The confession of a former Messi coach that will move you

It’s been a long time Quique Dominguez He decided to stop training with small soccer commitments. He didn’t have to do it, convinced that the “best player in the world” had already passed through his hands, Leo Messi. “I sincerely hope that one day I will meet him, hug him and say in his ear: ‘Thank you, you did it’“, he said in an emotional chat with EFE.

“For me Leo is a chosen one. Just as there were great painters, musicians, almost all of whom were self-taught and ended up creating works of art, Leo had the gift of playing football,” he said.

Hand in hand, with his loving dog walking in the garden of his house Rosary beadsthe Argentinian city that saw the birth of ‘la Pulga’, Domínguez recounts the memories that remain for more than a year -“all 99 and some months of 2000″, he elaborates”- where he trained the star in Newell’s Old Boys Nursery School, one of the main Rosario clubs.

“It is very, very petite, but this did not eliminate the possibility of competing with stronger, larger men. Leo, if there’s one thing that always separates him, it’s his courage. He is a very brave boy when it comes to fighting for the ball, when it comes to competing,” said the father of former soccer players Sebastián and Nicolás Domínguez, now Hernán Crespo’s field assistants at Qatari Al-Duhail.

The chosen one

After starting kicking a ball around his humble neighborhood of Rosario and joining a club near his home, Leo entered Newell’s school in 1994, with seven years. And it was at 11, shortly before Barcelona noticed him and signed him to their youth academy, giving him the hormonal treatment he needed to grow, when Quique trained the group of boys he belonged to.

“I liked it more than practicing it. Because Leo already knows at the age of 11 everything that his teammates and other kids will learn in the next 6, 7, 8 years. He was very advanced in the forms of the game, the way he hit the ball, the dribbling, the feint…”, he recalled.

And he doesn’t beat around the bush: “God gave him the gift of playing soccer, he likes it and always perfects himself to enjoy it.” “For an 11-year-old boy, it’s one thing to think and another thing to transfer it to the body on foot, in space, in the environment, and Leo did it with speed, accuracy and precision that in the years he had had to be a gift, something natural, coordination”, he added.

Dominguez is the Messi’s last school coach, and then the little star spent a short time in the lower divisions of the club, before his father, who could not afford the treatment he needed and was not provided by the Rosario club, looked for other options.

“He went through the River (Plate) first. Apparently, they will go pay for education but he had to get the free pass from Newell and Newell wouldn’t give him the pass, the father supposedly thought, and this option arose from someone who sent a video to Spain and they fell in love . This is it’s impossible not to fall in love to see him play”, he exclaimed.

Messi or Maradona

On who is more… if Maradona or Messi, he thinks: “Diego is more transgressive, more rebellious. On the other hand, the children of Argentina, and I think of the world, They see in Leo a gentle hero, who does not shout, He is almost the children’s hero”.

“Maradona was world champion, he was the best player in the world at one point, but Leo seven Ballon d’Ors He is the youth world champion, of the Copa América, he has all the records, he is the one who played the most for the national team, the one who scored the most goals for the national team,” he pointed out.

For all this, he has no doubts: Leo is “the best player out there in the world, of history”. And he admits that after the “year and peak” that he trained Leo, in addition to other personal situations, ran out of “expectation”: “I already felt that, there is nothing better”. And he gave up training.

“My big dream was to become a professional soccer player. My career was cut short, but I was rewarded with the life of a great soccer player like my eldest son, as passionate about football as my second son, who is also a player but semi-amateur”, he assumed, adding that the most important thing life gave him was “the possibility” to meet Messi.

see him again

The emotion seizes him when he asked if he saw Leo again: “I get excited every time I say no.” “I leave them alone. I trained them, I hope they learn something, all good. I sincerely hope that one day run to him by chance and give him a hug and whisper in his ear: ‘thank you, you arrived’. He achieved his dream of playing football, and when someone has a dream and achieves it, it’s amazing for me,” he said.

“Only Leo knows what’s left of me, some image, some words, some experience of me. What I am sure of in awarding myself is to be with the dream,” he said.

Will Leo end his football career at Newell’s, where it began? “It gives me the feeling that, affectively, he is want to wear a Newell jersey. The reality is different, in a city that is becoming too violent, uncertain, a player who generates too many economic expectations and everything else, so I have reservations that he can go. But I think Leo, if certain conditions are met, would love to wear the Newell shirt.”