A day after his sacrifice enabled the signing of Eric García and Memphis Depay, Piqué headed home the latter’s free-kickGerard Piqué was 13 or 14 the day the Barcelona manager came to tea. When his grandfather proudly introduced him as the future Camp Nou centre-back, Louis van Gaal walked over and, without a word, pushed him to the floor. Standing over him, he looked down at this kid lying there and delivered a devastating verdict: you’re too weak to play for Barcelona. Twenty-one years, 567 games, eight leagues, eight cups and four European Cups later, a World Cup and a Euros too, he’s not just still standing; he’s carrying the club on his shoulders. Well, someone has to.That was how...
Lionel Messi and Sergio Ramos are gone, while Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid will fancy their chances of back-to-back titlesZinedine Zidane was the first one out, so early it feels like a lifetime ago. Then Sergio Ramos departed, the full-time whistle finally catching up with him. Now Lionel Messi has gone, flying back into Barcelona to find the contract he had come to sign was no longer there. Arguably the three most significant men in Spanish football over the past decade, along with Cristiano Ronaldo, all gone in a single summer. And Ronaldo had already left three years earlier.This week, Ramos contacted Messi to say he could stay at his place if he liked. There was always respect there – well,...
Even in his moment of greatest sadness there was no recrimination, only departing tears, which Barcelona then repackaged as contentFittingly, it began and ended with a napkin. Lionel Messi’s first Barcelona contract was signed hastily on a restaurant serviette. Now, as he sobbed his way through his farewell press conference, his wife, Antonella, stepped forward from the front row to hand him a tissue. “If the rule you followed brought you to this,” asks Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, “of what use was the rule?”Out in the world beyond, Messi’s choking tears were already being repackaged as content. The live stream on Barcelona’s YouTube channel was accompanied by numerous clickable links inviting viewers to purchase...
If there is one thing guaranteed to make it difficult to sell players, it is other clubs knowing you have to sell players“I don’t want to create false hopes,” Joan Laporta said, but that was all they had left. Barcelona’s president had been explaining the reasons why they could no longer keep Lionel Messi, offering a portrait of bankruptcy partly created by the pursuit of hopes that were not real, the consequences of calamitous management at the club, when he was asked the question some inevitably clung to. More than once, in fact. What if?What if there was still a way to fix this? What if there was a shot at salvation, some way back? A sale, a loophole in...
Wherever perhaps the greatest player of all time ends up, this wretched tale shows what modern football has becomePerhaps football has never been about football. Certainly it’s a long time since those who pontificate about the separation of sport and politics have seemed anything other than peripheral cranks (albeit an alarming number of them serve on the IOC or at Westminster). But still, the saga of Lionel Messi’s contract is so profoundly sordid that you wonder whether Ebenezer Morley, if he had known where it would lead, would ever have written the letter to Bell’s Life magazine in 1863 that led to the formation of the Football Association a year later.Morley’s main concern was to end “feverish” disputes about the...