MESSI EARNS MEGABUCKS
the multiple Ballon d’Or winner has agreed financial terms worth €700million (£623m) over the course of five years in the employ of City Football Group, the club’s holding company.
Messi – who on Sunday underlined last week’s decision to walk out on the final year of his contract by failing to report for Barca’s mandatory Covid testing – is expected to spend three seasons at City before moving to CFG’s MLS franchise New York City FC.
The deal allows the group’s Abu Dhabi ownership to employ the footballer they have coveted above all others since buying into European football 12 years ago at CFG’s two most prominent clubs, with a degree of flexibility retained over the exact timing of Messi’s cross-Atlantic switch.
According to a source f ami l i ar with the negotiations, Messi has been offered an equity stake in CFG as part of his compensation package.
However, there are complications involved in the valuation of shares in a sports company that City stated was worth a heady $4.8billion (£3.6bn) upon announcing a $500m equity investment from a US tech company last year.
Messi may ultimately prefer to be paid in cash. The 33-year-old is said to have chosen City over other suitors because of an ambition to play in the Premier League and a calculation that the best opportunity to add to his four Champions League titles and six Ballon d’Or comes from reuniting with Pep Guardiola.
“Messi thinks Guardiola took the best football out of him, and he wants to repeat that,” said a source close to the player.
The move also follows a long period of contractual and sporting tension between Messi , his advisors and Barca. With his current contract due to conclude in the summer of 2021, negotiation on a new deal were held earlier this year in which the player’s father Jorge requested a further increase on financial terms that were already the most lucrative in the sport.
Last summer, Messi asked the club to focus recruitment efforts on bringing his friend Neymar back from PSG, working with several team-mates to persuade the Brazil international to choose the return over a competing offer from Real Madrid.
Barca failed to conclude the deal, instead signing Antoine Griezmann, a move that angered Messi and is understood to have cost his father a €20m commission on Neymar’s proposed transfer.
Messi’s current contract – the then-unprecedented terms of which were agreed in 2017 – contains a clause that permits him to leave without transfer fee should he formally state his intention to do so within 20 days of the end of each La Liga season.
The player’s camp has received legal advice that this clause, which would have originally expired in June, remained in effective force last week because of the Covid- enforced extension to Barca’s season.
Barcelona lawyers are adamant it has lawfully expired, and that the club would win any legal case brought by Messi to secure a transfer-fee-free switch.
Although there have been talks within the Barca hierarchy that Messi’s sale would make both economic and sporting sense, club president Jose Maria Bartomeu is under immense political pressure to retain Barca’s most popular player.
The club have so far remained insistent Messi will only be permitted to exit on payment of his €700m release clause.