Lionel Messi: Fabregas tells story of first training session at Barcelona | OneFootball

Lionel Messi and Cesc Fabregas are very good friends.

The pair were born just a few months apart and played at Barcelona’s famous La Masia academy together.

Fabregas would move to Arsenal in 2013, while Messi would go on to establish himself as a Barcelona legend and arguably the greatest footballer of all time.

And now, in a , Fabregas has told the story of meeting a young Messi for the very first time.

In fact, the midfielder remembers the very first training session in which Messi, who joined Barca at the age of 13, made him look silly by skinning him during a drill.

Fabregas remembers his first training session with Messi

“He was a very small kid, he didn’t speak, he was very, very shy,” Fabregas said.

“The first training session we had with Leo I was playing a bit more of a defensive midfielder. We were doing this exercise of one against one. In my head, I’m thinking ‘I’m going to get the ball easy from him’ because I like to go on the floor and I like to tackle. I saw that he was coming with speed that was not normal, he was coming very very fast at me. I was already shocked because I was already on the floor and he scored the goal. So from that moment I said ‘Hold on a second, we need to take this boy very, very seriously.

“Before then, it wasn’t that normal to see players at that age coming from so far. If you were very good, they could take you from somewhere in Spain, of course. Seeing someone come from somewhere so far away at such a young age we all thought ‘wow, this boy must be something really special.’

“You need to be mentally really, really strong and to have a special character otherwise you don’t succeed. There are so many moments where you feel weak where your head misleads you a little bit and you want to go back to your family, you want to go back to your habits, you want to go back to your friends. I’m sure it was very tough but I want to believe we were good kids as well and we tried always to be next to him and help him as much as we could.”

Fabregas returned to Barcelona – and couldn’t believe watching Messi

“I went to Arsenal and three or four months later I had two days off so I went back and my dad told me ‘Listen, just here your ex-team are playing close to Barcelona and they’re playing against Real Madrid,” Fabregas added. “So I said ‘Oh my god, I’d love to go and watch.’

“Leo was playing as a No.10 and I’ve never seen anything like this. He was getting past players but with so much ease. They had to foul him so hard to stop him. I told my dad, and I said ‘Oh my god, Leo.’ He looked so much stronger as well, it’s like he had made that change physically that nobody could stop him. That was the first day I said ‘I don’t think I’ve seen anyone like this at this age.'”