How Messi, Ronaldo became the two best players in the world

Adapted from Goal.com

Leo Messi is 5ft 6½in. He wasn’t always so tall. When he arrived in Barcelona as a 13-year-old from Argentina, he was 4ft 6in, nearly one foot shorter than the average height for a boy of that age.

As a child, Messi was diagnosed with a rare growth hormone deficiency. The condition affects one in 20 million people. It is not a family affliction. His younger sister, Maria Sol, for instance, is a tall young lady.

The average cost of treatment, which involves subcutaneous injections every day for three to five years, is over £100,000 a year. This kind of money was beyond the means of Messi’s parents. Messi began his treatment in 1998.

At the time, his father worked in a steel-making company; his mother at a magnet manufacturing workshop. The medical insurance they used to cover the costs of the treatment ran out after two years.

Messi’s club, Newell’s Old Boys, initially offered to pay for every second injection, but when payments started arriving late, Messi’s parents got the hump and took their talented son for a trial to Barcelona when the opportunity arose.

Messi’s family joined him in Barcelona when he arrived to take up his apprenticeship in February 2001. They knew so little about their new city that it came as a surprise to them that it was by the sea. Suffering from homesickness, however, his mother and his siblings returned to their hometown, Rosario, birthplace of Che Guevara, later that summer.

Messi, who summered in Argentina, was asked repeatedly what he wanted to do; he decided to return to Barca of his own volition. Messi’s father, Jorge, who looks a ringer for his son and manages his financial affairs to this day, stayed in Catalonia to chaperone him. The young prodigy admits that he was so miserable at times that he used to cry in his house, alone so that his father wouldn’t see.