Messi's departure signals the death of Barcelona as we know it

Updated: 5 Aug 2021 19:47 BST
4 min read

Lionel Messi, Barcelona, 2020/21 — © ProShots

Barcelona thought, quite simply, that they were beyond the law and that Lionel Messi would stay.

The shock announcement of the Argentine's departure highlights just how dysfunctional an organisation the Catalan giants have become.

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Everyone has a budget that must be adhered to - unless you’re a super club flagrantly flaunting FFP regulations. Spain, in particular, has the most stringent self-imposed salary laws of any league in the world.

This summer Memphis Depay, Eric Garcia and Sergio Aguero have arrived. Their wage allowance for 2020/21, given the €1.2 billion of debt hanging over the organisation, was always going to be stripped to the bone. There were estimates it would be less than €200m.

Messi’s contract would consume roughly half of that amount. Even with extended deals and accounting deferment, it didn’t seem viable. And yet Joan Laporta assured everyone to relax, that the deal would be done, and Messi would sign for another five years.

That relationship has been blown apart on Thursday. It’s no longer leverage, as Messi did last summer, to try and put himself in a better position. It’s an official announcement, from the club Twitter account, terminating the relationship. It’s a staggering turn of events.

LATEST NEWS | Leo #Messi will not continue with FC Barcelona
— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona) August 5, 2021

It’s difficult to stress quite how badly Barcelona have been run in recent years. Since Neymar’s expensive departure to PSG in 2017, €1bn has been wasted on bad signings, wages and signing-on fees, and after all that, there’s barely a sellable asset to show for it.

Antoine Griezmann, an expensive fall guy who they waited 12 months to sign when the club accounts suggested it was already too rich. Phillipe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele, two over-inflated, over-hyped signings who never fitted the system and who decimated the Neymar money and have offered nothing close to any kind of return.

And that’s before we get to the wage bill. Messi’s €100m per year aside, some of the salaries handed out to players barely good enough to feature in Barcelona’s golden age of 2009 and 2011 would make Cules weep.

And that’s what this announcement is, a full stop at the end of the Barcelona dynasty. An end of an era, one totally self-inflicted.

Successive presidents - Sandro Rosell, Josep Maria Bartomeu and Laporta himself, who cannot be protected from blame given his first period in charge - have overseen a reduction in standard while the money spent increased. It’s unconscionable, it’s a disaster, and it made Messi feel he was left without an option.

Make no mistake. Messi would have left 12 months ago had the economic conditions allowed it. He was so disillusioned with the makeup of the squad, fresh from a battering by Bayern Munich in the Champions League, that he wanted out.

Only Bartomeu’s ability to hold him to the remaining year of his contract, and demand a huge fee to sell him, fended off suitors. There’s no such issue this time.

Messi’s been out of contract for a month. And yet everyone just expected a financial situation where the numbers didn’t add up to be resolved. It’s a classic case of what everyone had duped themselves into thinking was inevitable, actually couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Where Messi goes next is almost irrelevant. That a historic organisation such as Barcelona has brought itself to a position where the greatest player ever feels it is no longer workable is the biggest crime of all.

We’re witnessing the death of Barcelona as we know it.