Lionel Messi is shown the way back – Newspaper Kommersant No. 58 (7503) of 04/05/2023

One of the main intrigues of the end of the current European football season was the intrigue associated with the near future of the best player in the world. Lionel Messi, who a few months ago, after a triumph at the World Cup in Qatar, was believed to be ready to extend his expiring contract with PSG, it seems that he may return to his native Barcelona in the summer due to the fact that the Parisian club, in need of financial “cushion”, insists on reducing the salary of the Argentinean.

PSG and Lionel Messi are ‘extremely close’ to parting ways L’Equipe. A number of French and Spanish sources agree with this information. This is an unexpected twist in the history of the seven-time winner of the Golden Ball.

Lionel Messi, a graduate of Barcelona, ​​who played for it at a professional level from the age of 16 and won many prestigious prizes with the Catalan club, gone at PSG in the summer of 2021 against the background of the acute crisis that the Spanish giant was going through at the time.

At the same time, until recently it seemed that Messi would remain in the Paris team for a long time.

At the end of last year, the Argentina national team won gold at the World Cup in Qatar, and the brilliant performance of 35-year-old Lionel Messi was probably the key factor in their triumph. Shortly after the championship, the same L’Equipe confidently announced that PSG President Nasser al-Khelaifi and representatives of the Argentine footballer agreed in advance to extend the contract expiring on June 30, 2023 for at least one more season.

The publication explains the radical adjustment of the positions of the parties, which happened in early spring, by the fact that the French club changed the conditions proposed by Messi.

His management insisted that the player should take a 25% pay cut (most sources suggest that the Argentine earns around €35m a year at PSG). L’Equipe’s interlocutor, familiar with the negotiations, stressed that such a measure was necessary for two reasons. The first is that PSG, whose application, along with Messi, also includes many highly paid players like Kylian Mbappe and Neymar, thus wants to insure against the risks of violating the financial fair play rules of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). The second is the desire to save money and have “more freedom” in the summer transfer market. Such freedom indeed looks highly desirable for PSG, given recent developments. They transparently hint at the need to strengthen the application.

The fact is that the situation in which PSG finds itself is very reminiscent of a dead end. For many years, it has retained the same status – a club with huge funds, which, despite them, cannot achieve a truly significant continental success, limiting itself to already bored domestic successes. Moreover, in the second half of winter and early spring, the “dead end” became even more noticeable.

After a break in the season associated with the World Cup, PSG played 14 matches in the French championship and suffered as many as five defeats in them, which by its standards is almost a disaster.

In the last two rounds of the championship, the Parisians lost at home to Rennes and Lyon without scoring goals. They still have a margin of safety in the form of a six-point lead over second-placed Lens, but this is more a consequence of the rather low level of competition in the French championship than the power of PSG.

In addition, the Parisians traditionally failed in the Champions League. In the opening round of the play-offs, they are convincing knocked out Bayern. At the same time, in matches with her, as in the spring championship games, the vast majority of the club’s leaders, including Messi, played very pale.

L’Equipe’s version of which club Lionel Messi will end up with is to be expected. It boils down to the fact that the priority option for the Argentine is to return to his native Barcelona. Actually, the desire to return the legend was not previously hidden by Joan Laporta, who took the post of its president in the wake of the crisis. Spanish media resources, such as Mundo Deportivo, believe that this option is very likely, and the appearance of Messi in Barcelona is actively lobbied, including by her head coach Xavi, who played for a long time in the Catalan team along with the Argentinean.

Alexey Dospekhov