It is the way that many long marriages fall apart. The first talk of divorce comes from one side. The decree nisi ends up being set in motion by the other. And there is a third party, a saboteur, named and shamed.
A year after Lionel Messi announced he wanted away from Barcelona, the club he has elevated for more than half his lifetime, it is the Catalan giants who have told him that they can no longer live with him, at least in the way he expects to be treated.
The love is still there, the club’s president made clear yesterday, and Joan Laporta gathers from Messi that it is an enduring, two-way affection. It is just that to continue the relationship means jeopardising the future, the next generation. Besides, that villainous third party, Spain’s La Liga, has put an insurmountable barrier between them.
Laporta, standing on a podium at the Nou Camp’s 1899 Auditorium — note the date: Barcelona have been around for 122 years, the president kept reminding us, longer than their star — gave a detailed explanation of why an all-but-agreed new contract between the club and their captain had not been signed. He also outlined why Messi’s next contract is now as likely to be with somebody else as with the Catalan club.
“We worked very hard to make it work,” Laporta said, all wounded spouse, “but could not — for reasons beyond our control.”
Advertisement
The immediate marriage-breaker cited here is La Liga’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules, which require top- division clubs to operate according to a ratio of expenditure, on salaries and transfer fees, to projected income. According to Laporta, the new contract acceptable to Messi, whose deal expired in June, would have pushed Barcelona’s outgoings to 110 per cent of their income, even though Messi had agreed to halve his previous £78 million basic salary. “The deal we reached did not fit with La Liga,” said Laporta, who concluded that after several weeks of negotiations with Messi’s advisers, there was no way of squaring the circle.
There was no give, either, from La Liga, in which the caps on spending are more restrictive than in other European leagues and are designed to prevent clubs from going to the wall. Barcelona argue that, given the unprecedented impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on revenues, La Liga might have shown greater flexibility. “It seemed they were going to ease the fair play [rules],” the Barcelona president said, explaining why the talks with Messi had progressed so far before stalling suddenly.
Laporta, who began his second mandate as president in March, spoke for close to 80 sobering minutes. At one stage he was interrupted by a social media post from the La Liga president, Javier Tebas, anxious not to be styled as the spoilsport in the Messi saga.
Tebas tweeted his way into Laporta’s press conference to point out that, last week, he had engineered “a solution” for all Spanish clubs struggling with the post-Covid recession: a proposed deal with the venture capital firm CVC, promising an immediate injection of about £230 million to Barcelona — their share of a total fund for La Liga clubs — in exchange for CVC taking a 10 per cent stake in long-term media rights for the league.
“We will not mortgage the club for half a century,” responded Laporta, who, directly addressing Tebas, added that the proposed CVC deal undervalues La Liga. Real Madrid also oppose it. The two biggest Spanish clubs, both supportive of a European Super League, are expected to lobby other clubs to reject the CVC offer.
Advertisement
“La Liga wanted to have Messi in their competition,” Laporta noted, “but there are clubs who want the [FFP] rules stuck to, which I respect.” But he acknowledged that the squeeze on Barcelona’s ability to pay high salaries is not conditioned only by the application of rigid spending guidelines to one poor financial year.
“We inherited a dire legacy,” he said in reference to his predecessor, Josep Maria Bartomeu, who left Messi so unhappy that the player (unsuccessfully) asked the president to release him from his contract 12 months ago. Bartomeu, Laporte claims, also left concealed chambers of debt, to which are added the effects of the pandemic. “The losses that we had forecast would be €200 million [about £170 million] will be €487 million,” Laporta said. “Our audit shows the numbers are much worse than we have been told, and we haven’t had time to turn the situation around.”
Messi was told the same, it is understood, in answer to his exasperation that contract negotiations were abruptly declared impossible on Thursday. Laporta, who is on good terms with Messi, insisted he had talked in good faith to the star’s advisers but said that, when confronted by the hard line of La Liga on FFP and the slow-reveal gravity of the club’s economic ills, “We and Leo have faced the reality.”
Was it a bluff? Laporta gave no indication that he expects Messi to return to talks with lighter demands, saying: “I do not want to raise hopes. He’s the best player in the world, he has other offers.”
What Barcelona have not had is handsome offers for any of the players whose sales might have generated funds and eased the wage bill. At the start of last year they were paying more to their players than any club in the world. The list of poor investments has become shorthand for how to spend big and badly: Philippe Coutinho, signed from Liverpool in 2018; Ousmane Dembélé, from Borussia Dortmund in 2017; and Antoine Griezmann, who joined for £108 million in 2019, a year after he had told Barcelona, humiliatingly, he did not want to play for them.
Advertisement
Dembélé is for sale, but unfit. Coutinho is for sale, loan or any other device that may cover a portion of his wage. For the right price, Griezmann can go.
But there is no stampede of buyers. The market is flat. Some Barcelona players have accepted salary deferments; others resist revising their contracts. There are new arrivals too, free transfers like Sergio Agüero, Memphis Depay and Eric García, all alarmed to learn there is a risk of not being registered for La Liga, let alone that the alluring idea of playing alongside Messi turned out to be a breakable promise.
