Who is responsible for Messi's departure from Barcelona? All you have to know

Lionel Mesi cried at a press conference on August 8, telling the Barcelona and world media that he had no choice but to leave: "The club didn't want to go deeper into debt." Barcelona and soccer fans are looking for answers. The club's directors are accused of mismanagement, La Liga is reproached for sticking to its rules and Messi himself is criticized for putting money before loyalty. 

The responsibility for Messi's departure from Barcelona 

The blame game surrounding Messi's disastrous departure from Barcelona has not taken long to start. Certainly, there is plenty of responsibility to go around.The club, owned by the fans, has been so badly managed that, for every euro ($1.17) earned, it has been paying out €1.10 ($1.30) in player salaries alone. By definition, expenses far outstrip revenues, meaning the club has been resorting to a growing debt load to pay for big-name signings and their huge wage packages, and the club's total debt has now passed the €1 billion ($1.1 billion) mark.

Messi claims to have done everything possible to stay, and had accepted a 50% reduction in his salary. However, his previous contract amounted to a staggering €555 million ($652 million) over four years, the highest of any athlete in history, and included €115 million ($135 million) just for signing the deal and €78 million ($91 million) as a "loyalty bonus." After earning that kind of money, he could have agreed to play for free at Barça for a season to help the club he loves with its problems and remain the highest paid footballer in the world for the past half-decade.

And then there is La Liga, which runs the top two divisions of Spanish soccer. In 2013, it created new financial rules for clubs that set limits on how much clubs can spend on their playing squad in a single season, based on an analysis of their financial health. La Liga found that, after the financial impact of the pandemic, Barcelona needed to make significant cuts in player salaries to stay within the rules, a 47.1 percent drop from €656 million ($770 million) to €347 million ($407 million).

Barcelona president Joan Laporta blamed the club's failure to sign Messi on La Liga's refusal to relax its rules, but Barca happily embraced these regulations in 2013 along with the other 19 La Liga clubs. Blaming financial regulations for Barcelona's problems is a bit like blaming a doctor for preventing you from cutting your hand: Barcelona's financial crisis will not be solved by more lavish spending. A more rational line of questioning in the direction of La Liga would be to ask why the rules have not been much tougher to prevent the club from getting into this mess in the first place.

In fact, La Liga was so desperate to keep Messi in Spain that last week it reached an agreement in principle to sell a 10% stake in La Liga to private equity firm CVC in exchange for $3 billion to be split among the 20 clubs. Laporta said that financial boost would have provided the additional cash the club needed to re-sign Messi, but at the cost of selling a stake in the league's financial future, most notably the television broadcasting rights, a devil's bargain he could not support.