The Press Conference None of Us Wanted
Messi, fairy tales and the harshest of life’s lessons.
So this… this is where it ends. It ends surrounded by salivating journalists, stood at a podium against a backdrop of branding and staging and banners that looked so poorly and quickly bundled together it resembled a stall at a University jobs fair. It ends in the middle of a conference room filled with teammates, family and - just out of picture - those executives with viper heads and razor sharp half-smiles, where the blame for this whole gut-wrenching shitshow can wholeheartedly fall. It ends in a room so devoid of moral conviction and competence (save for a few) that the sound of sobbing reverberates around the room. It ends in a suit. The tie between Lionel Messi and Barcelona - a tie as deep as any in the history of sport - should never have ended in a suit. It should have ended in glory: wearing a shirt soaked by the sweat and toil of a bond that produced some of the greatest moments of our lives.
Yet here we are, this press conference being the latest addition to the existential anxiety that has come to define life in general over the past few weeks, months, years.
If you so desire, and no doubt people will, you could extract a lot from that Messi press conference. Watching it myself, beyond the evident sadness and emotion of the occasion, I felt this deep sense of vein-popping rage. Unfortunately, as someone better equipped to illustrate his deepest emotions through his footballing talent, the words just wouldn’t come out for Messi, and the ones that did were not enough. It wasn’t his fault; you could have watched the whole affair with the sound off and it wouldn’t have changed the overwhelming sense of disappointment that oozed through the TV screen. It was the most ill-fitting and bluntest of send offs for the greatest participant of the most popular game in human history. From a Barcelona perspective, given the events that led to this point, it was so painfully, perfectly on brand that it almost looked satirical. A dimly-lit conference room. It would have been as hilariously tone-deaf and dumbfounding as when little Rudi Giuliani did that weird press conference outside a garden centre to try and wheel back the 2020 Presidential election, were it not for the fact that we were witnessing first-hand betrayal, live on television.
Yet here we are, this press conference being the latest addition to the existential anxiety that has come to define life in general over the past few weeks, months, years. I think it took this for me and (probably) many others to realise that over the years, our love for Barca has actually just been our love for Messi. Undoubtedly there has been a pretty phenomenal supporting cast: that untouchable Guardiola team, the Suarez/Neymar axis, the master-apprentice early years with Ronaldinho. But for the most part, Messi has been the constant. A reliable source of joy that would turn Sunday evening blues into a night at the theatre. A seemingly immortal entity that tested the very fabric of reality. A thing of fairy tales.
The hardest part of this to swallow is that it is all very real. Those of us that have grown with Messi’s career have been lucky enough to live at least partially in a fairy tale. But the real world has a habit of stomping on the things we enjoy from time to time. Death by a thousand accounting decisions is not the fairy tale ending we all wanted for Messi. His parting with Barca was not on his terms, in the magical way he would’ve hoped. It was on the terms of incompetent men in suits, in offices, in boardrooms. It was on terms that none of us could refute: life doesn’t always give you the ending you want.
