Argentine start always felt awkward when he met famous personalities but could not communicate with them
Lionel Messi has said he regrets not learning English when he could. The Barcelona and Argentina legend has a well-known inability to speak English, often needing translators and conducting all interviews in Spanish.
Messi said he was a bit of “an idiot” for not taking his opportunity to learn English while at school, and that it always made him feel awkward and small when he met famous personalities but could not communicate with them.
“I regret many things,” Messi said on Mexican podcast Miro de Atras. “To not have learned English as a boy. I had the time to study English and I didn’t do it. I deeply regret it.
“I experienced situations where I was with incredible and spectacular personalities to be able to talk and have a chat and you feel half ignorant. I always thought: ‘What an idiot, how I wasted my time.’
“When you’re young, you don’t realise it. Today that’s what I tell my children: having a good education, to study and be prepared, I always tell my children to take advantage of it. They have a different situation to the one I had although I never lacked anything.”
Messi moved to Barcelona from Argentina when he was 14, joining Barcelona’s youth team La Masia after a contract signed on a napkin.
Messi labelled his last year of school in Argentina “a disaster”. “I knew that I was leaving,” Messi said. “At Barcelona, I finished my high school with the other children that went to La Masia.”
