Messi at PSG
Now that Lionel Messi has moved to Paris Saint-Germain football as we know it apparently dead. Consider the following from Rory Smith in The New York Times:
“This was not a journey many had ever envisaged him making. But he had no other choice; or, rather, the player for whom anything has always been possible, for once, had only a narrow suite of options.
There is a portrait of modern soccer in that restricted choice, and it is a stark one. Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.
He could not stay where he wanted to stay, at Barcelona, because the club has walked, headlong, into financial ruin. A mixture of the incompetence of its executives and the hubris of the institution is largely responsible for that, but not wholly.”
Smith goes on to add that the pandemic and its impact on the game had meant that PSG was one of only three clubs that could afford to sign Messi (Manchester City and Chelsea being the others) and that the limits that this had placed on Messi’s choice spells a kind of doom. Similar essays have been written in other publications—Miguel Delaney in The Independent and Jonathan Liew in The Guardian have both, for example, bemoaned the move.
But there is little logic to these laments. To see Messi play for a different club will unquestionably make for a surreal sight. But the mechanics of football have been driven by the craven needs of commercialism for a few decades now. It was evident that Barcelona were being mismanaged—not only were they paying Messi astronomical sums every week, but they had also paid exorbitant amounts for an array of middling players. That this mismanagement led to Messi’s exit might be sad. But that Messi had no choice other than to move to PSG is absurd. For one, he could have reduced his demands. That he chose not to do so was a decision of his own making. He was of course within his rights to do so. Players have a right to be compensated well, and as, arguably, the greatest footballer of all time Messi can ask what he wants. But to claim that he had no choice is incorrect.
The second argument that these articles make is that football itself has somehow been diminished by PSG’s signing of Messi, that the influx of money from the Middle East and Russia, into PSG, Manchester City and Chelsea has ruined the game. What this ignores is that between 2010 and 2016, during Messi’s zenith, Barcelona were sponsored by Qatar Sports Investment; their Blaugrana shirts had the words “Qatar Airways” emblazoned on them. That Barcelona’s success itself owed to the structure of modern football and its financial architecture didn’t stop any of us from eulogising Messi’s football. The unequal television rights in Spain for years led to a duopoly at the top of the league, but we were scarcely concerned about this because that duopoly comprised Barcelona and Real Madrid, two clubs with “sporting history”.
PSG are a relatively young club. They have been buoyed by Qatari investment. But the idea that they lack identity and history—regardless of whether that should matter— as Simon Kuper shows here is a myth. Therefore, the claim that Messi’s choice is antithetical to football and what it stands for just doesn’t add up.
Now, none of this means that we oughtn’t to question how the game is structured. The sport’s financial arrangement, set in motion during the early 1990s, has led to a hugely unequal playing field. But that field was just as unequal when Messi’s Barcelona were sweeping trophies across the board. It’s important to question the existing business structure of the game, and to interrogate the use of football as a political weapon by nation states, but we must do so for the right reasons.