Messi leaves Barcelona: no game and no fire, the worst ending for a romance that seemed eternal

Adrian Maladesky

08/26/2020 - 1:18

• Clarín.com
• sports

If many times Lionel Messi's career resembled a script, on some wild nights, the last image is at least unfair . That the farewell to the top scorer in the history of Barcelona, ​​a club where he shone for 16 seasons, is a football catastrophe sealed with an 8-2 against seems in bad taste.

But he decided that the ending should be romantic and dramatic. Pushed by some leaders with whom the war is already total, it is true, and by a team that did not know how to promote it, too. The almost bolero pulse with which this 20-year romance ends (they would be fulfilled in September) puts him in a place of a victim, also exaggerated, like the whole story.

Messi surely does not deserve everything he is experiencing, although it is his choice to end up like this. The Lionel who slammed the door that reverberates around the world also spits against his latest experiences in the Champions League.

In that unimaginable defeat of Lisbon that now puts Bayern Munich in the place of the killer of a brilliant cycle, and of a romance that seemed eternal, Messi showed a soulless version of himself, rare but not at all unknown. In the National Team and also in Barça he was seen like this other times. almost always with extenuating circumstances. A Messi without reaction to adversity, without game or fire.

The rebellion found her off the field and expressed it via burofax.

He is a Messi who at 33 also rebels against his own impotence. He knows that he cannot alone, he experienced it firsthand in Rome, Liverpool and Lisbon. The Champions League gives him back an image that bothers him: he needs more from his teammates, but also from his own contribution.

With the blue and white he was missing a Xavi or an Iniesta , a midfield that allowed him to exploit a unique firepower. Little by little, Barça became intoxicated with the same deficiencies as the National Team.

Converted Leo into a slightly less spicy forward, but a more select assistant, the absence of hierarchical partners similar to the inimitable times of Pep Guardiola was noted. In the last season Messi was a top scorer in the Spanish League, for the seventh time and fourth in a row, a strong mark, but with 25 goals. A lot for any striker, little for someone who turned 50 in 2011/12 and 46 in the next. As a sign that his game was changing, he achieved a pass-goal record: 21. The point is that he didn't reach.

Messi's numbers play against him in any comparison. If there is not an arrangement difficult to imagine today, he will close his exorbitant career at Barcelona with 634 goals in 731 games and 34 titles.

The habit of seeing the impossible from his left makes the possible insufficient. This season ends without titles, for the second time in 16 years. Barcelona lost the League to Real Madrid, after having won it twice in a row and only then is the above valued. It is true that when the championship returned, Barça had two points of advantage, which they squandered with two draws and one defeat in the last eleven games, and that Messi barely contributed six goals and in five games he did not score any. In the return of the Champions League he added only one goal in 3-1 against Napoli. In the parameters of Rosario it is very little.

Everything is required of Messi and this Messi who is now betting on reinventing himself in another geography, is another. He accustomed us to magic in continuity for almost 16 years. At 33 he needs more from the team and everything around him. He called for help several times and had no response. Now the cry, definitive, leads him to an unthinkable move.