Messi leaves Barcelona!!!
it hurt Barcelona fans to imagine a time when Messi stopped playing, it is worse to contemplate a time when he only stopped playing for them. This isn’t really that Messi is going; it’s when he’s going, why he’s going, and how he’s going. Where he is going, too: Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Juventus, it doesn’t matter much. What matters is that it’s to another club. At least when he said the end was near, they imagined getting there together – his final game, like his first, would be in a Barcelona shirt, a fond if tearful farewell, a collective celebration which will never happen now.
The reaction to his using the word retirement that night last December was revealing, a collective panic, a “don’t say that”, as if seeking to escape a truth that didn’t bear thinking about. Afraid of being exposed by Messi, the board rushed to respond. “Leo’s got a long time left,” the president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, said – not least because he had to.
After 20 seasons at Barcelona, 17 in the first team, after 34 trophies and 634 goals, it almost certainly comes to an end. It is damaging news for Barcelona and for La Liga, already confronted by a troubling reality. Yet even that is not really the point. Players don’t talk about retirement the way that people don’t talk about death, Jorge Valdano says, but this is a fate worse than that. Not for the rest of football of course – there will be excitement at seeing him elsewhere, the electricity of expectation – but for Barcelona fans. It will feel wrong.
~Tarun Choudhary
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