Messi's left Barcelona, but LaLiga promises drama once Real Madrid, Atletico, Sevilla begin
There has never, in the chequered history of Spanish football, been a prologue to a season like this one. Whether the next nine months of LaLiga can produce drama that lives up to the last handful of weeks, I swear I don't know.
It's not just that Lionel Messi is leaving in floods of tears; the unpalatable fact is that FC Barcelona have made a historic dog's breakfast of how to retain the services of their greatest-ever player, and one of the best of all-time. If there were awards for monumentally insensitive incompetence they'd be unchallenged on the podium.
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There has been double dealing and treachery, but by whom to whom, and to what degree, has still to fully emerge.
That FC Barcelona are mired in financial catastrophe and have humiliatingly surrendered their greatest-ever footballer to a direct European rival -- precisely as a private equity firm, CVC, are queuing up to inject €2.7bn into Spanish football (apparently like manna from heaven) -- feels like it could only happen in this country.
The size and scale of their debt (€1.2 billion) has fully emerged, but the destructive impact hasn't. How far President Joan Laporta will go in his embarrassing, and deeply injudicious, Super League "pact" with Florentino Perez -- and Juve's Andrea Agnelli, with whom the two Spaniards had lunch in Barcelona at the weekend -- will be the perfect barometer as to the real depth of Barca's problems.
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