Messi should have left and Barcelona could have cashed in but money isn't everything

Andy West 18:29 25/11/2017
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  • Lionel Messi, if you want to keep things simple, is just a footballer.

    Like many others, his job is to kick balls. That’s fairly straightforward. Of course, over the last 15 years he has repeatedly proven that he is one of the very best ball-kickers in the world – if not the best – and as such, he is rewarded with higher wages than other players.

    On a very basic level, it’s easy to explain and understand Messi’s new contract with Barcelona, which he finally signed on Saturday nearly six months after it was agreed, on those matter-of-fact terms: he is very good at playing football, and therefore earns more money than other people who play football.

    In the current economic climate, Messi’s new wages of around £2million a month are, therefore, ‘worth it’.

    For starters, his presence in the Barcelona team for the next four years will greatly help the Catalan side on the field of play in their quest for major honours – right now, indeed, it’s hard to imagine how they could challenge for anything significant without him.

    Messi will also add considerable value to the Barca brand in lucrative areas such as sponsorships, TV deals, ticket sales, corporate hospitality, merchandising and pre-season tours.

    You can be absolutely that the club’s commercial department will have studied and re-studied and examined and counter-examined all the figures in those areas until their heads were spinning with a whirl of numbers.

    Contemporary elite football is very big business and decisions over major expenditures – such as the £100million Barca will pay to Messi over the next four years – are not taken lightly, especially as the squad total wage bill is already higher than it should be.

    And the club will have concluded, after several lengthy meetings, conference calls and spreadsheets, that the wages they are paying to their Argentine star represent fair value for the club.

    Messi and his entourage will have also thought and long and hard about the compensation levels he is receiving before agreeing to put pen on paper.

    They are fully aware that Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain would have eagerly snatched any opportunity that might have presented itself to secure Messi’s services, and the player’s father Jorge will have been careful to make sure that his son was not selling himself short. Because for the Messis, as much as for FC Barcelona, this contract is a business transaction.

    Lionel Messi's agent and father Jorge

    Lionel Messi’s agent and father Jorge

    If you wish, you can view the confirmation of Messi’s new contract to stay at Barcelona until the summer of 2021 purely in those cold, hard, financial terms. It is a deal which makes sense for both sides, and we could just leave it at that.

    But, if you want to really understand what’s going on, you have to look a little deeper. And that’s because in addition to being a footballer, Messi is also a human being. And in addition to being Barca’s club president, Josep Maria Bartomeu is also a human being.

    Human beings are not entirely rational. Whether we like it or not, we are also driven by impulses, desires and personal motivations – emotions – which don’t always ‘make sense’ on a purely objective level.

    These emotions drive our behaviour all the time, and they have also driven the behaviour of Messi and his club in their negotiation and agreement of this contract.

    Let’s start with the player. Messi, it’s almost certain, could have earned a lot more than £500,000 per week if he had decided to chase dollar signs rather than follow his heart.

    In January he would have been available on a free transfer, and as PSG were prepared to spend £200million – double the amount Messi will be earning between now and 2021 – purely to sign Neymar, never mind his salary on top, it’s hard to imagine just how much they would have been willing to hand to Messi as a ‘golden handshake’.

    PSG would have been interested in linking this pair back up again

    PSG would have been interested in linking this pair back up again

    Certainly they would have valued Messi, on a free transfer, at more than £100million over the course of four years, and if Messi’s only priority was money he would now be biding his time until 1st January before boarding his private jet on a secret flight to Paris or Manchester.

    Similarly, from the club’s point of view it would have been easy to argue that now is the time to allow Messi to leave, or at least tie him to a much shorter contract, because the £2million a month he’ll be earning for the next four years could soon start to offer questionable value for money.

    Messi is now 30 years old. When his newly-signed contract expires he will be 34. He has been playing brutally competitive football week after week, virtually without a break, since he was 18.

    Although there occasional exceptions, it’s enormously unusual for any player in those circumstances to continue to perform a central role in a top-class team beyond the age of 31 or 32 – even the super-fit Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, is now being regularly rested and has been given a new, less physically demanding, role in the Real Madrid team.

    It would be great to think that Messi will continue to play 60 games a year until he’s 34, but that probably won’t happen. Far more likely is that he’ll follow the same path as Andres Iniesta and Xavi, who became more peripheral figures after moving into their 30s – still great when they play, but suffering more regular injuries and needing more regular breaks.

    So Barca, being cold and objective, could have easily looked at those figures now and concluded: OK, Messi is worth £2million a month right now. But in 2020 he probably won’t be. So we offer him two years now, and then we renegotiate. Otherwise, no deal.

    Being aloof and analytical, Messi maybe should have left to earn more elsewhere. Barca maybe should have allowed him to leave and spent the money elsewhere.

    But those things didn’t happen because, as football is conducted by emotional human beings, money is not everything.

    Messi transcends money, and Barca know it. As Ivan Rakitic noted earlier in the week, he is part of the club’s badge – not literally, but metaphorically, FC Barcelona means Lionel Messi. In our shared global consciousness, the two cannot be separated.

    For everything he has done, Messi has become an icon, a symbol. If Barca are more than a club, he is more than a player, and his presence in any team cannot be measured in financial terms alone. His presence evokes those strange things…emotions…which are the most valuable in human life.

    Bartomeu, therefore, could never have survived becoming the man who allowed Messi to walk away from Barcelona, and he was duty-bound to keep the player at the club even if it meant giving him a contract which might prove to be over-valued by the time it comes to an end.

    And from Messi’s point of view, how could he leave Barcelona? It’s the club which has given him everything, starting with expensive hormone injections when he was a scrawny young kid from Argentine with big dreams but a small stature.

    Playing for Barcelona has allowed Messi to fully develop and expose his talents on the world’s biggest stage, in Europe’s biggest stadium. It has allowed him to play with Ronaldinho, Samuel Eto’o, Carles Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, Neymar, Luis Suarez, and win four Champions League titles.

    Barca might not be a perfect club but it is, unquestionably, his club, and the thought of him running out at the Parc des Princes wearing the dark blue shirt of PSG will have been as strange and uncomfortable for Messi as it is for the rest of us.

    And so, despite everything, Messi decided to stay and Barca decided to keep him, even though both parties could have obtained better financial transactions with his departure.

    He has stayed because emotions overruled finances. And as we are all guided by similar emotions, that’s surely something to celebrate.

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