Planet Money - Messi economics

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

Soccer star Lionel Messi is currently hoping to lead Argentina to victory in the World Cup. His path to global fame was shaped by a crisis in Argentina's economy.This episode was made in collaboration with NPR and Futuro Studios's The Last Cup podcast.Subscribe to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoneyLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. There is this incredible video, this grainy video from the 1990s. It's a soccer match in Argentina. And even though this has got, you know, like a proper sports announcer, what we're seeing is a patchy field surrounded by concrete walls with peeling paint. And the players here, they are a bunch of children. We see this tiny seven-year-old get the ball and then just like weave through almost an entire team of bigger players. Messi goal, as in Lionel Messi, who is now 35 years old and arguably the greatest soccer player on the planet. Messi is currently trying to help Argentina win the World Cup, which they

have not won since before Messi was even alive. And I felt like I had heard all about Messi and all about his soccer journey until I heard it all reframed as an economic story in a new podcast series called The Last Cup. Because when Lionel Messi was born, Argentina's economy was headed for disaster. Unemployment would surge. Inflation would head towards not 8%, not 11%, 2,600%. And as bad as that was, things would get even worse into the late 90s, when Messi was 10, 11, 12 years old. A group of our NPR colleagues, along with Futuro Studios,

have been telling an incredible story about this period of time in Argentina. It is this street-level version of what it was like to live through all of this as a kid, you know, like aware, but also not entirely aware. And it follows two very different people as they leave Argentina. One of those people, Lionel Messi. The other, NPR correspondent and regular Planet Money guest, Jasmine Garst. Now, Jasmine is going to share the first part of this series on the show today, and she starts with a bit of her own backstory here. I'll hand it over to Jasmine. I was a teenager in Argentina back then, in the late 90s. While Messi was perfecting his extraordinary dribble and rosario, I was further south in Buenos Aires. I hadn't heard of Messi

yet, of course, but we grew up in similar environments. We had parents who were stressed out about money. We were raised largely by our grandmothers. And that's about where the similarities end. While he was polishing his free kicks, I was a 15-year-old perfecting my black eyeliner technique, fighting with my little brother, listening to cumbia like Gilda, Hole, and Dos Minutos, while grandma was in the kitchen cooking and singing boleros. You know, Besame Mucho. You know, besame mucho. And at some point, she'd come out and be like,

okay, come on, everybody. Everybody get up. You can't just be locked in here all day. Get out. You got to get some fresh air. So I'd go to the park by my house and smoke with my friends all day. by my house and smoke with my friends all day. When I'd come back home at night from our adventures,

I'd spray a lot of deodorant on myself to mask the smoke and sometimes crawl into bed next to my grandmother. I would have never told my teenage friends this, but we used to hold hands in our sleep, even if we were mad at each other. Para que podamos andar juntas por los sueños. So we could be together in each other's dreams. Abuela Yaya was an odd one. My grandmother slept with her patent leather platform shoes on in case there was an emergency and she had to run out. And a tiny plastic radio was always on, muffled under her pillow, playing the news. And as I lay there, I'd hear the official numbers. 15% unemployment. 17% unemployment.

Eventually, it would get to 20. Things were getting very, very bad. We're talking about the year 98, 99. Almost 2001. This is Dr. Diego Schwarzstein He says around that time, the economy was falling apart And Argentina's social structure just broke It fractured There were no protections

People couldn't get medications, hormones. It was a huge problem. I mean, people's cancer treatment got interrupted. Diabetics couldn't get insulin. And for Dr. Schwarzstein, all of these things mattered a lot, in part because during this time, he was Lionel Messi's doctor. And Messi needed some of those medications. Let me give you a little bit of background here. In the early stages of his soccer career, Messi was in fact very small for his age. He wasn't growing like the other boys. Messi first went to see Dr. Schwarzstein when he was 11. And the doctor found that Leo had a hormone deficiency, which for an aspiring athlete was super problematic.

This could have derailed his dreams. If he hadn't gotten treatment, he would have been like any other kid suffering from an untreated growth hormone deficiency. And definitely he would have been shorter than he is today. I don't know, maybe four or six inches shorter. I don't know if he would play at this level. In an interview with ESPN, Messi, a teenager with a crackly voice and a goofy haircut, he talks about his hormonal treatment, which was kind of a lot.

He says, I had to inject myself every night and every day. An injection to wake up my hormones, to grow normally. Messi's dad worked at a steel plant. His mom cleaned houses, and this treatment was incredibly expensive. They had to make decisions about the future. Guillem Balaguer wrote the authorized Messi biography. It's called Messi. The prospects weren't great.

Factories were closing. Jobs were being lost. In fact, there was going to be a recession. And they realized that they may have to take steps towards leaving the country. My dad was a professor at the University of Buenos Aires at the time. He lost almost all his work that year. So did my mom. Our family basically tailspinned into having almost no income.

Our family basically tailspinned into having almost no income. And the government started putting caps on how much of your savings you could take out of the bank. There was a lot of anguish. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water and finding my father at the kitchen table just staring into space. He was also starting to wonder if we should try to leave. After the break, what it is like when one of your first jobs in America is selling cowboy hats to Americans. And also the brief history of how European soccer clubs

started importing Latin American teenagers hoping to find the next soccer superstar. maybe travel to the grocery store or you'll do some holiday shopping and that will be thanks to semiconductor chips. Every data center, every telecommunication system, every cell tower, every cell phone has semiconductors in it now. They are everywhere. Who makes them and how has huge implications for the global economy. It is no exaggeration to say that semiconductors in their strategic importance as a driver of the performance of the overall economy, is comparable to oil. Inside the battle for control over semiconductor technology, a battle unfolding between the U.S. and China. That's in our recent bonus episode for Planet Money Plus listeners. Sign up to hear it and support NPR at the link in our episode notes.

up to hear it and support NPR at the link in our episode notes. Nowadays, in European soccer, teams have all these international players from Latin America and Africa, but it wasn't always that way. For starters, in the 90s, there was a major rule change that removed caps on how many foreign players were allowed on any given European team. Another thing that changed, cable companies made deals with the big European soccer leagues. Sky Sports proudly presents FA Premier League football. In 1992, the English Premier League sold broadcast rights to Sky Sports in a landmark deal worth £304 million.

Here we go. Weekends will never be the same again. sports in a landmark deal worth £304 million. The deals meant larger audiences, more sponsorships, more money in teams' pockets. Simon Cooper, the author of The Barcelona Complex, says European teams started thinking... Okay, well, we're going to buy the best Brazilians, Argentinians and Uruguayans principally and bring them here because we have the money now to do that. Player after player, the European teams started really going in on getting the best talent from Latin America. going in on getting the best talent from Latin America. So in the late 70s, Argentina had arguably the best league in the world. And by the early 90s, it's just a kind of feeder team and baseball team, almost a triple A league for the European leagues. And then at some point, European clubs, they start to think, well,

why not bring younger players for cheaper? Cooper, who has written a lot about Messi, says Messi's dad knew. His son is brilliant. It doesn't take business genius to realize that the gold is in Europe and not here. Messi's dad started talking to one of the biggest teams in Spain, Barça Football Club, in Barcelona.

So Messi's dad is a big football man. This again is Guillem Balague. And he realized the potential of Leo. And they went for it. So Messi got on a plane to do a tryout. He was only 13. He made a big impression, but Barca had doubts. One of the problems in soccer is it's very hard to extrapolate from being good at 13 to being good at 18. It just doesn't mean very much if a kid is great at 13, 14, 15. Your body changes, your desires change.

Some kids get better, some kids don't. So it's just not a good bet. And this, Balaguer reminds me, was a kid who required an expensive hormonal treatment. There was a big question mark. And yes, it had to do also with the hormone treatment that had to be paid by the agents when he landed in Barcelona, because Barcelona didn't have the money for it or didn't want to pay for it.

Messi comes back to Argentina without a contract. A few months later, Messi got invited to join the Barça Youth Academy. The Messis didn't tell a lot of folks in Rosario that they were leaving. It was early 2001, and Balague says Messi cried the whole way to the airport. A few months later, I would take a similar journey. Many people did. Because in December 2001, things blew up in Argentina. There's this one memory I have of my country coming apart. To this day, I think about it more often than I like to admit. It's the memory of this young man.

I saw him on TV. He was protesting outside the presidential palace, not far from where I used to live. This guy, he's a kid. He must have been like in his early 20s. And he's being dragged away by cops. And as they're taking him he screams we're dying of starvation they're starving us and then he yells his name

I was a kid myself not that much younger than he was and I think the reason this moment is seared in my memory is because as he was screaming his name, I thought to myself, he wants us to know who he is in case they do something to him. That's how violent the government crackdown had gotten. It was December 2001. And here, in a nutshell, is how the country reached its breaking point. A brutal dictatorship ruled over Argentina in the 70s and early 80s. During that time, foreign debt increased fivefold. Add to that decades of disastrous economic and monetary policies, rampant corruption in the 90s. That's just a few of the things that led to this totally unsustainable situation. People started going hungry. Hospitals started having shortages.

It got so bad, groups of people started busting into supermarkets, grabbing whatever they could eat and running. The morning the government declared a state of siege, I was watching the news when the broadcast was interrupted by an official announcement from the president. The president was basically saying some of our rights were no longer guaranteed. No moving freely in public spaces, no gathering in groups, you could be arrested without explanation, and militarized police were deployed. And the response from the police was brutal. They showed up and whipped people. They shot at them. Elderly people, women, minors. It didn't matter. Eventually,

protesters ran the president out of office. Over the next month or so, we would get four more presidents. Around this time, my parents decided that we were going to try and move to the United States. And I remember we had this family talk in which we sat down and explained to my grandparents that this way, when they got older, we could help them out. This is the only time I have ever seen my grandfather cry. He was like a big old shuddering tree. In the middle of the talk, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and just sat on the edge of the toilet and sobbed. My parents were both teachers, so it's not like there were a lot of savings to be salvaged. But on this one hot summer day, my mother grabbed the

cash she'd been storing away at home, put it in a pouch under her clothes, and put on her red winter jacket. On the cab ride to the airport, she was stern and irritated with us. Now, as an adult, I understand why. She must have been really scared. That would be my last drive through Buenos Aires for many years to come. That year, about 225,000 people left the country.

One economist I spoke to told me that at the time, he remembers seeing graffiti at the airport, which read, El ultimo en salir apague la luz. Last one out, turn off the lights. In this video from Barça Football Club, shot after he arrived in Barcelona, a young Messi sounds relieved. He says he's living a different and better life in Barcelona. He's happy because things have changed for him.

And you have to understand, he left his country just as everything was really unraveling. Still, he says, Argentina is home. All his friends and family are back there. His mom and siblings were in Rosario. It was just him and his dad, which sounds kind of lonely. Guillem Balague says this was a lot for a young teenager. Basically, he realizes that he couldn't, very early on, that he couldn't make mistakes and he couldn't doubt,

because if he did, the whole thing could collapse. In interviews like this one with the SPA, Messi says he's happy at Barca, but he has this dream. He wants to go home someday and play for a local team in Argentina. While Messi was killing it on pitches in Europe, my family and I, we lived in a motel in Southern California. That first year in the U.S., I worked a lot of jobs at once. I did nights at a bakery.

I cleaned bathrooms at a hair salon. And I worked at this one store called The Frustrated Cowboy, where I sold cowboy hats and boots to suburbanites while listening to Tex Ritter on a loop. I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy. It was like I had been thrown into the deep end of the American experience. deep end of the American experience. And during my breaks, I'd sit in the parking lot smoking, and I'd think to myself, coming here was a mistake. I couldn't afford to go back, but I kept my country in the rearview mirror. And I'd tell myself, one day I'm going to make a U-turn, maybe in a year

or two. Okay, three years. I'm going to give it three years. Just wait to know if the people I arrived with, my parents and my brother, are going to be okay. And then I'm going to go back. Before I knew it, that place I loved so much, the one I kept in the rearview mirror, had become a speck on the horizon. And I'd spent a lot of time telling myself, I'll be right back. And I meant it every single time I said it. And Messi, I think he meant it too. Yeah, yeah, I know. I was making minimum wage and Messi was well on his way to becoming a millionaire. But I get why he did what he did when Spain asked him to join their national team. He said no.

Despite having been adopted and taken care of by Spain, Guillem Balague says Messi felt deeply Argentine. He wanted to play and be recognized by his home country. Home is home. And you may be appreciated by Catalans or by, you know, millions around the world, but I'm telling you, you are an immigrant, so am I. Unless I'm recognized at home,

it just doesn't feel the same. It doesn't feel the same. It doesn't feel the same. Messi says it himself in that ESPN interview. His goal is to play with the Argentine national team. After the break, Argentina resorts to antics, hijinks, a caper, whatever you want to call it, to officially make Lionel Messi a member of the Argentine national team.

And it is very fun. In 2004, the world did not really know about Lionel Messi. Maybe the intense Spanish fans knew that this promising 17-year-old was in their league. Certainly some international coaches would have been aware. But Messi was just starting in the Spanish big leagues, and it was relatively hard to watch international soccer in 2004. And so back in Argentina, fans did not necessarily know about Lionel Messi. Because if they did, I suspect a lot more people would have shown up

to a very weird soccer match that took place that year. Just to set the scene here before we hand this back to Jasmine, 17-year-old Messi had not officially been claimed by either Spain or Argentina, as in, you know, which country would he play for when it came time for things like the World Cup? And even though Messi had said in interviews that he wanted to go back and he wanted to play for Argentina, Argentina didn't have a guarantee. And Spain is this big, incredibly rich, well-funded national soccer team, while Argentina, like, not so much. Certainly not back in 2004. So Argentina had to make sure that Spain

didn't lock in Messi before they had a chance. And this is where the antics come in. I'm just going to hand this back to Jasmine Garst, who explains from here. professor, was one of the trainers with the Argentina national squad. He says the Argentine Soccer Federation played their cards close to their chest. They didn't want to make a big fuss about this brilliant new player. We didn't tell them we were trying to force a player onto our national team. We lied to them and said, let's just get some practice. The real reason for assembling this game is a rather obscure soccer rule. If a player who is not signed to any country puts on that country's team jersey and plays in a game where tickets are sold, that's it. The national team gets to claim that player. that player. On June 29, 2004, Messi stepped onto an official game with an Argentine jersey,

sealing his fate. Almost no one showed up. The stadium was still under construction, but it had to be an official match, and tickets had to be sold. It was broadcast by Teise, an Argentine sports channel that was still kind of new at the time. And it was completely empty. There were like three dudes and a stray cat sitting in the bleachers. Messi got sent in during the second half. This kid is going to play a few minutes, says the announcer. He's a bit of a mystery. He's 17, he's from Rosario,

but he went to Spain to play really young. What's notable about this game is that the team is all but ignoring Messi. Like at some point, it's a blowout, 6-0. And even the announcer said, Hey, pass it to the new guy. He's all by himself. But then someone does pass it to him. And he turns it on, dribbling at the speed of light.

The seventh goal was his. He dribbles past like six Paraguayan players. It's like the ball's attached to him. What a goal, the three people in the stadium cheer. This experience seals the deal for Messi. He decides Argentina is his team and will be for the rest of his career. Messi had arrived back home. But what he didn't know was that coming back home is never easy. In fact, it can be a nightmare. But to find out more, you'll have to listen to the rest on the podcast, The Last Cup. The Last Cup is a co-production of NPR and Futuro Studios.

This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo, Marlon Bishop, and Julieta Martinelli, with support from Paz S. Sarabia. Our editor is Luis Trelles. Our bilingual team of producers includes Fernanda Echavarri, Skylar Swenson, Juan Diego Ramirez, with help from Nick M. Neves, Liliana Ruiz, and Nicole Rothwell. Voice-over actors were Brian Jeffords, Alex Marrero, Sebastian Sancho, and Memo Sauceda. Our production coordinator was Margaret Price. Our mix engineer for this episode was Catherine Silva. Music for this episode provided courtesy of ZZK Records and Rata Sencelo.

Katie Simon is the supervising editor for Embedded. Lauren Gonzalez is the senior manager of the content development team. Our executive producers are Yolanda Sanguini for NPR and Marlon Bishop for Futuro Studios. Anya Grundman is senior vice president for programming and audience development. We love getting feedback from listeners. You can send us a message at thelastcup at npr.org. I'm Jasmine Garst. You can find The Last Cup wherever you get your podcasts. Send us a message at thelastcupatnpr.org. I'm Jasmine Garst. You can find The Last Cup wherever you get your podcasts. Contigo llorar y reír, contigo es hermoso sufrir, el Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.