AEnter Lionel Messi. Black suit, dark blue tie. His first press conference as a Paris Saint-Germain player. He grins, he beams, he laughs even before he has uttered the first word. A club employee hands him headphones so he can listen to the translator. Then Messi says what soccer players say when they start at a new club. How happy he is to be here now. How kindly everyone would have received him. And how big his ambitions are with and with the new employer. “I have the same passion and the same desire to play for this club as I felt at the beginning of my career.”
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Flashback, three days ago. Here, too: Enter Lionel Messi. Dark blue suit, dark blue tie. His last press conference as a FC Barcelona player, although he is no longer contractually speaking. He sobs, he sniffs, he cries even before he has uttered the first word. His wife, who is sitting in the front row with their three children, hands him a handkerchief. Then Messi says what he never wanted to say as a footballer: goodbye. “I’m not prepared for something like that. We all really wanted to stay here. At home. In our house. I’ve been here my whole life. “
The temporal proximity between the two events is enough to make it clear that a really extraordinary football transfer was carried out here. Lionel, nicknamed “Leo” Messi, is one of the greatest superstars the world has to offer. He seemed forever connected to FC Barcelona, the club that once brought him to their own academy as a 13-year-old from Rosario, Argentina. A club with which he won 35 important titles and in whose service he himself was named the best player in the world six times. Messi was Barcelona, Barcelona was Messi. For 21 years.
“The goals are the same”
On Wednesday, in Paris, the 34-year-old tried to emphasize this inner conflict again. “It was very difficult to leave Barcelona. I didn’t know where to go, ”he said. There are reasons why the choice fell on the noble club PSG so quickly. Messi says: “My goals and the goals of Paris are the same.”
Also, that he has “friends here”. Specifically, he names the Brazilian Neymar, who “had a great influence” on his decision. In addition, coach Mauricio Pochettino, a compatriot he “has known for a long time”. In the end, the decision to “start over in my life” in France’s capital was therefore almost inevitable: “It was very easy,” says Messi. And laughs.
As supposedly the greatest gem, the Argentine refines the diamond-studded piece of jewelery that the PSG squad already is. A series of storms with him, Neymar and France’s world champion Kylian Mbappé sounds like world selection – even more so when the Italian European champion Marco Verratti directs it in midfield, the Spaniard Sergio Ramos organizes the defense and Italy’s EM hero Gianluigi Donnarumma is in goal.
The recapture of the French championship after a year in which one surprisingly had to give way to the Lille OSC is just an annoying compulsory number for this star ensemble. Because although Messi also spoke again and again on Wednesday of “titles”, plural, that he wanted to win with the club, it is clear to everyone that basically only one title, singular, really counts: the Champions League, the PSG despite the immense financial ones Efforts even ten years after the takeover by the Qatari investor group QSI has still not won.
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