Barcelona president Joan Laporta has shouldered the responsibility of Lionel Messi’s departure from the team in 2021, although adding that he did not have many options in the first place.
Messi left Barcelona in the summer of 2021 to move to Paris Saint-Germain after the team failed to hand him a new contract.
Then in €1.35bn of debt followed by the consequences of COVID-19, there simply was no way for Barcelona to hand their captain a new deal.
So when asked about how the situation affected Laporta on a personal level, the president told El Tiempo: “A lot.
“At an institutional level, it represented something we did not know how to solve well.
“Here I take responsibility, even though I didn’t have many options either. The truth is that it is an issue that has always left me with the feeling that we could have resolved better.
“On a sporting level, having a player as talented as Leo Messi is always very good, he is the best player in the world.
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Meanwhile, he also reminded Messi that Barcelona is and always will be his home, but out of respect for PSG, the president did not comment about it much.
“We are overcoming this circumstance, we are convinced that Messi knows that Barça is his home and that we love him very much, but out of respect for PSG and Messi himself, it is a subject that we cannot delve into very deeply,” he added.
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