The blame game has already started at Barcelona – who is most responsible for the club allowing its greatest ever player to slip away when he clearly still has two or three years of brilliant football left?
The club’s former president Josep Bartomeu will always be the man most attached to this catastrophic failure to run a football club properly. Had he not overseen the squandering of vast sums of money on the likes of Philippe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele the club would not be in the financial mire, regardless of the pandemic.
He should have renewed Messi several seasons ago instead of breaking transfer records on players who have then been monumental failures.
La Liga president Javier Tebas will be blamed by many for going too far with the Spanish League’s internal financial fairplay rules.
One thing was to get Spain’s house in order and radically reverse the shameful position many clubs were in – spending fortunes on players while owing the Spanish tax man huge sums, but could he have been more pragmatic after a pandemic that has wrenched 300m from the coffers of Spain’s clubs?
Surely it’s in La Liga’s interests to keep Messi and in Real Madrid’s interest to be cut more financial slack so they can make signings this summer? Could Tebas not have met with Spain’s big four club’s to thrash out a solution.
La Liga’s president deserves massive praise for making La Liga more competitive and no longer just allowing the big two to run things but perhaps this was the time to take a step back, ease back on salary restrictions in what will be the first season with fans back in the stadiums since the coronavirus.
Messi will take some blame too. Why not play for free if you love the club so much? That has been the cry from some Barça fans. No one chooses to work for free and those that say Messi is not to blame for the club’s financial mess are spot-on. It’s also true that he brings as much money to the club as they spend on him. It still would have been a fantastic gesture to the club he has been at since he was 13 to make some attempt to enable the club to sign him without breaking La Liga rules. He will say a 50 per cent wage cut was exactly that gesture.
Assuming current president Joan Laporta can not turn the situation around – and in theory he still has the rest of the month to do so – then he will also be far from blameless.
He ran his last election campaign on the sole pledge to do everything he could to make sure Messi stayed. He came as close as is possible to promising it in an interview with Sportsmail when he said he could not imagine Messi in any other club’s shirt.
When he goes before reporters today at 10am he will have many questions to answer:
Why was he so confident in recent weeks and days that the club would be able to keep Messi?
Why were Messi and his father under the impression that they would be signing the new contract on Thursday?
Why has Laporta apparently thrown in the towel when there are still three weeks to sell other players?
La Liga rules don’t say the club can’t register Messi, so why do they not register Messi and not register other players?
Why was the Messi announcement on Thursday timed to follow La Liga’s announcement that they had agreed a 270 billion euros deal with a group of American investors?
Why on Thursday night did Barcelona follow Real Madrid’s lead and say that they would not accept that deal? Does a potential financial injection of 280m euros for the club – 15 per cent of which can be spent on players – not help them keep Messi?
Laporta’s press conference should shed some light on those queries. And will go a long way to deciding if he is remembered as the ‘president who lost Messi’, or if history decides that Bartomeu, Tebas and Messi himself were the reason the club legend had to leave.