Messi and Laporta embrace in the box before Felipe VI hands over the Cup to the captain of Barça.Alejandro Ruesga
Messi has gone from crying in Barcelona to laughing in Paris, nothing strange for anyone who has played football since he was a child if one takes into account that at the Camp Nou they did not even process his card and at PSG they have dressed him as a king against Neymar and Mbappé, two footballers who at the moment and on their own have not been able to dethrone 10, now happily champion also with Argentina.
The pressure will begin when the game begins and the Rosario verifies that the titles won will not be counted, but those not achieved will be discounted, as corresponds to a rich club, extreme opposite to the one that Maradona lived in Naples.
Messi's competitiveness is so extreme that at 34 he prefers to take on major challenges to living on income in Miami.
Photogallery: Messi signs for PSG: the player's presentation, in pictures
The departure of the Argentine forces Barça in return to set up a team and update a club that in victory and defeat lately always referred to Messi. The process is also very serious at the Camp Nou and the starting point is even more complex because somehow a gap was opened between Messi and Laporta. There are influential characters who have mediated before, after and during the negotiations with the player and the president and now they feel offside, misplaced, unable to decipher the labyrinth that Laporta has gotten into. They also do not know what happened at the last minute, beyond the conflict of egos and the difficulty of the highest president to respond to his euphoric promises and attend to the 10.
Laporta's momentary surrender is a bad sign for those who made him president after displaying the electoral banner near the Bernabéu, remembering 2-6 and evoking the figure of Eto'o.
No one guessed then that the president wanted to see Florentino again at the Botafumeiro and not at Chamartín.
Ruined, Barça now needs to capitalize and prefers the mana that will come from the Superliga to the hard cash from LaLiga.
Today there is no longer a signing that is worth like Ronaldinho's;
nor advertising as seductive as that of Unicef;
Nor can a party with gazpacho be organized to challenge the administration;
and the nights of leisure in rooms like Luz de Gas are in quarantine by the covid-19.
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"You can stay at my house"
Messi smiles in Paris
It is already known that frustration is difficult to manage when illusion was generated as has happened with Laporta. In addition to audacity, resources are needed to find a good club model, a cohesive action plan is required, applied by professionals and that transcends cost cutting, broken as Barça is by the Bartomeu board. In the absence of the Messi brand, they are no longer worth membership fees or subsidies since some endorsers act as shareholders on the Laporta board. It is enough to look at the squad, and the reinforcements of Eric, Memphis and Emerson to notice the bad sports policy: the team seems to have been designed by Bartomeu to please Koeman more than Laporta in his attempt to convince Messi despite Agüero .
The choice of captains has resulted in the feeling that the dressing room also acts as if nothing had happened after Messi's goodbye. Jordi Alba reinforces the group made up of Sergi Roberto, Piqué and Busquets. Right now the usual song is playing in the Camp Nou dressing room. The dynamics are not changed, there is no place for Ter Stegen or De Jong, and the Masia is sold as the only spiritual and football refuge. The risk that the players run is even greater than that of the president and Messi's. The fans will have no mercy with the footballers who, out of selfishness or generosity, manage the deferred collection of their file if their salary has not been cut before after not being able to register the 10 who left for Paris.
The debt has not gone away with Messi's goodbye nor did it go away with the resignation of Bartomeu in the same way that the cracks in the Camp Nou have not healed nor has Koeman become more Cruyffista than a follower of Van Gaal.
The story that has been built from Barcelona said that Neymar saw himself playing for Messi's Barça and in the end it has been seen that it is Messi who plays for Neymar's PSG.
Trapped by the dynamics of bad news in Barcelona, it is not surprising that Rosario's face has changed as soon as he arrived in Paris: his challenge today seems much less chimerical than that of Barça if Laporta does not react.
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