Jeré Longman of The Times traveled to Barcelona recently to research a feature about Lionel Messi for Sunday’s paper. Not everything he learned will fit in the final version, however, including this glimpse of Messi’s early days at the club.

BARCELONA — Lionel Messi came to Barcelona from Argentina a decade ago as a 13-year-old when the club agreed to pay for the costs of growth hormone therapy. He was thin and short at about 4-foot-7. He had the reputation of being a terrific player, but some Barcelona officials wondered whether his size would be a hindrance to his career.

Manu Fernandez/Associated Press

“He was shy, not very talkative,” said Carles Folguera, the director of the residence at Barcelona’s youth academy, known as La Masia. “We all thought, can he be so good? He was so small. But he was accepted by the other children as the leader.

“Sometimes, older kids can be jealous, but not with Messi. They knew they could always count on him. He played for them. When he got kicked down, he stood right up.”

Guillermo Amor, a former star midfielder at Barcelona and now the technical director of its youth academy, said: “When you are young, it’s easier to be different from the rest. Would he be able to do that as he got older? One year, we put him on four different teams and he did better and better each time. He made everything much better. There was no doubt he was No. 1.”

Josep Gombau, then a youth coach with Amposta and later a Barcelona youth coach, said the first time his team faced Messi: “He dribbled through everybody. One player made everything.”

Yet Messi did not then, and does not now, seem to have a big ego, said Gombau, who now coaches a professional team in Hong Kong.

“He is one player in the team,” Gombau said during a visit to the Barcelona academy this week. “They don’t play for him; he plays for them.”