It’s finally happened. Lionel Messi, not just the world’s best footballer (sorry, Christiano, but he really is) but possibly the best footballer EVERRRRRR, has left his home forever. Leo was ‘born’ in Barcelona. Ok, not actually delivered into this world there but we really don’t care about the messy bits. He went there when a baby and now he’s really old, 34, they’ve kicked him out. Mercilessly. And he’s gone to the orphanage known as Paris St Germain. Like Oliver Twist before him, the ‘poor’ dude will have to survive on his own, at massive personal cost as his wages are cut severely. So severely that his weekly wage is now only about 40 times what the average worker earns in a year. It is positively heart-breaking. Ok, Oliver Twist didn’t generally use private jets much and probably didn’t stay at £17,000 a night hotels, but the parallels are otherwise staggering. Dickens must have been a Barca fan.

Barcelona have to divest themselves of their favourite child because they can no longer afford him. Which, in the world of football, is a wonderful breath of fresh sanity in a foggy soup of stale and corrupt madness. Spain actually imposes a ‘salary cap’ on teams. So even though the great Barcelona have debts of about half a billion (Euros, but pounds, dollars, all pretty much the same at that level), their player wage bill is currently 110% of the team’s total turnover. If it was anything but football they’d have put ‘bankrupt’ stickers all over Nou Camp and shut the doors forever. But this is football, so basic economics doesn’t work properly in that context. It’s like needing special physics at the sub-atomic level because gravity and mechanics just fail.

But Spain are at least making a fucking effort to stop the rot. And Messi at Barca, for about 2 million a WEEK, was deemed to much. Even cutting it in half was still problematic. So he’s gone to France. Where the footballing authorities are as toothless, testicle-free and ludicrous as they are here. And at PSG they have no limits to anything financial. As long as there’s money in the state of Qatar, Paris St Germain are doing fine. You can think of them as Manchester City in French. With both governed only by UEFA’s ‘financial fair play’ rules. Which has been shown time and again, are totally worthless.

Bienvenue a Paris, Leo

A xxxx