The choices facing Lionel Messi are these. He can sign on
for another year, maybe two, locked in what seems to be a loveless but
lucrative marriage of convenience with Paris St.-Germain. The downside is that
he must endure the occasional indignity of hearing his name whistled and jeered
and taken in vain. The upside is the chance to continue to play in — but if we
are honest, not win — the Champions League.
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Option two: He could take the easy route, the smooth and
seamless path that leads straight to the golden sunset. Al-Hilal would very
much like to pay him an eye-watering sum of money to turn the Saudi Premier
League, in effect, into his and Cristiano Ronaldo’s very own Las Vegas
residency. Cons: He would have to bid farewell to the (European) Champions
League. Pros: $400 million a year.
A third path, to Major League Soccer — and, more
specifically, Inter Miami — can provide all of the same drawbacks and none of
the same benefits. He would not earn nearly so much. He would still be absent
from the club tournament he cherishes the most. He would have to be coached by
Phil Neville. The pull of Miami, the lure of the US and the prospect of the
2026 World Cup are appealing, but they may not be appealing enough.
All of which, of course, leaves the road down which Messi’s
heart would surely guide him. He never really wanted to leave Barcelona. He
certainly did not want to leave the way he did, rushed out of the door by stark
economic reality. Messi had spent his career deciding his own fate, only to
have the nature of the end of it decided for him.
The sense of unfinished business is mutual. “I have a thorn
in my side that Leo could not stay at our club,” Rafa Yuste, Barcelona’s vice
president, said last week. He wished, he said, that “all of the conditions
could come together so that this mutual love story ends with Messi at Barça.
When you are in love and you separate from someone, you always want to stay in
love.”
As overblown as that might sound, it would be churlish to
dispute Yuste’s sincerity. Barcelona almost certainly sees some sort of
sporting logic in bringing back Messi, of course. Correctly or not, the club
genuinely believes that success is more likely with him than without: both
directly, as a result of his performances, and indirectly, thanks to the boost
to the brand that his presence would provide.
Barcelona has come to see Messi as a platonic ideal of its principles, the ones he was reared in from his days as a shy, homesick teenager at La Masia.
But that does not mean the romantic impulse is not genuine.
Barcelona has come to see Messi as a platonic ideal of its principles, the ones
he was reared in from his days as a shy, homesick teenager at La Masia. Through
its own colossal mismanagement, the club to which he devoted his career was not
able to give Messi the goodbye it wanted or he deserved. It feels a duty to
right the wrong.
It would be naive, though, to believe that is the only
motivation. Barcelona’s apparent fixation on the return of its king is powered
by a swirl of emotions. Affection might be one of them, but so too is
nostalgia, in its purest sense, an attachment not to who Messi is but to what
he represents.
Everything about the modern Barcelona screams that it has
become a place obsessed by and addicted to reclaiming a past that still feels
achingly real, overwhelmingly present. It is a club that could convincingly
claim to be the biggest in the world barely a moment ago, the home of the
finest side in history, and it is a club that continues to rage against its
loss of status.
So much of what Barcelona has done in recent years has been
inspired by a refusal to acknowledge the ticking of the clock, the changing of
the seasons. The pursuit of the European Super League, the appointment of Xavi
Hernández as manager, the mortgaging of its own future for immediate glory —
this is the desperate, thrashing reflex of a club that assumed its primacy was
the natural order of things, and does not understand why the world has been
allowed to change. Restoring Messi to azulgrana would offer the opioid comfort
of a step back in time.
And then, rather more tangibly, there is political
necessity, the projection of power. Barcelona is not owned by an individual; it
is a members organization, one that functions, at least in theory, as a
democracy. Joan Laporta, club president, will soon enough have to seek another
mandate from the team’s 143,000 socios.
Currently, he would have to stand for reelection as the
president who lost Messi. He would much prefer, one would think, to be able to
claim to be the man who returned him to where he belonged.
After all, possessing Messi is more than having arguably the
greatest player of all time in your ranks. His move to PSG, two years ago,
proved that he is as much symbol as star. Messi represents relevance and
importance, glamour and appeal. He would be a sign that the lean days had come
to an end, of Barcelona’s resurgent virility.
Most urgent of all, though, is the reputational benefit, not
to Laporta as a president but to Barcelona as a club. Once as pristine a
sporting brand as could be imagined, the sort of team that considered its
jerseys so sacrosanct that it refused to despoil them with a sponsor, Barcelona
has been wracked by scandal for years.
Barcelona’s love for Messi is deep and it is sincere. But
its need for him — as a symbol of power, as a reminder of what it once was, as
a source of quick and easy dopamine, as a way of drawing the eye away from what
it would rather you did not see — is greater still.
He has four choices in front of him. They are, at heart, all
the same. Barcelona wants to use him to clean its image just as surely as PSG
wants to use him to prove its primacy and Al-Hilal wants to use him to burnish
a nation’s reputation and Inter Miami wants to use him to grow a league. There
is no romance at the heart of any of them, none at all. It is business, just
business and nothing more.
Cold, brutal, and entirely irresistibleGary O’Neil’s career as a Premier League manager began,
unexpectedly, in late August. His predecessor at Bournemouth, Scott Parker, had
talked himself out of a job a few days earlier, using the occasion of a 9–0
defeat at Liverpool to explain, in great detail, exactly how little chance the
club had of avoiding relegation.
Everything about the modern Barcelona screams that it has become a place obsessed by and addicted to reclaiming a past that still feels achingly real, overwhelmingly present. It is a club that could convincingly claim to be the biggest in the world barely a moment ago, the home of the finest side in history, and it is a club that continues to rage against its loss of status.
O’Neil was supposed to be what is now, by convention, called
not a caretaker or a place-holder manager but an “interim,” a coach who will be
replaced by a safer pair of hands as soon as one could be identified. But he
did well, avoiding defeat in his first six games and slowly helping the team
acclimatize to the Premier League. Quietly, perhaps a little reluctantly,
Bournemouth made his appointment permanent during the World Cup.
Gary O’Neil is now the 10th-longest-serving manager in the
Premier League.
There was a point, not so long ago, when it seemed English
soccer had finally learned the benefits of patience. Clubs seemed to have
internalized the idea that reflexively firing a coach at the first sign of
trouble was not ideal from a long-term planning perspective. Just as
significant, they were putting more thought into their appointments in the
first place.
That particular dam broke in the last two weeks of March.
Crystal Palace firing Patrick Vieira, on the back of almost three months
without a win, proved the decisive fissure. Between then and now, three more
managers have gone. Leicester, now at grave risk of relegation, fired Brendan
Rodgers. Antonio Conte committed dismissal-by-press-conference to get himself
out of Tottenham. And, of course, Graham Potter met his inevitable, if
accelerated, demise at Chelsea.
None of those decisions were especially flagrant examples of
the caprice of Premier League owners, of course, but the failures of both Conte
and Potter probably say more about the people who appointed them than they do
about the coaches themselves.
Conte was handed a squad in need of a rebuild and tasked
with winning immediately. Potter was placed in charge of a squad so large that
the changing room at the training ground reportedly could not accommodate it —
several players had to change on chairs brought in from elsewhere — and told to
fashion a cogent team in only a few months.
The ability to choose the right job, of course, is an
invaluable part of the armory of any elite coach; Potter, still in the early
stages of his career, will doubtless heed that lesson when he selects his next
opportunity. But his failure at Chelsea, like that of Conte at Tottenham, is
not solely his fault. He should not be allowed to become a scapegoat for those
who made it impossible for him to succeed in the first place.
After all, they are still in place. They are in charge, in
fact, of choosing a replacement, with precious little evidence so far that they
should be trusted to make the right selection.
It is homeEngland got a boost of confidence in its biggest game before
this year’s World Cup by beating Brazil, 4–2 on penalties after a 1–1 tie, on
Thursday in a meeting of the European and South American champions at Wembley.
The victory, like England’s triumph in last year’s European Championship final
in the same stadium, was delivered off the foot of Chloe Kelly.
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