Rosario, Argentina.
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