Messi, during a training session with Barça in the 2015 preseason. /
The Argentine signed up to eight renewals with Barcelona and sealed a preliminary agreement in the summer of 2021 before leaving for PSG
On December 5, 2001, when he was only 14 years old and had settled in Spain for just over twelve months, Leo Messi signed his first contract with Barcelona. Accompanied by his parents as he was a minor, the Argentine sealed a bond of “non-professional player integrated into the squad of amateur soccer players in Barcelona” in which the entity then chaired by Joan Gaspart undertook to review it “within a period reasonable to secure services as a professional player. According to the investigation by ‘El Mundo’, Barcelona set a penalty of 150,253 euros in favor of Messi in the event that the club did not want to continue counting on his services. On the contrary, if it were the player who did not want to continue as a Barça player to “join another club”, the player would have to compensate Barça with five million euros. It was the first of the abusive clauses that the Barcelona club exercised with the Argentine.
Then a remuneration was set for Rosario of 5,049 euros per year as a “scholarship”, separate expenses (for example, Barça paid for Messi’s growth hormone treatment). In any case, the disproportion in the clauses was a custom at that time, as was reflected in the ‘Baena case’, the club’s youth squad. With these conditions, 2003 was reached, with Joan Laporta starting his first stage at the helm of Can Barça. The current president sealed a nine-year contract that soon became outdated due to the great evolution of the footballer on the pitch. An annual salary of 45,977 euros was set during 2003/04, in addition to an official bonus per game played of 1,503 euros. The table below shows the evolution of said contract, in which a clause of 150 million euros was set if Messi broke it. Another new example of disproportionality because, if it were the case that Barcelona were in charge of ending the relationship, the compensation to the footballer would ‘only’ range between 180,304 and 300,506 euros.
Evolution of the contract that Messi signed in 2003. /
Messi broke down the door of the first team on October 16, 2004, at the age of 17 years and three months, and he would no longer drop out of the elite. His participation was in crescendo and his remuneration, too. In 2008, under Guardiola and a year before winning the first of his seven Ballon d’Ors, he already had a salary of 8.5 million euros per season. In 2009 his clause rose to 250 million. In 2014 his salary was set at 20 million a year and in 2017 he hit the big ball: 75 net ‘kilos’ per exercise, becoming the highest paid athlete on the planet.
From Barcelona to Paris
After a push and pull that lasted for an entire season, Messi reached a pre-agreement with Laporta to continue at the Camp Nou, but the Argentine’s requests were overwhelming for the weakened Catalan coffers. In the summer of 2021, the best player in the history of the club put an end to more than two decades in Barcelona and joined the ranks of PSG, commanding a multimillion-dollar project together with his close friend Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, in addition to Sergio Ramos, who that same summer left Real Madrid.
