Getting to know Messi

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This article was published 13/08/2021 (1876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s really just one story in football right now.

Yes, the Premier League kicked off its 2021-22 schedule on Friday, and today the top flights of Germany and Spain will follow suit. France got its Ligue 1 campaign up and running a week ago, and Italy’s Serie A will begin next weekend.

The commencements of Europe’s biggest leagues signals the start of the club season on that continent — a late-summer ritual in which hope is plentiful, newness palpable.

But it’s all second fiddle.

The game’s greatest player has seen to that, although he’d never have intended it. No, Lionel Messi, like the rest of us, simply assumed he’d be playing for Barcelona this term, just as he had, at one level or another, the previous 20 years.

What he didn’t know — what none of us really knew — was that the Catalan club’s financial situation made re-signing him impossible.

We don’t need to rehash the proceedings of the last week and a bit. They’ve already been well-documented. But, basically, years of mismanagement made Barcelona’s position untenable, and extremely embarrassing. They couldn’t even agree a reduced contract; a prospective investment scheme fell through.

Everyone associated with the club was left with pie on their face — everyone, that is, except Messi, himself. And when it happened, when it really happened, unconscionably, it happened fast. Which is why the best player to have ever played the game is now a member of Paris Saint-Germain.

But let’s rewind a bit — first, to his exit press conference.

Now, it’s not as though Messi hasn’t shown emotion before. Not at all. He has always played with joy, with intensity, but his naturally shy disposition has tended to make him rather difficult to connect with, especially when juxtaposed with the flamboyant, proud and camera-happy Cristiano Ronaldo. As far as personality is concerned, there has always been something of a shadow there.

Which is why the sight of him, breaking down and crying, was so extraordinarily poignant. Here was a man, so typically introverted and guarded, who, in a moment of heaviness, couldn’t control himself. It was remarkably human, strangely reassuring.

Now, rewind a bit more — to last month’s Copa America final. Because it’s there that our new, more personal relationship with Messi actually begins.

Going into the tournament he had never won a major title with Argentina. It was something we’d long held against him, as if that shortcoming somehow made him more of an earthling. But then he won it, beating Brazil no less, and in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana.

At the final whistle he collapsed the ground more in relief than elation, after which he couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. He celebrated, really celebrated, and it was impossible to not celebrate with him.

All those Spanish titles, those Champions Leagues, they all seemed subservient to that moment. And Messi, in that long-awaited triumph, looked happier than he’d ever been, released of a weight he had unfairly carried for far too long.

In hindsight, the relieved, lighter, contented Messi was never going to return to Camp Nou, to a team in decline that he’d be forced to carry on his back, again, to a club for which he’d already won everything. Yes, he wept at his departure, but then he moved on, quickly, to something better, to something that made sense at this stage of his career.

At PSG—and we can rightfully be cynical of their super-team project, not to mention accounting practices — he’ll be part of a star cast that already includes Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Marco Verratti, as well as the just-arrived Georginio Wijnaldum and Sergio Ramos.

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Ah yes, Sergio Ramos. The former Real Madrid defender and Clasico rival who once two-footed him from behind. They’ve already been photographed training together, laughing together, enjoying a previously unimaginable camaraderie. Old enmities, it turns out, don’t die all that hard.

Through much of this week Messi has done more interviews than he ever did in Spain. He’s had his picture taken arriving in the city, greeting the club’s fans and getting started on the training ground. He still hasn’t had a pre-season. And through it all we’ve gotten to know him a little bit more, maybe as much as we ever will.

The consensus GOAT, it has been nearly impossible to connect with him. He has been, and remains, so good as to keep an almost planetary distance between himself and the rest of us. Call him a robot or a video game player or whatever, Messi has always been different, been somewhere out there, untouchable, like a comet watched in awe from a distance.

What the past few weeks have done is brought him just a bit closer, even humanized him. Turns out he’s one of our species — even if we’ll never quite be sure how he came to live among us.

jerradpeters@gmail.comTwitter @JerradPeters