After the press conferences of the last couple of days, by Barcelona president Joan Laporta and by the man himself, there is no doubt about it: Lionel Messi is leaving Barcelona.
Messi wanted to stay. The club wanted him to stay. The fans wanted him to stay. And yet he is gone. Why? Because of the litany of awful financial (and, in many cases, footballing) decisions made by the bosses at FC Barcelona in the last five-or-so years. They have extended and extended the contracts of players who ought to have been put out to pasture, usually keeping them on big money, and all the while continued to sign for yet more big money players that they didn’t need or weren’t good enough. Oh, and they put them on big wages too.
Their signing of Antoine Griezmann was a case in point. From day one this move did not make sense; an exceptional player, Griezmann plays his best football off the striker – and so does Messi, it’s just that he happens to be greatest to have ever played the game. As such, who plays there is a no-contest. This situation would be perfectly acceptable were Griezmann being brought in as a backup or a squad player, but he wasn’t. Barcelona pay him £800’000 per week. It’s absolutely batty stuff for anyone to be on, never mind a player who you shunt out to the wing so as to stave off the embarrassment of making a benchwarmer of your latest marquee signing.
The end result of this and much, much more of this sort of utter lunacy by the Barca management has led to the current situation: Barcelona’s wage bill is 110% of their revenue.
With their biggest earner, Messi, out of contract this summer, the only way they were ever going to be able to keep him was by convincing La Liga to bend its own financial rules and give them special dispensation for the fact that the club has been so incompetently run for the last half a decade.
Their argument to La Liga was of course slightly different: he’s the league’s best player, not just ours.
And La Liga, quite rightly, have told them to shove it.
