Lionel Messi confirms that he will stay at Barcelona while breaking the silence on the transfer saga

Lionel Messi has confirmed that he now plans to stay at Barcelona in his first statement about his future.

Messi contacted the Nou Camp club last week to communicate his desire for an immediate exit.

Manchester City was considered one of the pioneers to land the Argentine in a fascinating transfer battle with Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Milan between which they are also related.

But after a period of chaos at the Catalan club in which father and agent Jorge Messi arrived from Argentina for crisis talks this week, he is now ready to stay at Camp Nou.

However, he has beaten up President Josep Maria Bartomeu and insisted he wanted to leave long before the Champions League humiliation against Bayern Munich.

Messi told Goal: “I told the club, especially the president, that I wanted to go. I’ve been telling him all year. He believed it was time to step aside.

“I believed that the club needed more young people, new people and I thought my time in Barcelona was over, I was very sorry because I always said that I wanted to finish my career here.

“It was a very difficult year, I suffered a lot in training, in games and in the dressing room. Everything became very difficult for me and there came a time when I considered looking for new goals, new airs.

“It did not come because of the result of the Champions League against Bayern, the decision I was thinking about for a long time. I told the president and well, the president always said that at the end of the season I could decide if I wanted to.” to leave or if I wanted to stay and in the end he did not end up keeping his word.

“Now I’m going to continue at the club because the president told me that the only way out was to pay the 700 million clause, that that’s impossible, and then there was another way was to go to trial].

“I would never go to trial against Barça because it is the club that I love, that gave me everything since I arrived, it is the club of my life, I have made my life here.”

Asked about the Burofax that he sent to the club communicating his desire to leave, he said: “The burofax was to make it official in some way. Throughout the year, I had been telling the president that I wanted to leave, that the time had come to seek new illusions and new directions in my career.

“He told me all the time: ‘We will talk, no, this and that,’ but nothing. To put it in some way, the president did not give me ‘ball’ what he said.

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“Sending the burofax was making it official that I wanted to go and that I was free and the optional year I was not going to use it and I wanted to go. It was not to make a mess, nor to go against the club, but the way to make it official because my decision had been made …

“Sure. If I don’t send the burofax, it’s like nothing happens, I have the optional year that I had and the year continued. What they say is that I didn’t say it before June 10, but I repeat, we were in the middle of all the competitions and it was not the time.

“But apart from that, the president always told me ‘when the season is over you decide if you stay or go’, he never set a date, and well, it was simply to make the club that he was not following official, but not to get into a fight because I didn’t want to fight. with the club. ”