Lionel’s father also was struggling with work, along with 3 million other Argentines. With the medication costing $1,300 a month and with devaluation of the peso on the way, it would have been extremely difficult to afford. At such a young age Lionel could not possibly understand it, but he could feel it, with 30 percent of his treatment still incomplete. “Nothing would have happened to him health-wise because stopping halfway through does not leave side-effects. But he would have been much shorter than he is now,” the doctor clarifies from his offices in Rosario, where he is called incessantly every time the No. 10 suffers an injury and asked if it is his fault - which is never the case. The Messi family became desperate. Jorge, Lionel’s father, started to move to find a way to keep paying, but the complex political climate at Newell’s - not to mention the economic whirlwind that had swept through the country - meant the club decided against financing the treatment itself. The money was not coming. Messi was taken to Buenos Aires for a trial with River Plate. He was accepted, but the Millonario also declined to invest in the little star. At that point, the chance to go to Barcelona appeared, another tough call for the young Messi, enveloped in a dispute between the club, his father and a series of intermediaries that left him out of soccer for almost a year. Many years before, when Schwarztein finished his medicine degree, he traveled to Catalunya to specialize in endocrinology. When he heard Messi was Barcelona-bound, he took it upon himself to contact his former mentor in the city and introduced them so Lionel would be looked after by someone he trusted. The No. 10 went with his father to live in Barcelona, his mother and siblings stayed behind in Rosario, his old friends carried on playing in the same block on Israel Street. He left his school, and the Newell’s ‘87 category team lost its star. Messi even stopped seeing the love of his life, as he had already met Antonella Rocuzzo, cousin of teammate Lucas Scaglia, who would years later become his partner and the mother of his children. He restarted the treatment in Barcelona and completed the 30 percent still outstanding. The Catalan club put up the funds, and Messi was able to reach the height to which his body was intended to naturally grow. If he had not continued with the daily injections - which continue all the same, although the needles now come with the medication included in a small tool which looks uncannily like a permanent marker - he would not have developed the hormones necessary to keep growing. Who knows what would have happened with the lives of Guardiola, Xavi, Iniesta and with the four Champions Leagues lifted by Barca since Messi came on the scene? When he first walked into the doctor’s office, he was just more than 4-foot-1 and nine years old: he finished measuring more than 5-foot-5, 2 cm taller than Diego Maradona. That is not just coincidence, but the result of a promise Schwarztein made to his young patient: “I don’t know if you will be better than Maradona, but you will be taller.”
