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...
The Barcelona maestro has been in top form in the Copa América, but his country’s pool of young talent is drying upThe ball comes to Lionel Messi in midfield. He returns it with a disdainful flick of the foot that says: I can’t do anything with this. I don’t want it. Take it back. And then he sighs and walks off in the opposite direction. Surprised, and a little abashed, Guido Rodríguez gathers the ball and looks around for somebody else to pass it to.Perhaps it’s because Messi gives so few interviews – and tends to say so little in the interviews he gives – that over time you start to delude yourself, in a weird anthropomorphic way, that you...
Willingness to believe in the cult of the winner is worsening the plight of Barcelona and Juventus On Tuesday, Juventus might overcome a 2-1 deficit against Porto in the Champions League. On Wednesday, Barcelona almost certainly won’t come back from 4-1 down to beat Paris Saint-Germain. Both clubs were comprehensively outplayed in the first legs, both are burdened by an ageing and expensive superstar, both have found the cracks in their financial planning exposed by the pandemic. At some point the narratives of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo will decouple, but not now, not yet.Football deals badly with mortality. It can be brutal in dealing with those with whom it has finished. Bill Shankly couldn’t even tell Ian St John...