If that’s the case PSG have to win the CL in the next 2 years or it’s a massive failure on their part.
-------------------Navas/Donnarumma
----Hakimi—Ramos----Marquinos—Kurzawa
------Verratti--------Paredes-------Wjnaldum
---------Messi-------Mbappe------Neymar
With DiMaria and Icardi on the bench. They’ll score 130 goals in the league.
The whole thing is odd. Why did Barca negotiate a salary of $X with Messi if that wouldn’t fit under FFP regulations? Why couldn’t they renegotiate down to make it fit? A lot of Barca fans seem to be blaming Laporta, but if this is on a president it’s got to be Bartameo, IMO. He brought in a lot of dead weight.
They thought La Liga would let it slide cause…its…Messi, and they have already lost Ronaldo.
Turns out not so much.
Barca is well and truly fucked.
Messi and Ramos on the same team. Its going to be weird as fuck.
Aguero is now out at least 10 weeks with a calf injury. It looks to be a similar injury as Mike Trout and he is nowhere close to returning to a more forgiving sport in baseball after nine weeks.
If Coutinho can regain some form, they might not be that bad. He didn’t work as the Iniesta replacement, but he might work better as the Messi replacement. I expect Griezmann will improve too. He wasn’t a good fit for a team that needed a 9, but maybe it’ll work now. Neither Madrid team is a world beater at the moment, so who knows.
Messi to PSG is official now. It’ll be sooo weird to see him as #30.
Really surprised that he is not staying in Spain. I wonder how seriously they take the drug testing in France, but in Spain it seemed that they had carte blanche.
I’ve seen it speculated that, after the flirtation with the European Super League back in April, La Liga was in no mood to cut Barcelona any slack over FFP rules. Between revenue losses due to COVID and the club’s debt burden, they’ll have no way to keep a competitive squad around Messi, even if he was to play for free.
Is La Liga cutting of its nose to spite its face? They have some distance for their UEFA coefficient to fall before their ranking is really jeopardized. It’s still going to be a few lean years any way you look at it.
During the 16 years they had Messi, why couldn’t Barcelona had run a tighter financial ship? Presumably Messi was bringing in a lot more revenue than he was costing them in salary.
I knew they brought in Henry, Pique, Alves, and others in around that time so went to take a look at transfer fees. Yeah, damn cheap compared to today. Cheap compared to the Galacticos too, although four of those were Ballon d’Or winners. Henry for 24M euros! He was 29, and at the time that seemed older than it does now, but still.
Also, the picture of Ronaldo used in the Galactico article…
There is a problem with Spanish Law here: If you have a contract and that contract expires, if you then sign a new contract the remuneration in this contract cannot be below 50% of the former contract. Thus the salary can only be lowered by 50% max, which was not enough to satisfy the Liga.
Barça overpaid for years and squandered Neymar’s 222 Mio. windfall. Liverpool, BVB and Atlético must have celebrated some party at their expense! Barça’s presidents remind me of British PMs: just when you think that this one is the worst since Chamberlain and that it couldn’t get any worse, you get Núñez → Gaspart → Laporta → Sandro Rosell → Bartomeu (left some irrelevants and a repetition out, for pity’s sake) / Major → Bliar → Cameron → May → Boris (left some irrelevants… etc).
Saw your post before you edited it. I think both Xavi and Iniesta are all-time greats and Busquets is a generational great. (Roughly defined as not being insane to fit them in a ~23 man roster composed of players from whatever time frame).
I feel like during their careers Xavi was more well regarded, but then Iniesta looks better in hindsight? I’ll stick with Xavi.
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