BARCELONA – Lionel messi He will not play for Barcelona again, unless there was a turnaround as absolute as right now utopian, and after three months, if not more, of turning to an issue that always seemed to be heading towards a diametrically different end, he goes to the stage the warning that was repeated actively and passively from the Argentine player’s environment, cooling down again and again all the optimistic messages that were transferred from the Camp Nou.
Joan Laporta spoke of a “calamitous inheritance” at the press conference in which this Friday he sentenced the departure of the Argentine star and denounced that if with Leo the club’s salary mass is at 110 percent of its income, without him it falls to 95, which is not enough either. However, the more than 560 million dollars of losses that the president announced that the club is going to suffer can be understood as definitive.
Messi wanted to stay at Barça as much as Barça wanted Messi to remain Barça, but after months of negotiations, comings and goings, encrypted messages and vain hopes, reality won the pulse of illusion. It’s over…
On June 1, ESPN published, citing sources from the Barça club, that the agreement between the two parties was practically a fact, in the absence of small fringes, and that Leo’s continuity at the Camp Nou was sentenced. Immediately, a source very close to the Argentine player rushed to cool the matter down. “It is not true. There is a lot to talk about,” he revealed at the beginning of June and practically that was the speech, simple, which was repeated every time information appeared pointing out that the OK was a matter of days, or hours …
And although Leo, silent about referring to Barça in any public appearance before, during and after the Copa América, always kept his continuity at the Camp Nou as the first option, as the weeks passed around the club began to settle the feeling that Joan Laporta’s optimism was a pose facing the gallery and that his famous electoral sentence, “I fix Messi with a barbecue”, had no foundation.
In this chess game the pieces have been moving with caution and foresight since Laporta took office on March 17th and until July 14 when Leo’s representatives gave their approval to the club’s final proposal. A month and a half after Barça solved the closed agreement, the positive response from Jorge Messi finally arrived in a telephone conversation with Laporta.
Everything was agreed and agreed … Pending, only, to fit in the salary limit established by LaLiga.
That is why the player’s silence continued, already on vacation, and that his closest collaborators maintained the same cold tone, even though Leo had no other idea to follow, in view of the fact that all the club’s efforts collided with the reality: the difficulty in accelerating the exit operation of players who do not count for the club (impossibility at the moment) and the reluctance of others to adapt (lower their salary) constituted an increasingly insurmountable wall … until at the beginning of the week everything was blown up.
On Wednesday afternoon, theoretically oblivious to everything, Leo Messi returned to Barcelona with the purpose of closing the agreement. The idea was to announce it on Thursday, join the preseason on Friday and go to the Johan Cruyff stadium on Sunday as captain to address the fans even if he did not play against Juventus. But at night his father, Jorge, already flying from Argentina, learned from Laporta that everything was twisted and that it was completely impossible to sign.
Nobody knew it on Thursday morning when the most prominent members of the Board of Directors were briefed directly by the president and the heavyweights of the staff also learned the reality. The surprise with which Jorge Messi received the news was brutal. So much so that in his conversation with Laporta he transferred a feeling of absolute disbelief, the same as the footballer felt, confined to his home in Castelldefels and trying to get used to the idea of this new scenario.
“It is not a play. There is nothing to do,” they assured ESPN Digital up to three different sources of the Barça club, already at night, rejecting that the farewell statement was nothing more than a way to pressure LaLiga. From the entity It is maintained that the possible “and the impossible” were done to fit in that new Messi contract; from the player’s environment it is considered that, as was warned so repeatedly in recent months, the situation was never as clear as it was wanted to show .
And, for the first time in the history of professional football, an unprecedented event was consummated: a club that wanted a player and a player who loved that club could not agree. It’s over … Or so it’s supposed.