I've never seen a player with so much quality at that age, with such personality, wearing such an important shirt.

Messi is a great champion, and he can do what he likes with the ball. I am pleased that the boy so young does something so beautiful for football because

these aren't things you see every day. It's an advertisement for the game. Welcome to It Was What It

The Football History Podcast. I'm Jonathan Wilson and with Rob Draper. And that was the famously

hard to please Fabio Capello, talking about Messi playing in the Jean-Gampa Trophy in August 2005.

So in the first part of this two-parter on Messi's adolescent years, I guess you'd say,

we took it up to the summer 2005 when he helps Argentina win the Under 20 World Cup,

even though he himself is only 17. He's won a La Liga

Championship medal the previous year. He's on the fringes of the first team. He scored his first

goal. He's starting to come off a bench regularly. So what's next? How does 2005-6 go for

Messi, Rob? It goes pretty well, Jonathan, actually. I think as an outlier for the rest of his career, you know, it's spoiler alert.

Messi does well in this story.

But there are ups and downs and there are bits of jeopardy.

And I think we still see some of the young Leo Messi.

We've talked about in the first half how homesick he was, how fragile he was, and also the

other side of him, how bloody determined he is, and kind of egotistical at times.

I think that that's the crux of Leo Messi, isn't it?

Those things are always working in tension in him.

And I think that's evident in, they go on a preseason tour to Tokyo.

This is the era of everyone suddenly deciding that they want to, they go on a preseason tour to Tokyo. This is the era of

everyone suddenly deciding that they want to go to Asia on a preseason tour because there's loads of

money in it. And we mentioned the formidable Catalan journalist Christina Koubera in the first half.

...