By Chris Wright
The depressing fact of the matter is that today is only Lionel Messi’s 28th birthday – a man who has already broken more records and surpassed more milestones in football than is strictly decent.
To celebrate their little maestro turning the big two-eight, Barcelona have shared a swatch of previously unreleased footage of Messi back in his Cadete A (Barca’s top youth side) days.
After graduating up through the Infantil and Cadete B strings, Messi scored 37 goals in 30 matches for the Cadete A side – a ratio he’s pretty much kept going to this very day.
Here he is in action in 2002/03-ish, aged roughly 15/16-years-old…
It’s funny, but we don’t remember the year that Lionel Messi was briefly played by a young John Terry…
Happy Birthday Leo, you precocious little bloody bugger!