Like a character from a novel, Lionel Messi fell quickly for Antonella Rocuzzo. She was the cousin of one of his friends and he saw her for the first time while Messi and the friend were playing Playstation. Right then he knew he wanted to be with her forever. They were in the middle of a game, and the girl who lived upstairs from the Scaglias came to ask if they needed anything. Messi’s friends still joke with him about the silly faces he pulled every time the girl came near. The ´87 category in Newell’s was unstoppable on the pitch, or so they say in the Malvinas park, but also a close-knit group of friends. Messi played in the No. 10 shirt and was the leader, and he found great things among that gang of kids. Among others, the love of his life. It was not the first time a woman had made Leo go crazy. Once in a tournament outside Rosario he was dumbstruck at the sight of an older girl, who was around 17. Over the course of two days he could not take his eyes off her for a second. That did not lead anywhere because of the age difference, but more than a few Newell’s people wonder what the girl would think now if she knew that, for a fleeting moment, she had the kid who would end up becoming the best player in the world and one of the most famous individuals on the planet in the palm of her hand. Despite his slight stature, Messi’s life in Rosario was the same as any young boy. “We were all pretty cowardly with the girls,” one of Messi’s best friends from the neighborhood, Diego, told Goal. When the neighborhood dances started, their lives changed: they stated to comb their hair, get dressed, pay attention to appearance. “After all that we did nothing all the same because we didn’t have the guts to ask out girls,” his friends, now rock fanatics, say - but they assure that the Barcelona No. 10 prefers tropical music, cumbia, which lets him show off his dance moves.
