photo credit: Emborg
Think you know the biggest mistake ever made in the history of the most beautiful game? I know I do.
Take a guess. And no it isn’t the recent hand ball goal by Thierry Henry and France’s win. And no it wasn’t Diego Maradona’s Hand of God goal either. And if you think it was Zidane’s headbutt then you are heading down the wrong path too. The biggest mistake ever made in football happened off of the pitch.
River Plate is the unfortunate winner.
When Lionel Messi was sixteen years old he made his debut for Barcelona in a friendly. The rest is history currently being made (if that makes any sense). Lionel Messi is the best player in the world and he has a treble to prove it. Wayne Rooney is a fantastic player and has really stepped it up this year for Man U and Cristiano Ronaldo may outdo Messi this year for the La Liga title with Real Madrid, but Messi is flat out the best player year after year.
But when Messi went overseas from Argentina to Spain his first option was not to move there and sign with the giants, but to stay in Argentina and play for Primera Division squad River Plate. The catch was that Messi needed funds to support his hormone deficiency treatment and the price of such a monthly procedure was around $900. River Plate opted not to pay for the annual procedure that is estimated to have cost around $10,800 a year. And total it probably would have cost them less then $50,000. But lets be honest. That’s a lot of money to pay for a child.
Of course today Messi has more then paid back that debt for Barca (just a tiny bit) and it was in fact the biggest mistake made in the history of football. Messi went to Barca and played for their youth team, and five years after he was diagnosed with the disease, he was ready to contribute for the best football team in the world. Messi has won nearly a dozen trophies all ready in his young career with dozens more on the way.
And River Plate is well, there talking to Doc Brown about creating the flux capacitor.
