The perfect moment for Lionel Messi's storybook career to reach its conclusion has been and gone. If the greatest player of his generation was out to script his ending he could not have come up with a better moment than the World Cup final in Qatar, the night where he reaffirmed his greatness, passed the torch on to his successor and completed football all at once.
Athletes are not authors, however. They don't go looking for the end, they run from it for as long as possible. And so the Messi tale rolls on. The Ring has been cast into the fires of Orodruin but what's this, there are still several hundred pages to go?
This is something of a problem for Messi. The last thing he needs to be doing in his retirement years is retconning his legacy a la Michael Jordan, using a multimillion-dollar series to convince you that his last action in basketball was that shot over Byron Scott. Paris Saint-Germain, Inter Miami, Al-Hilal, the latter of whom have offered him €400 million a year: that all sounds a bit Washington Wizards-y, no?
If global glory with Argentina is not going to be Messi's endpoint, then he will need something of comparable value. Fortunately for him, Barcelona are waiting in the wings. This would be the chance to right the great wrong of his career, to cauterize the wounds of that tearful press conference where he realized -- a year on from losing his patience with the club hierarchy -- that he wanted nothing more than to be a Culer for fife. Barcelona want the same.
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Even PSG, such a belligerent force on the European stage, seem to acknowledge that the seven-time Ballon d'Or winner is not right for them. Their fans seem convinced that Messi's heart is not in it. With 18 goals and 17 assists in 33 appearances, this is greatness on autopilot. It cannot end this way.
Meanwhile, in Barcelona, you can sense all parties writing the next pages of the script for a courtship that began the day Messi left. As Xavi himself put it, "It's a Last Dance like Michael Jordan." If only it were that simple.
Chaos in Barcelona
There is a reason why Messi left in the first place. A billion euros in debt, beset by crises on and off the field, there was simply no mechanism by which Barcelona could keep their greatest-ever player. Even if Messi had committed to playing for free, the club's finances were such a cataclysmic mess that La Liga would not allow his registration. In the 18 months since, the turbulence around Barcelona has hardly eased. Indeed the charges that the club are facing over payments made to companies linked to Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, a former senior figure in Spain's refereeing bodies, threaten to bring with them a level of instability comparable to that which cost them Messi. With investigations from Spanish authorities and UEFA ongoing few players could be blamed if they concluded that now is not the time to be making commitments to Barcelona.
Set aside the Negreira case and there are still roadblocks aplenty. Laporta's policy of economic levers -- selling off stakes in club assets and broadcast revenue -- allowed Barcelona to strengthen Xavi's squad in the summer while circumventing the league's salary cap. La Liga president Javier Tebas has made plain that they will not be able to do so again this summer, indeed to even start adding more players they will have to undertake a firesale. "Barcelona has been involved in questionable behavior which has had an impact on La Liga and we are acting accordingly," he said last month. "We have ruled that they can no longer sign more players. They sold off €700 million in TV rights and tried to find different ways to solve the situation but they won't be able to do that next season.
"In the case of Barcelona, they have to drop from spending on wages and transfers from €650 million to €450 million, so it's a budget of minus €200 million." They can, however, spend 40 percent of any sales to strengthen a squad whose wage bill will be trimmed by the absence of Gerard Pique, Antoine Griezmann and, perhaps, Sergio Busquets. Still, to afford Messi it would have to be a lot of sales.
After all, paying Messi $168 million a year was in no small part how Barcelona, one of the most valuable brands in sport, got into such a mess financially, one where 103% of their revenue was being paid to their players. If anyone merited an overpay it was Messi, much more so than some of the supporting cast, but even he seemed to acknowledge at the last that his salary was doing harm to the Barcelona books, negotiating to cut it by 50 percent before he was forced to move on in the summer of 2021.
If Messi is to come back now it will have to be, as Tebas noted, "with a considerable reduction in his salary". As they did last year, Barcelona publicly project a belief that they will have the money to do big things next season, when they will have temporarily moved out of the Camp Nou for the much smaller Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys so that refurbishment work can be done on their ground. But unless they decide to sell Pedri, Frenkie De Jong or one of the handful of other players who might have sizeable value in the market.
A last dance worth saving?
Would it all be worth it? Probably. Without him, this Barcelona side might be contenders for Champions League glory next season anyway, particularly as their La Liga title means they are less likely to get the sort of hellacious group that has doomed them to an early exit in the past two seasons. It came at the cost of an awful lot of future income but Laporta's spending spree brought with it a far more reliable defense, one which has given up the fewest goals and expected goals in Europe's top five leagues. The midfield would no longer be the smoldering wasteland that Messi left behind while Robert Lewandowski would surely hit the target more frequently than he has in recent months if his supply line went through the Argentine. There are tactical questions about how he, Pedri and Gavi (assuming his contractual situation is addressed) fit together but they are the sort that Xavi would want to puzzle over.
Messi reaffirmed his enduring greatness at the World Cup, a tournament display that might offer a blueprint for Barcelona or any other top side in terms of how to win knockout competitions with the great man. His Ligue 1 numbers show a player who can still bully mediocre opposition, per 90 minutes he averages one non-penalty expected goal or expected assist, a mark 10 percent better than his nearest rival Kylian Mbappe. PSG fans might grumble but they have been getting a goal contribution from him every 83 minutes. He is still the gold standard for modern attackers.
What his brilliance has not led to, however, is PSG getting any closer to their raison d'être, a first Champions League title. Messi added to an already great attack but he also served to exacerbate the great problem that every coach faced at the Parc des Princes, a frontline whose off-ball work was diffident on the best of days. According to Wyscout data, PSG had one of the highest passes per defensive action -- a metric that records the intensity with which teams press -- of the Champions League's elite this season, allowing opponents an average of 13.5 passes before their defense clicked into gear. During Barcelona's brief time in the competition, they registered the competition's second lowest at 7.2. Barca defend high up the pitch, forcing rapid turnovers near to goal as they ease their opponents down blind alleys. "Everyone defends when we don't have the ball," Xavi has said. Such rules would almost certainly not apply to Messi.
There are some players worth upending systems for. Messi may well be one of them. Argentina eventually found a way of being defensively rigid whilst milking just enough from their best player at the other end of the pitch but even the best international tournaments do not require the tactical rigor of the Champions League.
That ultimately is what Messi would be aiming for were he to return to Barcelona, a decision that would mean the heart has triumphed over the head (and indeed the wallet). It might not be quite on the scale of what he achieved with Argentina, a fifth European Cup would be quite the way to bow out at the top level. However, just getting back to Barcelona would be an achievement in itself, such is the turbulence around the club, let alone guiding them to Europe's pinnacle again.
