ROSARIO, Argentina — Fernanda Quiroga still remembers how Lionel Messi played soccer in what were then dirt roads around their working class neighborhood in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city.
“(Messi) was always kicking something, a ball, a bottle cap,” said Quiroga, who at 35 is the same age as the captain of Argentina’s national soccer team. “The memory I have of him because he lived right in front of my house, is going to buy sweet pastries at his grandmother’s around the block and he was always kicking something.”
Excitement for Sunday’s World Cup final, when Argentina will face defending champion France in Qatar, is rising fast and anxiety is running particularly high in Messi’s hometown as many are hoping this will be the year when Messi finally wins the one major trophy that has been missing from his illustrious career.
“Even though it pains us all, it’s been said this is Leo’s last World Cup, so we’re all hoping he wins it, I think more for him than for the national team itself,” Quiroga said. “I think what weighs more this time around is that we want him to get it because he has generated so much love and respect.”
After beating Croatia in the semifinals Tuesday, Messi said Sunday’s match likely would be his last in a World Cup.
The neighborhood popularly known as La Bajada has turned into a sort of altar for Messi with murals and graffiti that praise the soccer star.
“From another galaxy and from my neighborhood,” reads graffiti that is seemingly ubiquitous in the area.
A large mural of Messi looking up at the sky is painted on the side of his old house that still belongs to his family.
“The little guy was very spicy. If he got mad, he grabbed the ball and took it away,” said Marcelo Almada, a 37-year-old construction worker who played soccer with Messi in the streets around the neighborhood where he still lives. “He didn’t like to lose … but he was a very good kid.”
With the World Cup, “there has been an explosion in the neighborhood,” where “we’re all like brothers,” he added, noting that after every Argentina victory people celebrate in the streets until the early hours of the morning.
Another person hoping for a Messi victory is 55-year-old Andrea Liliana Sosa, who was Messi’s math and science teacher in fifth and sixth grade.
“He was a quiet and dutiful student, responsible with what he had to do for school and well loved by his classmates … especially during the breaks to play ball,” Sosa said in one of the classrooms of the school that has chipped paint across many of its walls. “He was very focused on soccer.
“(A victory Sunday) would be like the cherry that he’s missing, so let’s hope he makes it, but he has done enough already to be recognized and loved by everyone,” she said.
In La Bajada, residents are hopeful that if Messi wins Sunday he will come back to his old home for a visit.
“We all have the dream that he will come back,” Quiroga said. “It’s a very strong wish, especially for the youngest who’ve heard that we all know him and they want to meet him, too. There are huge expectations for him to come back and I think that some day it will happen, whether it be now or later. This is his house, his family’s house, let’s hope it happens.”
