Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi walks on the pitch during the Spanish league football match between FC Barcelona and Valencia CF at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona on Dec. 19, 2020.LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images
Back in August, Lionel Messi announced his intention to leave Barcelona, the club that had literally raised him from a child. It probably would have been in everyone’s best interest to let it end there. Instead, Barcelona insisted that Messi see out the final year of his contract.
Despite being thwarted, it was expected – correctly – that Messi could be professional about the whole thing. Barcelona brought in a new president and promised to win back Messi’s affection.
That hasn’t gone well and nor has Barcelona’s season.
Meanwhile, all of Messi’s complaints have been prescient. In particular, he was angry at the team for jettisoning his best friend, Luis Suarez, to a key rival for next to nothing in return. Suarez is the leading scorer in La Liga this year, with Atletico Madrid.
Imagine you are one of the people who runs Barcelona. When things are going well, it’s the best gig in sports. But when the greatest player in history has told everyone you are an idiot, and then been proved right in his assessment, it must be less so. It must be so awful that you might find yourself doing strange, difficult-to-explain things.
That brings us to this weekend.
A few days ago, Barcelona announced it is close to broke. The club owes nearly $2-billion. Most of that money went to wages. No team in the world spends more on its employees.
A couple of days after that, Spain’s Madrid-based newspaper of record, El Mundo, got hold of Messi’s contract.
What a coincidence.
Spain's Madrid-based newspaper of record, El Mundo headline on Sunday January 31, 2021 reads 'Messi's pharaonic contract ruins Barça'.Supplied
The numbers in the report are staggering. El Mundo blew one of them across its front page – 555,237,619.
That’s the amount of euros Messi stood to earn over his four-year deal that is now ending. In Canadian dollars, that’s $215-million a year.
The contract includes a complicated bonus structure, not every clause of which Messi managed to hit. But still.
Everyone knew Messi made a lot. No one knew it was that much. That is more money a year than the entire payroll of any team in the NBA. It’s more than two Calgary Flames.
The first move out of the PR playbook here is to deny everything. Accuse El Mundo of having been hoodwinked or the story of being undermined by incomplete information.
But that won’t work because El Mundo doesn’t just have the figures. It has the contract itself. The newspaper splashed redacted images of it across its own pages, as though it had got hold of the Pentagon Papers. Because, in Spanish news-value terms, it had.
According to reports, there were only four copies of the contract. Messi had one. His lawyers had another. The league had a third. And Barcelona had the fourth.
No one’s saying Barcelona leaked the contract. Not in those exact words. But if you were Messi, who would you suspect?
Within hours of the report, Messi announced his intention to sue El Mundo. Barcelona denied it was behind the leak (already a terrible sign) and said it would also sue.
Good luck with that. I don’t know anything about Spanish media law, but I understand a little about how the news business works.
From El Mundo’s point of view, this is pure gold. First, it got to leak the sports story of the year. Now it gets to spend months patting itself on the back for defending the principle of a free press. Messi has become to El Mundo what Donald Trump was to The New York Times.
From Messi’s point of view, this isn’t a lawsuit. It’s a mole hunt. Messi must have his suspicions about who did this to him. He’s just announced his willingness to risk further embarrassment in order to prove it.
One question explains any high-profile stab in the back: Who benefits?
In the very short term, this helps Barcelona. Messi has already said he’s leaving and there is no changing his mind. This report proves Barcelona can’t be faulted for cheapness. The sums are so exorbitant – El Mundo’s front-page headline called the amount “pharaonic” – it may turn a few fans off their favourite player.
But if you look beyond the next day or two, leaking this information is inexplicable.
Sure, Messi makes an obscene salary. So does Apple chief executive Tim Cook.
But whereas any one of us is fully capable of saying, “I’ve got a wild idea, guys. How about we make another iPhone, and then sell it for more than the last one,” none of us is going to be chosen the best soccer player in the world six times.
Riding Messi’s pristine personal brand, Barcelona built itself into the second-most valuable sports franchise in the world. It makes US$1.5-billion a year shilling beer, razor blades and team jerseys. When people drink, use and wear those products, who do you think they are imagining themselves as?
However gaudy the wage, Messi earned that money. He’s probably earned a lot more than that.
Unlike many of his peers, he doesn’t flaunt it. Messi has spent years cultivating an image as a humble man living a simple life. That will really start paying off now.
In the end, the blowback from this story nicks up Barcelona’s reputation much more than that of the man it targets. Messi is guilty of leveraging his talent to its maximum. Isn’t that what we’d all like to do? Meanwhile, the club appears guilty of the gravest sin in the sporting fraternity: snitchin’.
You can resent a guy. You can treat him like 5½ feet of walking garbage. You can chisel him and badmouth him behind his back. But you cannot float his private business in public.
Because once you start down that road, there is no end to it. It puts the entire enterprise and the whole herd in jeopardy. Everyone, everywhere in the sporting world will reflexively turn on you.
Barcelona will lose Messi in a few months time. That’s an absolute certainty now. It will recover from that. The sports graveyard is full of indispensable players.
But this? If the worst is proved true, this level of betrayal will be a lot harder to come back from.