As the phrase of the day goes, Lionel Messi "completed" football in December. He won his first World Cup with Argentina, and at that point, he'd won everything: leagues, cups, league cups, Champions Leagues, Copa Americas, Club World Cups, UEFA Super Cups, a World Cup, Ballon d'Ors, Golden Balls and every other designation that's plated in a precious metal. No longer did his legacy really warrant comparison to any of his fellow soccer players; no, the only others whose career achievements stacked up to Messi's were the greatest-ever athletes in other sports.
His triumph in Qatar was so total and so barely believable -- an opening loss to Saudi Arabia, a near capitulation to the Netherlands and a back-and-forth 3-3 final with two goals from Messi and three from his presumed best-in-the-world successor, Kylian Mbappe -- that it sometimes felt pointless we'd even keep going as any newcomer who'd watched the final would forever be disappointed; soccer is, mostly, boredom. The games, and especially finals, were not like that. And with all the unlikely narrative currents that converged in Doha, Qatar, on Dec. 18, 2022, they'd never be like that again.
The months since have proved the point. Together, Messi and Mbappe went out meekly to Bayern Munich in the round of 16 of the Champions League. The latter looked intermittently threatening; the former struggled to have the domineering effect he'd managed to muster at the World Cup.
A few weeks later, Messi missed training to visit Saudi Arabia, PSG suspended him and we reported that he'd be leaving the club at the end of the season. To top it all off, mere months after Messi brought an entire nation to a near-literal standstill, angry PSG supporters marched to the club's headquarters and demanded that he be gone. He returned, apologized to the club and its fans, and he's back in training with the season ending later this month.
Now, his options appear to be to play in a league no one cares about, join a team that has never finished higher than 12th in MLS or rejoin a club that probably can't even afford him.
How did we get here?
The minor problems of Messi
Even at 35, Messi is still one of the best attackers on the planet -- if not the best. I've cited it before and will continue to do so because I think Michael Imburgio's DAVIES model does the best job of any publicly available model of contextualizing everything a player does with the ball.
We can look at goals or assists or any other separate metric -- shots, through balls, tackles, key passes, whatever -- and try to make some mental inferences about what each aspect is worth, but DAVIES is just a way to say what it all adds up to. And, well, this season: the player with the most valuable stuff? It's Messi.
Per Imburgio's model, Messi has provided 11.67 extra goals of value beyond the average player in his same role. The rest of the top five from the big five leagues, in case you're skeptical:
2. Kylian Mbappe: 11.52
3. Mohamed Salah, Liverpool: 8.98
4. Robert Lewandowski, Barcelona: 8.97
5. Erling Haaland, Manchester City: 8.91
In other words, Messi is still doing pretty much everything. Over the past calendar year, he leads all forwards across Europe's big five leagues, per the site FBref, in assists per 90 minutes, expected goals assisted, shot-creating actions, passes completed, progressive passes completed and successful take-ons. While those numbers speak to his late-career drift into more of a creator role, he's still averaging 0.56 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes (85th percentile) and attempting 4.04 shots per 90 minutes (94th percentile).
However, while there has been a minor uptick in defensive activity this season, Messi is a near zero on defense at this point in his career. His main defensive value simply comes from the dangerous attacking positions he fills while his team defends. When attacking, the opposition has to pay attention to where Messi is. If they don't, then they eventually lose him, he gets on the ball in space, Mbappe makes a run and it's game over.
Framed another way, the attention Messi warrants at all times should also limit the attacking capacity of whomever his team is playing. That is a form of defense, yes, but at this point, if you have Messi in your team, you can't really put together a coherent from-the-front press. I mean, you can if you're carrying only one player on defense, but PSG also has to carry Mbappe (who is way too young to already be this much of a passenger without the ball) and Neymar. As we've seen in the Champions League, it just doesn't work over the course of 180 minutes. Every other team that can afford Messi already has at least one defensively light starter.
Beyond the difficulty of crafting a coherent defensive team around Messi, you also have to kind of build your attacking identity around him. I don't think this is so much of a problem because he's so good at everything in possession, but if you have Messi, you know he's going to drop deep, get on the ball, progress play forward and then also try to dictate play from the top of the penalty area.
Perhaps a handful of coaches could convince him to hang higher up the field and trust that his teammates will get the ball to him in somewhat predetermined areas -- if Messi is playing for one of the best teams in the world, chances are he'll be playing with some of the best ball-progressing midfielders in the world, too -- and it's not like PSG had some kind of strong identity, culture or playing structure to convince Messi to fit into. But we still haven't seen Messi adapt his game to fit in with his teammates ... and we're 18 seasons into this thing.
If Messi is going to be Messi wherever he goes -- rather than turn up and down the various dials of how he contributes to the team -- then it does at least require certain profiles of players around him to maximize the team's ceiling. And because Messi isn't scoring 50 goals a season anymore and he's 35 years old, it's not quite a no-brainer for any club to immediately hop on the opportunity to add him to their roster.
So where could he go?
To start: anywhere.
Athletic careers are incredibly short, and soccer players should maximize their earnings to the best of their ability. It's a job with massive physical risk, and they're providing a ton of value to their employers. This frequently doesn't align with fan or media expectations for what an athlete should do -- aka "how a player should continue to write whatever story we all have in our minds" -- but that's just another one of the many contradictions of the world football economy.
Messi, of course, isn't your average professional soccer player. He is the professional soccer player.
Estimates suggest that Messi has made more than $1 billion over his playing career. Forbes called him the highest-paid athlete in the world for 2022, pegging his earnings at $130 million. He's one of the few athletes who are both good enough and rich enough that they could take a below-market contract to play wherever they want.
And yet we still don't really see this happen in soccer. Veterans in American sports will frequently sign for less than they'd make on the open market in order to fit under the salary cap with a team that could win a championship. Former NBA MVP Kevin Durant did it -- in the middle of his prime -- when he was with the Golden State Warriors, who had just won the most games in league history the season before he joined. One of the biggest competitive advantages for the New England Patriots, who won six Super Bowls from 2002 through 2018, was that their star quarterback, Tom Brady, accepted a below-market contract that allowed the team to spend some of the money elsewhere and create a deep, title-winning roster.
The closest thing we've seen in soccer recently is with Lucas Perez, the former Arsenal striker who took a tenfold pay cut to rejoin his boyhood club, Deportivo La Coruna, in an attempt to rescue them from the Spanish third division.
- Messi apologizes to PSG for Saudi Arabia trip
- Messi back in training despite PSG suspension
There's a sound labor argument that players shouldn't do this, that all they're really doing is saving their millionaire or billionaire owners money in tax penalties, and that they're not really freeing up more money for their fellow teammates. This is often true within the cartel structures of American sports leagues, where each team technically has the same spending power, but there's also a Byzantine financial structure that allows for teams to find ways to circumvent those limitations or pay extra in taxes in order to spend more on player salaries.
In soccer, Financial Fair Play puts a somewhat vague cap on player spending, but there is a pretty massive gulf in theoretical spending power between the clubs owned by nation states, a handful of the legacy superclubs and then the other top teams.
According to some estimates, Messi is making nearly double the salary of any player other than his teammates Neymar and Mbappe. Barcelona and Real Madrid also have a handful of massive earners on their books. Manchester United were willing to pay Cristiano Ronaldo a ton of money, and at a much more advanced and reduced stage than Messi is currently in. Manchester City could pay Messi what he wants, pending the current Premier League investigation. So too could Newcastle United. To expand it out, let's just say Bayern Munich, Chelsea and Liverpool could also make it happen if the owners really wanted to.
Among those teams, Real Madrid is an obvious no-go. He's leaving PSG. Manchester City seemingly tried to make it happen three years ago but appear to have since moved on; they're also probably the one team in the world who could easily make an argument that Messi might not even move their needle.
Manchester United would be going down a similar path as the Ronaldo deal, which was such a massive catastrophe that I don't think even United would be willing to try it again. Chelsea are now a mid-table team in the middle of the rebuild; why would Messi go there? Bayern Munich have never signed players like Messi; they've barely signed players like Sadio Mane. And Liverpool, well, have you been following the team for the past seven years?
So that leaves Barcelona and Newcastle United.
Messi already had to leave Barcelona once because their financial mismanagement -- in no small part due to their insistence on tying other player salaries to Messi's consistently rising wages -- made it impossible for them to fit his salary at a number he was willing to accept. The club clearly wants Messi to return, and I imagine a large part of the wider soccer world would like to see it, too. It's the club and the colors we'll all remember him in, and getting to see Messi in the Blaugrana, playing in the Champions League a couple more times, playing against Real Madrid -- it just feels right. It's not going to happen, though, unless he takes a massive pay cut.
Newcastle, on the other hand, are an ascendant Premier League team. They've been punching above their talent level this season, and adding in a superstar like Messi wouldn't throw things out of whack in the same way they might for one of the aforementioned clubs. They're something of a legacy club -- oh, and they're owned by the country that Messi just got suspended for visiting as part of his ambassadorial duties to the nation.
Imagine me saying this just 18 months ago? I can't, but it's true: From a financial and a sporting perspective, Newcastle United is the easiest fit for Lionel Messi.
Messi could also just, I don't know, play for a couple of million per year and join whatever club seems most interesting, most fun, most challenging or whatever else it is he's looking to fulfill over these final few years of his playing career. Selfishly, I'd like to see him playing at the highest level for someone other than PSG for as long as he's able to; we're not going to see another player like him for a really long time, and I'd like to see him do it while he still can. But with the way all of these different forces have collided, I'd put the chances of that happening at something like a coin flip.
Otherwise, it seems, he'll follow Cristiano Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia and make way more money than he'll make anywhere in Europe. They'll play out a sad, hollow version of the rivalry that defined modern soccer. Or he'll go to Major League Soccer, where commissioner Don Garber has already suggested that the league will bend whatever rules are necessary in order to make it possible for Messi to join Inter Miami (presumably).
In the end, though, it doesn't really matter. This is all a footnote to a career that has already been completed. In five or 10 years, these past few months -- and these next few seasons -- will have all but faded from the historical record. Plus, very few great athletes go out with grace, somehow snugly fitting their diminished skills into a team that gets the best out of whatever's left before they hang 'em up for good.
It's just that with Messi, as we saw at the World Cup and have seen frequently in Ligue 1 this season, it still feels a little too early for him to go out like this.