Lionel Messi: what suits the best footballer in history, the millions of Arabia or returning to Barcelona?

The divorce between Messi and PSG is a complex problem that can be explained by simple causes. The main one is the responsibility of Leonardo -and now of Luis Campos-, the sports directors of the Parisian club, who never learned the long lesson that Argentina left before Scaloni in more than a decade of troubles. For Messi to function as a star, he needs a team formed to serve him.

Otherwise, your uniqueness is not functional in a conventional tactical structure. In this sense, PSG never managed to manage the wealth of its squad to the point that it did not even manage to define its leadership, split first between the Argentine, Mbappé and Neymar, to later become a battle between the young French star and the current World Champion.

The second problem was tactical: neither Pochettino nor Galtier built their squads to drift the game in various directions. One was towards 10, normally close to the right, but there were also other lines of development at the ends (Di María, Neymar) or towards the 9 area (Mbappé, Icardi). The result of this lack of concentration was that Messi got fewer and fewer chances to assist and score, and also less prominence in the build. The scheme is relevant: Messi is not a conventional striker and his movements, especially when he makes the diagonal of the band to the center or when he plays false 9, force his teammates to occupy spaces. The best example is how the full-backs become wingers-carrileros with a vocation for goal (Alves, Alba or Molina). Rarely at PSG has he had that accompaniment or that flexibility.

The third problem was ambition. While PSG, with nouveau riche naivety, believed that footballing success was built through accumulating stars, Messi’s personal goal, sated with glory in Barcelona, ​​was already out of the heat of club competition and focused basically on your selection. This difference in objectives, quite evident in the last couple of years, is enough to understand why the Parisian fan resents the figures so much that they were unable to achieve the only self-imposed objective: winning the Champions League. If to this are added commitments more typical of retirement, such as tourist representation in Saudi Arabia, the tension should not be surprising.

That being said, will Messi’s eventual return to Barcelona be able to recover for the best version of both? Hardly. The Barça to which he would return is a financially precarious team, with a second-order squad in many positions, with game dynamics that are foreign to him and that are not at all reminiscent of the times of Guardiola or Vilanova. Messi, if he were thinking strictly about his career, should look for a financially robust club that plays a game that is natural to him and that has an environment that shelters him emotionally. That is to say, Manchester City (imagining it together with Haaland constitutes a case of bullying). But logic is rarely fulfilled in football and sometimes nostalgia prevails, which is always a bad adviser.

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