The club captain refused travel guides to Manchester and Paris during an hour-long interview but admitted Barça are ‘in a really, really bad way’
Lionel Messi can begin negotiating with any team he likes in four days’ time, but he will not. That’s the good news for Barcelona fans and there is more. Like the Argentinian declaring “I feel good now, enthusiastic”, describing the arrival of Ronald Koeman as coach as a “great choice”, and insisting the “difficult, terrible” summer when he tried to force his way out is “behind me”. Or the fact that he called Barcelona “my life” and his connection to the club “a relationship of love”.
Many of those settling in to watch Sunday’s hour-long TV interview did so in search of optimism, reasons for hope. If they really looked hard – and they did – they might also have found it in how Messi talked about his problems in the past tense and his desire for the new president to return Barcelona to winning ways. They could cling, too, to the ousting of the former president Josep Maria Bartomeu, who Messi said had conned him and briefed against him, and whose handling of Luis Suárez had been “mad”. With Bartomeu gone, maybe things can get back to normal.
