‘In two years I will leave’, Messi confession to Neymar
The Champions League semi-final second leg defeat to Liverpool in May this year, when FC Barcelona threw a 3-0 aggregate lead attained at the Camp Nou to succumb 4-0 to Jurgen Klopp’s men at Anfield, was one of the lowest points in Lionel Messi’s glittering career. In club history, for that matter.
This immediately led to calls for coach Ernesto Valverde to be dismissed, and it was only through the intervention of big personalities in the dressing room including the Argentine that such a fate did not come to pass.
Now, as part of an exposé on the Brazilian by Antoine Bourlon, via the Ballon d’Or-awarding France Football, confessions that Messi apparently made to Neymar in the aftermath of the results are set to send shockwaves through Catalonia, Argentina and the rest of the soccer world.
Talking to his friend on the telephone, Messi apparently said: ‘Only together can we win the Champions League, I want you to come back. In two years I will leave and you will take over’. Contacting him for comment, Bourlon told me that details of this conversation were revealed ‘by sources in Paris and Barcelona’.
That Barça’s captain wishes to see ‘Ney’ back in Blaugrana colours is no secret. He was pursued over the course of the summer to reverse his world record transfer from PSG, and, if Gerard Pique is to be believed, several FC Barcelona stars were even willing to take a pay cut to facilitate the move.
What has set alarm bells ringing instead however, is Messi’s voicing of an intention to leave in ‘two years’, which it is safe to assume would mean upon expiration of his current contract in mid-2021.
As has been well-documented, Josep Bartomeu recently voiced plans to offer Messi a fresh ‘indefinite’ deal before director of football Eric Abidal insisted ‘that the president is talking to his representatives to close the case once and for all’.
Incensed by such claims, Miguel Rico at Mundo Deportivo poured scorn on them last week. ‘They speak of the future fluently, as they have always done,’ Rico pointed out, ‘but negotiating, what is said of sitting face to face to discuss the conditions [of a new deal], they are not. Nor do they know when they will sit down [to do it], as they are the only ones that mark the times [and meetings].’
With Messi no closer to signing on the dotted line, fans and pundits will be sent into a tailspin in worry that the most famous graduate of the La Masia academy, at the club for almost two decades, is ready to call time on his Barça legacy.
On the contrary, though, the news shall be received in a positive light in Argentina and in particular by followers of Newell’s Old Boys in his hometown Rosario. As has long been threatened, they will be buoyed by the possibility of a then 34-year-old Messi seeing out his career at the outfit where it all started for him.
Or perhaps nothing too serious should be read into this, with the player confessing since the Anfield debacle that his family is settled in the Catalan capital and that it would be hard to convince them of a move across the Atlantic.
Messi could have just been speaking in the heat and hurt of the moment, still intending to be a one-club man while closing in on his 700th appearance for the La Liga holders this week.
