Lionel Messi doesn’t forget. By the sound of it, he hasn’t entirely forgiven, either.
On the evening of Aug. 4, 2021, he and his family flew from Ibiza to Barcelona, touching down at El Prat around 8 p.m. local time. Holiday over, the way he recalls it, his kids were excited about another year at school in Castelldefels and he was looking forward to another season at Camp Nou. It would have been his 18th.
Everything was sorted: an agreement had been reached to renew his contract at the club where he had played since he was 13. His salary would be halved, but he was happy. All he had to do was go in the following day and sign it.
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Overnight, literally overnight, everything changed. Messi was told to leave: go and find another club. A statement was released by Barcelona that evening; the captain could not continue. He hadn’t even been back in the city 24 hours.
Three days later, Messi spoke, although it wasn’t easy to speak at all. “This is hard, I’m not ready for this,” he said. It was the worst moment of his career, he admitted, and it wasn’t about to get better. The league’s financial fair play rules didn’t allow him to renew, which is one way of putting it, the way many prefer as it suits them. Barcelona’s finances didn’t allow it is another. That came as news to him.
Look at the lines he offered: there would still need to be sales and salary cuts, “and I didn’t want that; I had been accused of many things that weren’t true before,” Messi said. And there was no actual formal contract offer, nothing was certain, still. Every line left Laporta looking bad: at one point, Messi even noted that he had not spoken to the president more than a couple of times in two years, and only briefly, even then. At another, asked if Barcelona had done all they could, he replied: “I don’t know.”
Every line essentially said the same thing: this might not happen, I couldn’t trust that it would, look what they did to me. Like last time, he might be stuck. And last time, it was not only that he had to leave Barcelona but, as it turned out, that he had to go Paris. His bad time there was on them. That memory weighed; the damage was done, not forgotten. Not forgiven either.
“When I had to go [the first time] they also said the league had agreed everything and in the end it couldn’t be done,” Messi said. “I feared the same thing happening as last time.” At no point is there excitement over Miami, a sense of a future to embrace. Every word of his interview returned to the last two years: to how bad it had been, to how the home he held onto had been taken from him. To the moment that forced it all on him.
And there is an inescapable fact here: of all the people involved in his departure, for all the blame to be spread around — Bartomeu, Laporta, Tebas, Jorge Messi, Leo — the only one who actually had to go, the only one who had to “pay” for it, the only one wasting two years of his life, the end of his career, was him. And with him, his family.
Which is why he wanted to come back, but also why he said he couldn’t. The finances hadn’t been fixed yet, Barcelona only able to spend 40% of what they can raise. He could have waited — it is only early June, after all, the window not even formally open yet — but what was the guarantee that things would change, that they would succeed in raising the money? How could he be sure that they could register him when they can’t yet register some of the players they already have?
“I feared having to run like I did last time,” he said. “It looked like being a long summer and I didn’t want to go through what I went through two years ago. I preferred to take the decision to end this and think about my future knowing what is possible.”
And yet, it was the past that mattered most. It was early still, but this had gone on long enough. There was no going back and no one had won. Except Miami.