[ad_1]
LIonel Messi can start negotiating with any team he likes in four days, but he won’t. That is the good news for the Barcelona fans and there is more. As the Argentine stating “now I feel good, excited”, describing the arrival of Ronald Koeman as a coach as a “great choice”, and insisting that the “difficult, terrible” summer in which he tried to force his departure is “behind me”. Or the fact that he called Barcelona “my life” and his connection to the club “a love relationship”.
Many of those who settled in to watch Sunday’s hour-long television interview did so in search of optimism, reasons for hope. If they really looked closely, and they did, they might as well have found it in the way Messi spoke about his troubles in the past tense and his wish for the new president to put Barcelona back on the winning track. They could also hold on to the removal of former president Josep Maria Bartomeu, whom Messi said had swindled and reported him against, and whose handling of Luis Suárez had been “crazy.” With Bartomeu gone, maybe things can go back to normal.
There was also no indication that a way out had been decided. During the course of the interview in La Sexta, Jordi Évole took out two Lonely Planet guides, one for Manchester and one for Paris, but Messi told him to keep them. He said that he had spoken with Pep Guardiola, the best coach he has had with Luis Enrique, but “it is not about getting back together.” The mentions of Neymar were about his return to Catalonia, not about Messi going to France. Above all, the Barcelona captain told Évole that he will not leave. For now.
And that is the bad news for the Barcelona fans. When asked if he would start talking to potential suitors in the coming days, Messi’s answer was clear and definitive. “No, far from it,” he said. But the rest of them don’t. They were honest and, at times, surprisingly open; He talked about how his wife, Antonella, had encouraged him to see a psychologist and how he accepts that he should, but not definitively. Messi will play this season, he said, doing “everything he can for the club.”
But then? “It would not be good to say what I’m going to do because I don’t know either,” Messi said.
There was another standout line when Messi said that he had always wanted to play for the United States one day. That was something new, a revelation, he had previously talked about ending his career in Barcelona or maybe even Newell’s Old Boys, and it was also intriguing, inevitably drawing minds to clubs like City, with connections to the United States. But maybe that’s too much and this answer could be (and mostly was) interpreted as a pre-retirement plan, something still a bit far off. The short and medium term was a different matter.
Yet listening to Messi speak, looking at him as well, there was no guarantee that those plans would focus on the club he joined 20 years ago.
Messi may not be determined, but he no longer seemed convinced that Barcelona is the best club for him. He sounded like a man who would still need to be persuaded a lot to stay, evidence of changes he doesn’t think is plausible. Put bluntly, it still sounds more outside than inside. While things have calmed down, the anger subsided and the main culprit left, there was no attempt to distance himself from his actions in the summer and no suggestion that the problems that got him there have fully occurred. resolved.
Messi said he would send the burofax again. It was just a way of formalizing a decision that he had repeatedly communicated internally; one, more importantly, had been a long time coming and carefully thought out, taken against his family’s wishes. He insisted that if he had gone to court, he would have won. He said that he felt he needed a change back then; He didn’t say he still needs a change now, but he also didn’t say he doesn’t. It sounded quite like him.
Instead of dismissing that decision, he postponed it. And the focus on success suggests this is far from resolved. “In June, we will see,” he said.
He insisted that he wants to compete and doing it at Barcleona is complicated. Messi called this a transitional season, a dressing room with young players, few of them homegrown. That, he said, was one of the reasons why he wanted to go earlier: “A cycle had closed.”
Transitions take time and, at 33 years old, convinced that he has won very few Champions League titles and aware that his opportunities to do so are running out, one thing Messi does not have is time. “I wanted to keep competing to win trophies,” he said. Can this season in Barcelona? Or for the next season?
He doesn’t seem to think that. The desire of a new president to fix things came with a caveat: “Whoever enters will find a very difficult situation. He will have to be smart, put everything in order and make a lot of changes to make things go well. And that, Messi admitted, is almost impossible; Having seen Barcelona’s steady decline, he has no illusions.
Asked about the possible return of Neymar, he replied: “How is PSG paid? It would be very expensive.
“They need to bring several players and it will be difficult to bring quality players because there is no money. The club is in a difficult moment, everything that surrounds Barcelona is wrong. It’s in a really bad, bad way. And it will be difficult to get back to where I was. “
To a place, in short, where Messi wants to be.
