Messi signs new contract at Barca
By 2021, when Messi’s current contract is set to expire, the player will have spent a total of 17 years with Barcelona.
Lionel Messi has signed a new contract at Barcelona through to the end of the 2020/21 season, the club has confirmed.
The new deal includes a staggering €700m buy-out clause which looks set to end all speculation over a future move away from the Nou Camp.
By the end of the 2020/21 season, when Messi’s new contract is set to expire, the Argentine will have spent a total of 17 years with Barcelona’s first team.
A renewal was agreed between player and club in July but it is only now that Messi has put pen to paper on the contract.
Throughout his career at Barça the 30-year-old has scored 523 goals in 602 games and is both the Club’s and La Liga’s all-time leading goalscorer.
He was awarded a fourth Golden Shoe on Friday to add to his trophy haul, which includes five Ballon d’Or awards, four Champions League titles and six La Liga Player of the Year accolades.
Meanwhile, from the highs of last weekend’s assertive victory over Newcastle to this: yet another humbling in Basel. After an opening 45 minutes of sustained pressure and chances, which Jose Mourinhoafterwards described as the “perfect half without the goals,” the tables were comprehensively turned as FC Basel served the visitors a healthy dose of their own medicine. Except, for the hosts, this culminated in a late Michael Lang goal – one that ensured that, almost six years on from that infamous defeat here at St Jakob-Park, United were once again felled by this modest Swiss club.
Despite last evening’s defeat, though, United’s place in the knockout stages of the Champions League is all but assured, barring a 6-0 thumping at the hands of CSKA Moscow next month. After a four-year absence, United are poised to return to the pomp and grandeur of the last-16.
But this is to brush over the cold, hard realities of the worrying identity crisis which is currently haunting the corridors of power at Old Trafford. For, as Wednesday’s defeat attested to, this a side not yet sure of itself. United flickered with brilliance here in Switzerland but were equally hamstrung by a lack of cohesion, a lack of purpose or direction which, against a team buoyed by an electric home crowd, served to undermine their efforts.
Paul Pogba’s performance, in particular, served as a suitable embodiment of last night’s performance. Captain for the evening, the Frenchman initially revelled in his new-found responsibility. As was the case at the weekend, the youngster was United’s beating heart, with his desire to impress from the start evident in his tricks-and-thrills approach to the game: a nolook pass here, a boyish stepover there, an ambitious shot on goal to keep his team ticking over.
Indeed, his cutting delivery to Romelu Lukaku in the opening stages of the game, weighted to perfection, pointed to a player returning to the height of his abilities after a lengthy spell on the sidelines. But this quality seemed hard to maintain as his grasp on the match waned. Having started as United’s fulcrum, he ended the evening a diminished presence. After 66 minutes he was hauled off in place of Nemanja Matic. Of course, Pogba has his excuses - namely a two-month injury spell - but the same cannot be said for his teammates who, like many of United’s travelling fans, will have walked away from this clash asking where exactly it went wrong. When Jana Novotna lost the Wimbledon final to Steffi Graf in 1993, she famously used the Duchess of Kent’s shoulder to cry on. It was one of the most poignant moments in televised tennis – an image so powerful it came to define her career.
Some observers believed she had caved in during the match while the player herself maintained she had lost her rhythm.
“Novotna blasted her second serve three feet out,” wrote The Independent’s Simon O’Hagan at the time. “Deuce. Then a simple volley that landed about six feet out. Advantage Graf. Finally, a smash that wasn’t even close to getting over the net. Game Graf. 2-4. Within 15 minutes it was 6-4 to Graf, and one of the great ‘bottle jobs’ was complete. The British player Sue Barker agreed: “No player wants to be thought of as a bottler, and if you’d asked me on the morning of the final whether I thought Jana was one, I wouldn’t have said so ... she’ll have to work twice as hard to lose it.”
Work Novotna did but she remains remembered not for winning Wimbledon in 1998 but for losing to Graf five years earlier.
The Czech player, who has died of cancer aged 49, retired in 1999. She was ranked number two in the world at her peak, renowned as an instinctive serve-volleyer who lived for the game.
In 2005 she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, after having notched 100 career titles, including 24 for singles and 76 for doubles. After her famous loss to Graf, Novotna received the runner-up plate from the Duchess of Kent who, in consoling her, said: “I know you will win it one day, don’t worry”. Five years later, aged 29, she did, defeating Nathalie Tauziat of France, 6-4, 7-6, (7-2) – in the final. THE INDEPENDENT