Revisiting Barcelona’s last Xl before Lionel Messi’s first-team debut, 2004

Rivaldo: A fairytale career

Paul Gascoigne: The Best Quotes

Legendary XIs: Ajax 1995

Lionel Messi may have left Barcelona to spend the 2021-22 season winning Ligue 1 with PSG, but he remains Barca’s defining player of the modern era – to the point where it’s difficult to remember a time before the enormous impact he had on the club. 

But such a time did exist, coming to an end when Messi made his first appearance in the Blaugrana shirt on October 16 2004.

Barcelona’s last game before the Messi era officially began was a 1-0 win over CD Numancia a couple of weeks prior to that debut and we’ve taken a look at that Xl.

After coming through the Barcelona academy, Valdes managed to cement his position as the club’s first-choice goalkeeper before Messi’s debut.

He made 43 appearances in all competitions in 2004-05 and won his first Zamora Trophy, awarded to the goalkeeper with the lowest goals-to-games ratio in La Liga.

Belletti joined Barcelona from Villarreal in 2004 and was immediately impressed by a young Lionel Messi during a training session.

“When Messi came out of the B team, Frank Rijkaard put him in with us in an 11 against 11 on a small pitch,” Belletti told ESPN in April 2020.

“He was on the substitute team and I was with the starters. Iniesta caught my attention and asked me if I knew him. I said no and he warned me: ‘Be careful, eh.’

“When he first got on the ball, I thought: ‘Damn! This kid is cheeky.’ Then, when I was preparing to approach him and take the ball off him, he’d already gone past me and scored a goal. He ran right through me.”

The right-back famously scored the winning goal in the 2006 Champions League final but was sold to Chelsea 12 months later.