Greed is good, if you're Lionel Messi

Paul Macdonald

• 4 May 2023 10:30 BST
• 4 min read

Lionel Messi’s Saudi Arabia debacle is, in a season packed with them, one of the most depressing incidents that represents just where football is at the moment.

The greatest player of all time, after providing a fitting end to an unbelievable career by lifting the World Cup, is degrading himself once again to the highest bidder, and be damned with everyone else.

Messi has allegedly been offered a £320 million per YEAR deal by Al Hilal to embark upon an exciting journey into a footballing wasteland, where his top-level career is wiped away by a pile of notes.

READ MORE: Messi plays final PSG game after players back club

Messi has picked up a suspension by PSG for disappearing to the Middle East mid-season to flutter his eyelashes at Saudi sheikhs and attempt to secure this incredible contract, which includes stipulations around promoting the Kingdom as they bid for the 2030 World Cup.

And the situation is so ludicrous that it’s impossible not to have sympathy for PSG - PSG! - here, where one of their franchise players is playing political games, knowing full well relations between Qatar and Saudi are strained at best.

But if it wasn’t clear before, it’s crystal now; Messi doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the example he sets. He doesn’t care about who pays him, just as long as they do, and in huge amounts. He’s still guided by his father in that respect and there appears to be no such thing as too much money in this case.

From a contract so impossibly large at Barcelona - well over £100m per season before bonuses - that he has helped financially cripple the club for a generation, to exiting to the only place who would meet his demands, it’s a greedy trek along ignominy for the Argentine.

Really, all we should be talking about is that World Cup win. At times it doesn’t feel real, the manner in which he saw off the current incumbent for greatest player in Kylian Mbappe to finally win the prize that his mentor and hero Diego Maradona had done three decades before.

It should be all we remember of his post-peak career. Instead, we are forced to witness PSG Ultras - who are well within their rights to do so - chanting his name outside the stadium and demanding that he never comes back. For a figure as publicly placid as Messi, it takes some incredibly bone-headed PR work to make a fan base think this way about you.

But then again, he’s never been well-advised by those around him, particularly father, Jorge. This is the same man who botched Messi’s tax affairs and landed him with a huge bill in Spain, or who allegedly courted Real Madrid with a view to a transfer there when Barca were proving difficult around a contract renewal.

Make no mistake - players have a right to maximise the revenue they can generate in what is a short career. They are duty-bound to protect their futures and those of their families by taking the best deal available.

Messi doesn't need the money

But there are obvious exceptions and this is clearly one of them. Messi doesn’t need this money. He doesn’t need to become a plaything of a state in which buying their way into existing global interests is the literal only way they will have any cultural impact on society at large. They are a monument to what money can do for you when you’ve got nothing else to offer, and Messi is happy to accept that situation, as long as the dollars keep rolling in.

And we’re left with an absurd scenario - the death throes of the greatest single rivalry in the history of football - Messi v Ronaldo - will reach its end played in the desert in front of no-one who really cares, to the global sound of shoulder shrugging.

Messi would be wise to look at Ronaldo, who has only been there for four months and already looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. Is this really how you want your career to end?

But it’s money, isn’t it. Saudi will never produce a footballer as good as these two, so they need to go out and buy them instead. Most people would see the problem in that. But Messi doesn’t.

Or, even worse, he does. And he doesn’t care.