More and more money is at stake in the football world. Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the few. The display of power is becoming more and more obscene. But, interestingly, not everything is silver up there. There is also room to feel. And it is proved by the bitter but sincere tears that Lionel Messi shed on Sunday during his farewell press conference for Barcelona.
Supercrack Rosario cried because he needed to go where he wanted to be: from the city and the team where he became a man, a star and a legend. She really cried, cried because she felt that way. He cried with a clean face and didn’t care that the whole world saw him. He wept because, being the ultimate expression of elite football, a feeling of belonging that is harder and harder to find continues to vibrate inside him. in an environment where players and capital come and go and nothing belongs to anyone for long. Everything is in continuous motion. Everyone speculates about the next pass and the next trade.
Messi cried and he shouldn’t have cried. In his mansion in Castelldefels, Barcelona, he reviews and analyzes contracts much better than he was preparing to sign with his old club. Contracts that will make you much richer than you already are, but not happier than you already are. Messi wanted to stay in Barcelona. And perhaps because of that, he also wept with rage and helplessness. Because your will did not reach you to achieve it. His desire was less vehement than the reasons that, in this game of power and millions, held up figures of the stature of Joan Laporta, the institution’s president, and Javier Tebas, the head of the Spanish League, to consider one of them closed. extraordinary events that a football player has had in a club throughout history.
Messi’s desire was once again less convincing than the power of big bosses who understand much more about numbers than emotions. It happened to him in 2020, when he sent the burofax to end his relationship with Barcelona and had to stay because President Josep María Bartomeu imposed it. And it happens again now in the reverse direction. He wanted to stay, but he needed to go. Not even his condition as football’s greatest star placed him under the protection of weaving and the management of the great interests that seem to make and break his liking.. If Messi, with everything that goes into just naming him, ended up being another piece of a game played in the carpeted offices of power, from there down, nobody is nobody and nobody at any time can be submitted to arbitration by the os executives who seem to have come to football to be with him.
Messi’s tears drenched a raw commercial dispute with legitimate feeling. But they weren’t enough to soften hard hearts from Laporta, Thebes and its cohort of professionals. Silver is not everything. But it’s still enough to force one of the greatest players of all time to do what he didn’t want to. Because your wish is the law only in the field, not in the cold offices of those responsible.
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