There was a time in the last decade when many Barcelona fans would have happily swapped a Champions League title for the sight of Lionel Messi lifting the World Cup.
Now Messi has done that, what would they do to see him back playing in a Barcelona shirt?
It has been 17 months since Messi’s abrupt departure from the club where he had spent his entire senior career. The forward’s exit left an open wound at Camp Nou which has not healed to this day.
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The emotions are still raw, but the reality is the decision to let Messi leave on a free transfer to Paris Saint-Germain was executed in the most clinical way.
One episode stands out from the gossip and conspiracy theories behind Messi’s move to the French capital. It involves one of his former team-mates and someone he had shared a dressing room with since their days at the club’s La Masia academy, where they were part of a renowned generation of youth players — Gerard Pique.
Let’s rewind to August 2021.
Joan Laporta, voted back in for a second stint as club president five months earlier, has realised how difficult it will be to finalise a contract extension for Messi, given La Liga’s salary cap rules. Barcelona’s salary limit has been almost halved in the previous two seasons — in the summer of 2019, the league had allowed them to invest €671million in player salaries, but this had dropped to €347m following the impact of the pandemic and former president Josep Maria Bartomeu’s tenure.
According to Football Leaks, Messi’s final contract at the club accounted for 30 per cent of their entire salary limit.
Laporta decided to call the team captains, to inform them of the situation. Pique took an active role in those conversations and, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais, told his ultimate boss that “without Messi, all the financial problems are fixed”.
Sources close to the former Manchester United and Spain defender declined to comment when this was put to them, but it is understood the relationship between the former team-mates has cooled to the extent that they have not been in touch since Messi’s exit.
Laporta was forced into a corner, drowning in numbers and wage limits. Messi boarded a plane to Paris and hasn’t set foot in Camp Nou since. But his shadow continues to loom over the Catalan club.
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Last August, when Messi had less than a year left on his two-year contract at PSG, Laporta made a typically loud statement in Los Angeles during Barcelona’s pre-season tour.
Barcelona president Joan Laporta said the club had a ‘moral debt’ to Lionel Messi because of the manner of his 2021 departure (Photo: Eric Alonso/Getty Images).“We have a moral debt with Lionel Messi,” Laporta said. “We’d love for him to spend the end of his career playing in a Barcelona shirt, receiving ovations in every stadium he goes to. It’s a dream we have. There’s nothing discussed, but it’s my goal as I feel jointly responsible for his departure.
“I think we can manage to make this dream a reality.”
Those were strong words from the club president. Not only did he admit a mistake in letting Messi leave, he also made it seem as if the Argentina international could return to play for Barcelona again.
Since then, not a month has passed without a quote from inside the club about Messi’s potential return.
Economic vice-president Eduard Romeu maintained some optimism in September. “Would a deal for Messi be feasible next summer?” he asked. “Well, he’d come back for free, so probably yes.”
In October, Romeu spoke on the topic again. “It’s an issue that does not belong to my department, this is a question for the sporting area,” he said. “If our staff consider him the right choice, we’ll work on it. As the president said in the past, Messi is a club asset and he’ll always have the doors open to come back.”
The narrative continued throughout the first half of the season, beyond Barcelona’s Champions League group-stage exit and up to the World Cup break. With Barcelona spending the hiatus top of La Liga, Laporta cooled talk of a reunion with Argentina’s triumphant captain.
“Messi? We will see,” Laporta said. “These things are always really complicated. Plus, there’s PSG involved and we don’t want to get tangled in any controversies, so I won’t say more than that.”
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That appears to be the party line at present for Barcelona. Club sources, who preferred to remain anonymous to protect their jobs, admitted “the options Barcelona have to bring Messi back are not big”, and said the 35-year-old’s return was “a dream we have, but we can’t overhype expectations”.
Last week, Laporta spoke again.
“I had to put the club in front of the best player to ever grace this sport,” he said. “FC Barcelona, from my point of view, are above any footballer, president, anyone. The club was financially ruined that summer. On the brink of bankruptcy. We did what we had to do, sadly.
“I prefer not to speak much more, because he is a PSG player. You have to respect that because otherwise I’ll be receiving backlash from everywhere. What’s true is that Messi will always be a part of FC Barcelona’s history. I would like him to have a different ending with the club to the one he had.”
When asked what a different ending at Barcelona for Messi could look like, Laporta said: “I can’t tell or I’m in trouble.”
Why did Barcelona believe last summer that he could return only to be taking a more cautious tone now? Is it a change of approach? Do they really want him back? Or is there a larger game at play here — is it, in fact, hugely beneficial to those in charge at Camp Nou to dangle the beloved Messi’s name like a carrot in front of supporters, keeping them optimistic?
Laporta seemed to hint at a final swansong for Messi back in Catalonia, but it’s difficult to see how that could happen.
Barcelona’s La Liga-imposed salary limit is €656million — a figure inflated by the series of financial levers the club pulled last summer. Following their early, expensive Champions League exit, however, the club are understood to be €26million short of their estimated income for this season — which affects the salary cap set by La Liga.
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How does Messi fit into all that? The naive answer would be to say the forward could return and be given a low, basically symbolic salary compared to what he could earn elsewhere. But the realistic answer is that he does not fit in, particularly given this is not a team who can guarantee him trophies — which is another of his priorities.
Laporta also claimed last week that he had been in touch with Messi over the past 18 months, which seemed to contradict what sources close to the Argentinian have said. If you speak to Messi’s camp, they insist Barcelona have made no contact since he left. They say Laporta and the family have not spoken since then, not even after what he said in Los Angeles last summer.
Deep down, though, the same people do believe Laporta genuinely wanted to extend Messi’s 21-year stay at Barcelona when he won the club’s 2021 presidential election.
Another factor to consider is that Messi is now finally settled in Paris.
This was not the case last year.
Messi and his family spent three months looking for a house and living in Le Royal Monceau, a hotel in the heart of the French capital, which could not have been further from the lifestyle they enjoyed in the Castelldefels district of Barcelona, where they barely had to set foot in the city centre. The search for a school for their kids, who have now adapted to life in Paris, also took months.
Messi’s wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, is more settled in Paris too, having been pictured on social media doing commercial work in the city for high-end fashion brands including Dolce & Gabbana, Guerlain and Louis Vuitton.
There were also problems on the pitch for Messi in those early days at PSG, according to sources from his camp. It took time for him to adapt to life with his new team, having missed pre-season with Barcelona as the contract saga trundled on.
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Then, as soon as he was getting into gear, he was sidelined by COVID-19. Messi tested positive after spending his Christmas holidays back in Argentina and had to deal with a tough variant which left him with heavy symptoms — including a mark on one of his lungs. He was kept out of training for two weeks and missed three games as a result.
Messi scored 11 goals and provided 15 assists across all club competitions in his 2021-22 debut season — his worst numbers since his early, breakthrough years in Spain more than a decade earlier. He didn’t even make the top 30 in voting for the 2022 Ballon d’Or, an award he won seven times with Barcelona, which seemed harsh but reflected the fact he was far from his best.
Messi is enjoying his football again at PSG, scoring or assisting 26 goals so far this season (Photo: Octavio Passos/Getty Images).Paris may never be Barcelona for Messi, who has said he will return to live in the Catalan capital once he retires — “I promised that to my kids,” he said when he left Camp Nou — but the new season has provided a fresh start.
Forget about winning the World Cup for a second — Messi has scored 12 goals and assisted 14 in 19 games for PSG in his second year with the serial French champions. Even aside from his personal life, his camp insists he is content with the atmosphere in the dressing room — and that’s why the most likely option for his immediate future is that he signs a contract extension to continue at the Parc des Princes.
Of course, that won’t mean his name isn’t mentioned in Barcelona.
In Catalonia, Messi is someone who transcends statistics and contracts — he is an ideology, a way of understanding the game of football and a political asset in arguably the most politicised club in the world.
Anyone in charge of the Camp Nou boardroom over the past decade lived in fear of being the president who let Messi leave.
Sandro Rosell, who had that job for almost four years from the summer of 2010, listened to executive Javier Faus criticise Messi on the record in early 2014 for wanting to extend his contract, then gave the player a new deal a few months later.
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Bartomeu, Rosell’s successor, even rejected a formal plea from Messi to be allowed to leave in the summer of 2020. The transfer request proved Bartomeu’s lowest point in terms of popularity among the club’s fans. He eventually resigned before he was forced to face a no-confidence vote led by socios (club members) and prompted by his fallout with Messi — although by that point more than 19,000 members had signed a motion to remove him.
Three years earlier, Bartomeu had given the Argentinian the biggest contract in sports history, according to Spanish outlet El Mundo, worth around €2.6million per week.
In fact, the possibility that Messi would stay at Barcelona was one of the factors which strengthened Laporta’s campaign in the presidential election he won in March 2021.
The two candidates who gathered the most votes, Laporta and Victor Font, both said the club had to work out how to extend the talismanic forward’s contract. No one could afford to let him down. And now, no one can afford to be against him.
Messi will almost certainly have a huge impact on future elections too.
Candidates will listen to him as they prepare their campaigns and it would be no surprise if they were to offer the Argentinian an executive role. In the future, his words could decide elections.
Barcelona have something in their favour any club would be desperate for: a brand associated with arguably the greatest player of all time and one with massive influence.
One of Messi’s Instagram posts after winning the World Cup last month became the most popular in the social media platform’s history with more than 74 million likes. That he boasts such a vast fanbase is largely thanks to the performances he produced in a Barcelona shirt, rather than an Argentina or PSG one.
Barcelona can say they were responsible for maximising Messi’s talent and moulding him into the player he became. That is also part of the reason why Premier League players still find it hard to reject overtures from Camp Nou during each summer transfer window — Messi helped make Barca this big.
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When Messi sent a burofax — a registered letter — to Bartomeu’s office after the 2019-20 season telling him he wanted to leave on a free transfer, he was set on joining Manchester City. The forward reached out to City manager Pep Guardiola — with whom he had enjoyed such success at Barcelona — and the Premier League club started exploring a potential contract proposal.
The plan discussed in the City boardroom involved offering Messi a route to New York City, their sister club in Major League Soccer, when his days of playing for them in the Premier League were over. They also considered the idea of making Messi a club ambassador after he retired.
That would have linked the City brand to Messi for life, rather than two to four years as a player. Of course, it never happened, but it was proof of the kind of influence he exerts.
Barcelona had already understood this, which meant fans experienced a sense of catharsis when he finally lifted the World Cup last month.
Watching Messi’s performances for Argentina in Qatar was like a trip down memory lane for Barca fans; as if they had dusted off their high-school photo albums and realised how happy they used to be.
Many Barcelona fans felt a sense of nostalgia watching Messi lift the World Cup with Argentina last month (Photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images).These days, it is easy for Barcelona fans to feel a sense of nostalgia — it is tempting to remember any day in the club’s recent past was better than what is happening today.
The stats don’t help either.
While Barcelona have failed to make it past the Champions League group stage in both the seasons since Messi left, he has scored nine goals and provided four assists in 12 games for PSG in Europe’s premier club competition, helping them into the knockout phase twice.
Last season, Barcelona scored just two goals in their six Champions League group games. In this one, excluding their meetings with Czech outsiders Viktoria Plzen, it was just three in four.
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With uncertainties mounting in Barcelona — when will the stadium be revamped? When will the team be ready to compete in the Champions League? Is Xavi the right manager? — the one constant is the name of Lionel Andres Messi Cuccitini.
That is all fans want right now; a certainty to hold on to.
That is why no matter how far from Barcelona he strays, Messi will always dictate the mood around Camp Nou.
(Main graphic — photos: Getty Images/design: Kris Sheasby)
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