Lionel Messi and Antonela Roccuzzo

I will tell you about the greatest footballer who ever lived, and I promise that almost none of this book is about football.

It is about a city called Rosario, in Argentina, where two children met in a family kitchen when she was about five and he was about nine. It is about what happened when the boy was shipped across an ocean at thirteen and the children lost each other for years. It is about a telephone call that came from Spain on the worst week of her life, and a boy who got on a plane. The world has spent thirty years asking what makes this man different, and the world has measured everything, the left foot, the low center of gravity, the trophies stacked like firewood, and I am going to give you the answer the measurements keep missing.

When it mattered, he flew home.

Hold that sentence. It is the spine of everything you are about to hear, and I intend to spend it carefully, the way the man himself spends words, because it is the kind of sentence that goes soft if you lean on it too often. You will get it at the beginning, you will get it at the end, and once, somewhere in the middle, where it earns its keep.

That is the whole engine of this story. The most famous athlete on the planet, a man whose face is painted on walls on five continents, has spent his entire life trying to get back to the same girl from the same city, and everything else, Barcelona, Paris, Miami, the golden trophies and the golden boots, happened on the way home.

Here is how the telling will work. The two of them will take turns, chapter by chapter, her voice and then his, because a marriage is a duet and I refuse to write it as a solo with accompaniment. She talks more than he does. This will surprise nobody who has ever stood within a hundred meters of either of them. The arithmetic of this book runs roughly the way the arithmetic of their kitchen runs, which is to say she supplies the sentences and he supplies the punctuation, and somehow, by the end of any given night, both of them have said the same amount.

One warning before we begin. This story contains no villain. There is no scandal act, no secret third act betrayal, no rain soaked breakup on a bridge. The obstacles here are the honest ones, an ocean, a decade, a boy's silence, a girl's grief, the whole roaring machinery of fame parked outside a family's window for thirty years. If you require a villain to stay interested, I can offer you distance, which nearly won, and I can offer you time, which takes everything eventually and has been sent away from this particular door more often than any defender in the history of sport. Everyone else in the story is somebody's cousin, and they are all about to feed you.

If you have arrived here as a football person, welcome, the football is in here, I could not keep it out. And if you have arrived here knowing nothing about the sport, even better, because she did not care about it either, and this is her book as much as his. More, maybe. He would say more, and he does not say much, so when he says a thing, the family writes it down.

You are in the right place.