Lionel Messi has revealed the heartbreak of his decision to leave Barcelona and why he ultimately resorted to staying at the club, Goal reports
The 33-year-old Argentine, who has spent 20 years at the LaLiga side, dropped the bombshell news on Barcelona in late August that he intended to leave on a free transfer.
However, Barca refused to uphold the break in his contract, as they claimed the period to utilise it had elapsed in June, and so a stalemate began in which the Argentina international tried to exit the club.
However, Messi has accepted he must stay at Camp Nou to avoid dragging his beloved club to court, but only after experiencing a desperately sad couple of weeks.
“When I communicated my wish to leave to my wife and children, it was a brutal drama,” Messi said in the interview with goal.
“The whole family began crying, my children did not want to leave Barcelona, nor did they want to change schools.
“But I looked further afield and I want to compete at the highest level, win titles, compete in the Champions League. You can win or lose in it, because it is very difficult, but you have to compete.
“At least compete for it and let us not fall apart in Rome, Liverpool, Lisbon. All that led me to think about that decision that I wanted to carry out.”
However, that desire to accept a new challenge was crippled by Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu, whom Messi claims reneged on a promise he could leave at the end of 2019-20.
“I thought and was sure that I was free to leave, the president always said that at the end of the season I could decide if I stayed or not,” he said.
“Now they cling to the fact that I did not say it before June 10, when it turns out that on June 10 we were competing for La Liga in the middle of this awful coronavirus and this disease altered all the season.
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“And this is the reason why I am going to continue in the club. Now I am going to continue in the club because the president told me that the only way to leave was to pay the €700 million (£624m/$823m) clause, and that is impossible.”
There was only one exit channel if Messi was to leave: suing Barcelona. But the six-time Ballon d’Or winner declined on charting that path, and so will stay at the club for another 10 months.
“There was another way and it was to go to trial,” he added. “I would never go to court against Barca because it is the club that I love, which gave me everything since I arrived.
“It is the club of my life, I have made my life here.
“Barca gave me everything and I gave it everything. I know that it never crossed my mind to take Barca to court.”
During the interview, Messi opened up on the heartbreaking discussion he had with his son, Thiago, who didn’t want to leave, while hailing his wife Antonella for standing firm by his side through all of the backlash from fans for his desire to leave Barca.
“Mateo is still little and he doesn’t realise what it means to go somewhere else and make your life a few years elsewhere,” he said.
The devastating defeat to Bayern was not the reason behind Messi’s drastic action, though it was certainly a bitter blow. Factually, internal discussions of an exit from Barcelona has been ongoing for 12 months or more, but with no conclusion was reached, and Messi finally felt that he needed to force the situation.
“I told the club, including the president, that I wanted to go. I’ve been telling him that all year. I believed it was time to step aside,” Messi said during the interview.
“I believed that the club needed more young players, new players and I thought my time in Barcelona was over. I felt very sorry because I always said that I wanted to finish my career here.
“It was a very difficult year, I suffered a lot in training, in games and in the dressing room. Everything became very difficult for me and there came a time when I considered looking for new ambitions.
“It did not come because of the Champions League result against Bayern, no – I had been thinking about the decision for a long time.
“I told the president and, well, the president always said that at the end of the season I could decide if I wanted to go or if I wanted to stay and in the end he did not keep his word.”
Sending the heartbreaking burofax to the club stating his position turned out to be an embarrassment for figures around the club, with former Barca vice-president Jordi Mestre notably declaring “the best player in history does not leave with a burofax!”
However Messi has pressed that it was not done with the intention of creating a bitter dispute, but to stamp his position in print, his decision to leave. Indeed, the Argentine is of the belief that it would simply have been business as usual had he not taken that step.
“Throughout the year I had been telling the president that I wanted to leave, that the time had come to seek new goals and new directions in my career,” explained Messi. “He told me all the time: ‘We’ll talk, not now, this and that’, but nothing. The president did not give me a clue at what he was really saying.
- Source: Goal
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