Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi waves before the 54th Joan Gamper Trophy friendly football match between Barcelona and Arsenal at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona on August 4, 2019.JOSEP LAGO/AFP/Getty Images
Lionel Messi’s connection to his employer, FC Barcelona, was born out of a charitable impulse.
At 10 years old, Messi developed a serious growth hormone deficiency. After moving to Spain from Argentina, Messi was offered a tryout for Barcelona’s academy. He was a reedy tween, only four-and-a-half feet tall, and perhaps never going to get any bigger. But Barcelona offered him an academy spot, as well as agreeing to pay his roughly thousand-dollar-a-month medical expenses.
It would turn out to be the greatest investment in the history of sport.
No modern athlete is more associated with a great club than Messi has been with Barcelona these past 20-odd years.
Long before he got to the senior team, he was already a legend. Once he arrived at 17 years old, he shot well past the hype. His tenure has coincided with the most successful run in the Catalan club’s history.
At the height of it – roughly 2005-15 – Barcelona was the greatest team in the world. Of any kind, playing any sport and of all time.
Now, just like that, it’s over.
On Tuesday, Messi informed Barcelona he wants to leave the club. In a nice, passive-aggressive touch, he delivered the message via fax.
Nothing gets the emotions running hot quite like a good sports divorce – Gretzky and the Oilers; LeBron and Cleveland (Parts 1 and 2); Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. This one will put all others in the shade.
You wanted relief from COVID? This is it. Not that it’s going to help in a public-health sense. But it’s all anyone in the world will be talking about for weeks.
Messi has been souring on Barcelona for most of 2020. This year, a long, slow decline became a malaise.
Good times or bad, Messi has always presented the same public face. His shyness and reticence are famous. Schoolboy teammates have claimed they thought he was mute.
So when Messi got on Instagram to rip his boss in February, the effect was seismic.
It started when Barcelona’s sporting director, Eric Abidal, said in an interview he’d fired the manager because the players had quit on him. Messi challenged Abidal to name which players, exactly, he was talking about. He then accused Abidal of “dirtying” the squad.
This isn’t standard operating procedure at any club. But at Barcelona, it’s the equivalent of lighting up a Molotov cocktail in the middle of a board meeting.
A couple of months later, Messi was back at it. A tempest had arisen over player wage cuts in the midst of the pandemic. Messi blamed the club’s board for inflaming the situation. Once again, he did it publicly.
When Barcelona lost the league, Messi got on TV and called his team “inconsistent” and “weak.”
A guy who’d never said boo to a goose was all of a sudden turning into Norma Rae.
The cause of all this bickering was the club’s quality. At 33, Messi remains an irresistible force. But the great ones arrayed around him, several of them his former academy colleagues, are no longer quite as great.
The club reached its nadir two weeks ago in an 8-2 Champions League shellacking by eventual champion, Bayern Munich.
As a matter of general principles, Barcelona does not lose by six goals. There is no acceptable reason for that to happen.
Within hours, another manager (and another one Messi didn’t like much) had been fired. Then Abidal walked the plank (six months too late to do any good). The new manager, Ronald Koeman, held emergency talks with his one-man band.
“Messi is Barcelona,” Koeman said afterward. “And Barcelona is Messi.”
One supposes the meeting didn’t go quite as well as he’d thought.
Submitting a formal request for transfer is an extraordinary measure in soccer. It almost always ends one way – with the player getting what he wants. And no player has ever had as much leverage as this one.
Usually, this would be fairly simple. Only a few clubs on Earth can afford Messi’s salary, which is reported to be in the neighbourhood of $100-million a year. Every one of them will want him, so it’s a matter of which one he prefers.
An early favourite might be Manchester City. It has the cash, is managed by the man who guided Messi through his golden period, and is far enough away from Spain to soften the blow there.
But this fracas is complicated (I would probably say massively improved) by the fact that Messi disputes Barcelona’s contractual hold on him.
He reportedly believes he can cancel his deal at will so long as he publicly states his intentions. Which he’s just done. He would then be free to move anywhere he likes without a transfer fee.
Conversely, Barcelona believes any club that wants Messi must still pay his $1.1-billion buy-out clause (yes, you read that number right).
I suppose it’s possible this family squabble can still be patched up. But it appears more likely that it’s headed toward complete estrangement. Messi will appear awfully silly if he goes back on what he’s just done, which may be why he did it.
There is something sad and inevitable about all this. Messi was one of the last connections to the 20th-century ideal of coming up and eventually going out with the same organization.
Some time in the nineties, sports became the best-paid slice of the gig economy. Greed got repackaged and moralized (“I’m just doing what’s best for my family”). Loyalty became a synonym for foolishness. Messi was a one-man bulwark against that shift.
One of his former teammates, Javier Mascherano, once summed him up this way: “Although he may not be human, it’s good that Messi still thinks he is.” That is the key to Messi’s global appeal – he seems surreal and completely down-to-earth at the same time. People everywhere connect to his remarkable averageness.
Well, he’s never seemed more human than he does right now. That usually means something bad is about to happen.