Everyone who saw Jorge and Celia Messi's son play football thought he was a star in the making. He was quick, skilful, he scored goals like they were going out of fashion and clubs were queuing up to take a look at him.
'Rodrigo was a good player and there was a time when people thought he was better than Leo,' recalled Oscar Lopez, the pair's first coach at Grandoli Sports Centre No 8 on the dusty outskirts of Rosario, 185 miles west of Buenos Aires. 'But he didn't have the same mental strength and focus as Leo. That was the difference.'
Grandoli is a stereotypically perfect place to start a footballing rags-to-riches story - a lazy, downtrodden suburb where people sit outside their tower blocks sipping the national drink mate, stray dogs sleep in the sun and the occasional horse and cart trot by.
Harmless by day but the sort of place they tell you not to go to at night. In the middle of it all is the sports centre and its football pitch, on which the grass has largely worn away. It is in constant use as boys sprint up and down, desperate to follow in the footsteps of the phenomenon who made his debut here.
'He was four years old, we were putting a team together and I was one short in the age group above him,' said Lopez. 'I asked his mother if it would be OK to put him in the team because his grandmother had urged me to. She laughed and said no, especially because of the size of the older boys.
'But we convinced her. So we put the boy on the pitch and he just sat on the floor playing with stones. Then the ball came his way, he jumped up, controlled it and started dribbling away. He was incredible.
'He didn't score that day but he did in the second game and from then on he couldn't stop. Everyone wanted to play against him to try to stop him. He seemed to create pictures of what he wanted to do in his head and then make them reality on the pitch. He was just born with this talent. You can't teach it.'
Messi had caught the football bug. He made fools of his peers at break time at school using a cola can for a ball, he dazzled in the Grandoli youth team and spent hours at home kicking a ball around while his brothers and sister played in the paddling pool.
The family home - where his parents and siblings still live - is about 15 blocks away from Grandoli in a narrow, humble road, a sort of Argentina version of Coronation Street. On two floors, it is now the most noticeable house on Estado de Israel street because of the security gates and videophone which allow the Messis a bit of quiet. A five-minute walk across some football pitches takes you to Messi's primary school.
'My overriding memory of him is kicking a ball around between classes,' said his maths teacher, Andrea Sosa, at General Las Heras No 66 school. 'He wasn't brilliant at maths but he was conscientious and did all his work without any problems. He was very shy, he barely spoke and he was the smallest in the class.'
Young star: Messi in his youth team
'He was six or seven when I taught him,' said one PE teacher. 'It was obvious he was going to be something special. The kids play football a lot with cola cans during their breaks and I was used to seeing a lot of good ones. But he was something else. The other thing I remember is that he was very caring. When he came into school he would always come and find me to give me a kiss.'
The words caring and humble crop up time and time again when talking to the people who knew Messi as a boy. The credit seems to belong to his close-knit family, quiet people who continue to shun the limelight. While his mum and dad worked as a cleaner and in a steel factory respectively, it was down to Messi's grandma Celia and his aunt Marcela to take him to football and look after him. It ensured a very close bond.
Marcela is still attached to the school - her son finished there just last year - and accompanied Messi on a return there in 2007. 'Marcela called me. It was 4.10pm and she said Lionel wanted to come to the school,' said headteacher Graciela Riboldi.
'Within five minutes the whole place had gone mad. When he arrived, he was mobbed. He couldn't move an inch. Everyone was screaming his name. He went round each and every classroom to talk to the children. He was brilliant but still very shy. He didn't move from his aunt's side.
Barcelona's Lionel Messi scores in the 2-0 victory over Real Madrid at the Bernabeu
'He was like a little boy at school all over again. He had photos with every child, he answered all their questions and then he tried to leave. As he did, the parents waiting outside went mad for him, too. He finally left at seven o'clock.
As his reputation grew in youth football, Messi was spotted by then Newell's Old Boys No 2 Claudio Vivas, who was working for future Argentina boss Marcelo Bielsa. Along he went to their training centre in the heart of Rosario where Gabriel Digerolamo was putting a team together.
'I had the team all set up and I was asked if I had space in the squad for one more,' recalled Digerolamo. 'He was from another world. He dribbled with the ball so closely it was like watching someone who had been given years of training in how to do it. He played like he does now, dribbling and scoring lots of goals. He was brilliant at anticipating what his teammates, his opponents and the goalkeeper would do.'
But there was one major difference between the Messi of today and the Messi who first wore the black and red shirt of Newell's.
'I played him as a sweeper,' said Digerolamo. 'That way no one marked him, he would get the ball and he'd run the whole way through the opposition. It worked brilliantly. He always scored spectacular goals, running from the halfway line like he has done at Barcelona. It surprised me at first but nothing does anymore. I think he has images in his head of things he has seen and then he tries to reproduce them.'
Digerolamo wasn't the only one to play Messi in a strange role. Ernesto Vecchio took over as his coach a year later and took a while before putting him in a forward position.
'It is just as well I didn't judge him on what he looked like because he was so small, he was just a flea,' said Vecchio. 'But the second I saw him with the ball I knew he had a big future. You can't teach someone as good as him anything technical.
'When he started out with me he was a defensive midfielder, because that is what we needed in the team. But I soon realised he was better off further forward. Even back then he played everywhere. He was amazing and each season he scored more than 100 goals. He was a goal machine and he scored all different types, even with his head. It never surprises me when he does something incredible. He is doing things at Barcelona that he was doing here as a child.'
Messi was not the only genius at Vecchio's disposal. Gustavo Roja was rated just as highly but a lack of mental strength and his family again proved to be the difference.
'Lionel was such a timid, humble boy. He never moaned or fought with anyone and he's still the same. I had another boy as good as him at the time called Gustavo. Boca and Independiente wanted him. But his circumstances weren't like Leo's and that made a difference. Leo's parents were brilliant but Gustavo's weren't. He grew up in a tough neighbourhood - in a slum - and he got distracted by drugs and alcohol. It shows how important Messi's family life was.'
A hundred goals a season and the perfect attitude were all very well but Messi and his family knew that to make it past youth football, something had to be done about his height. At the recommendation of the Newell's doctors, Jorge and Celia took nine-year-old Messi to child growth expert Dr Diego Schwarzstein.
'I examined him, did some tests and it was clear he had a growth hormone deficiency,' said Schwarzstein. 'I can't remember his height exactly but he was very short. He was very shy but I managed to open him up a little by talking about football.
'Working out the right treatment was not something we could do overnight so we spent a year or so looking at how much he grew each month. At that age you would expect a boy to grow about four centimetres a year. He was growing a lot slower than that because he had this hormone deficit so we treated it by injecting the hormone he was lacking.
'He needed an injection ever day. At the start his mother helped him with the injections but after a while he did it himself. He was a bit scared doing it the first time, of course. I haven't seen a single child in my time whose hand didn't tremble injecting himself for the first time. But it worked really well . With the injections, he grew over a year or two. The effect was fantastic. Lionel was so much happier. He needed new shoes and trousers every three months! It was good for his self-esteem.'
But increasing Messi's growth and self-esteem eventually came at a price. While the expensive treatment - which costs between $500 (£327) and $1,000 (£654) a month - was covered by the government at first, financial troubles in Argentina left the Messis with a tough decision.
'In 2000 the economy was about to crash and all of a sudden the money wasn't there for him, ' said Schwarzstein. 'That was a problem because the treatment was absolutely necessary and Newell's couldn't help him much. I don't know how big a role that played in him leaving for Barcelona but he needed to continue with the treatment, that's for sure. I think the financial crisis was one of the reasons the family left.'
And so Jorge and Celia sat the whole family round the table to ask if they should all go and live in Barcelona. Barca - who had invited Lionel for a trial after hearing about him through their scouting network - would pay for his treatment. If one of the family said no, they would stay in Rosario.
They, of course, said yes and the world's greatest footballer and his family left his homeland to take the next step in a dazzling career, leaving behind the legacy of a wonderfully talented boy whose humility set him apart from the rest.
'There was one game here where he picked up the ball in our area and started dribbling past their whole team,' remembered Vecchio. 'He got to the keeper, who came out, and they collided. Leo still somehow managed to keep hold of the ball but instead of slotting it into the empty net, he stopped and went to see how badly hurt the keeper was. That story tells you everything about the boy.'
Exclusively by: Alex Kay