From Grandoli to the World Cup: The neighborhood club where Messi’s journey started

ROSARIO: The breeze off the Paraná River brings a chill to the afternoon in Rosario. As the kids warm up, the clatter of their tiny cleats intensifies until the referee signals for the players to enter the pitch.
They’re wearing the orange and white-striped jersey of Abanderado Grandoli, the neighborhood club where Lionel Messi’s soccer journey started 34 years ago.

From a nearby building, a mural of a young Messi watches over the children as they chase the ball.
Just maybe, years from now, one of them will be compared to Rosario’s most famous son, arguably the best soccer player of all time.
“I watched him when I was little and it made me want to play like him,” said Julián Silvera, an 11-year-old who particularly admires Messi’s free kicks.
The final chapter of Messi’s glorious soccer career has yet to be written – in a few weeks, the 38-year-old Inter Miami captain is expected to play in his sixth World Cup for Argentina, though he hasn’t officially confirmed it. That story began here, in a lower-middle-class district of Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city and an industrial hub that was also the birth place of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
It was in 1992 when his maternal grandmother, Celia, took 5-year-old Lionel to watch his older brother, Matías, play for Grandoli in one of Rosario’s youth leagues.
How Messi ended up on the pitch has become part of the club’s lore: One player was missing for a seven-a-side match for 6-year-olds, and Celia saw an opportunity for her tiny but gifted grandson.