Messi's transfer to Paris St.-Germain highlights how even the best player of his generation was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along
Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along. Image: SAMEER AL-DOUMY / AFP
In those frantic, final hours in April, before a cabal of owners of Europe’s grandest clubs unveiled their plan for a breakaway superleague to an unsuspecting and unwelcoming world, a schism emerged in their ranks.
One faction, driven by Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, and Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, wanted to go public as quickly as possible. Agnelli, in particular, was feeling the personal pressure of acting, in effect, as a double agent. Everything, they said, was ready; or at least as ready as it needed to be.
Another group, centered on the American ownership groups that control England’s traditional giants, counseled caution. The plans still had to be finessed. There was still debate, for example, on how many spots might be handed over to teams that had qualified for the competition. They felt it better to wait until summer.
If the first group had not won the day — if the whole project had not exploded into existence and collapsed in ignominy in 48 tumultuous hours — this would have been the week, after the Olympics but before the new season began, when they presented their self-serving, elitist vision of soccer’s future.
That the Super League fell apart, of course, was a blessed relief. That this week has, instead, been given over to a dystopian illustration of where, exactly, soccer stands suggests that no great solace should be found in its failure.
©2019 New York Times News Service