Jorge Messi worked at a steel factory in Rosario. He left home while it was still dark and returned when his family was almost asleep. That was the rhythm for entire years, maintained so that his children would lack nothing.
Lionel put it this way in 2019: “My dad got up at four in the morning and came back at nine at night for dinner, practically every day. So we saw each other little and, when we did see each other, he enjoyed me”. There was no reproach in those words, only the memory of a boy who waited for his father’s return so he could hug him.
Jorge died this Saturday at the age of 68, hospitalized at a clinic in Rosario. He was a factory supervisor, then an agent, and always the person who accompanied Lionel every step of the way, from dirt fields to Barcelona. Today those words from 2019 carry a different weight: behind the best footballer in the world, there was a father who never stopped getting up early for him.
