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In the midst of the discussions about the future of Lionel Messi and the famous clause of 700 million euros, many are asking the question: is it worth today, at 33, such an amount?
The question is so subjective that it has at least two obvious answers, depending on who you ask: if the question is raised in Argentina or Barcelona, they will say yes and believe that it is even little; If you ask yourself in London or Manchester, where would you go, according to press rumors, they would say that you are older and that you already gave your best performance.
That is why it is worth asking an objective source: statistics. This is the exercise carried out by the BBC, which has compared the player’s performance since 2004 with the FC Barcelona shirt and has drawn interesting conclusions about his present.
Since the reference year, when he stood out in the Spanish club in which he has played all his life, each season he has grown in number of games and goals scored until reaching his peak in 2011-12, when he added 60 games and 73 goals. . From that point on, the curve decreased until last season he played 44 games and scored 31 goals between La Liga, Champions League, Copa del Rey and Super Cup.
And despite an injury at the beginning of the sports year and the suspension of football due to the pandemic, it was enough to be a LaLiga scorer, with 25 goals in 33 appearances. However, this data does not leave the Spanish tournament well standing because, counting the 5 leagues, up to four were more effective than him in the face of goal, according to UEFA data: Ciro Immobile (Lazio, 36), Robert Lewandowski (Bayern, 34), Cristiano Ronaldo (Juventus, 31) and Timo Werner (Leipzig, 28).
What happened to his predator nose? That over the years he has been delaying his position on the court, which has not been bad news at all, since it allows him to perfect his facet of traditional number 10: according to the BBC “no one tried more dribbles than he in the main European leagues (403 ) and only the Spanish of the English Wolves Adama Traoré was more successful (275 vs. 260) “.
Another facet that is revealed is that of an assistant, since he is “the first La Liga player to score and assist more than 20 opportunities in a season, something that Thierry Henry had achieved for the last time with Arsenal in the major leagues of Europe ( 24 goals and 20 assists in 2002-03) … And his 24 assists between the League and the Champions League were the best mark in a career in which he had only exceeded 20 on three occasions, “says the source. Of course, in this area he is not the best, because Roberto Lewandowski surpasses him, but he is the second, at 33 years old.
The only thing that did not change was his astonishing passing precision: “last season (82%) it was the highest in the last four years, although it was slightly below the 85-87% of the previous five years”, says BBC.
Then, is it worth the 700 million euros? Probably for the market the figure is crazy even for the most expensive in the world, the French Kylian Mbappé. But that it is a safe investment, that he still has some good years of performance at the highest level – thanks to his discipline and that he did not suffer serious injuries in his career – and that 8-2 was not the summary of his sports news, everything That is a fact. The novel of his future has a lot to do with precisely that, because he is still a top player even though he is older and that is why so many clubs with financial muscle follow the course of his history at FC Barcelona in detail.
