The cleansing power of Lionel Messi’s signature

NEW YORK – The choices facing Lionel Messi are these. He can sign on for another year, maybe two, locked in what seems to be a loveless but lucrative marriage of convenience with Paris Saint-Germain.

The downside is that he must endure the occasional indignity of hearing his name whistled

and jeered

and taken in vain. The upside is the chance to continue to play in – but if we are honest, not win – the Champions League.

Option two: He could take the easy route, which leads straight to the golden sunset. Al Hilal would very much like to pay him an eye-watering sum of money to turn the Saudi Premier League, in effect, into his and Cristiano Ronaldo’s very own Las Vegas residency. Cons: He would have to bid farewell to Europe’s Champions League. Pros: US$400 million (S$532 million) a year.

A third path, to Major League Soccer – and, more specifically, Inter Miami – can provide all the same drawbacks and none of the same benefits.

He would not earn nearly so much. He would still be absent from the club tournament he cherishes the most. The pull of Miami, the lure of the United States and the prospect of the 2026 World Cup are appealing, but they may not be appealing enough.

All of which, of course, leaves the road down which Messi’s heart would surely guide him. He never really wanted to leave Barcelona. He certainly did not want to leave the way he did, rushed out of the door by stark economic reality. Messi had spent his career deciding his own fate, only to have the nature of the end of it decided for him.

The sense of unfinished business is mutual. “I have a thorn in my side that Leo could not stay at our club,” Rafael Yuste, Barcelona’s vice-president, said about a week ago. He wished, he said, that “all of the conditions could come together so that this mutual love story ends with Messi at Barca. When you are in love and you separate from someone, you always want to stay in love.”

As overblown as that might sound, it would be churlish to dispute Yuste’s sincerity. Barcelona almost certainly see some sort of sporting logic in bringing back Messi, of course. Correctly or not, the club genuinely believe that success is more likely with him than without: Both directly, as a result of his performances, and indirectly, thanks to the boost to the brand that his presence would provide.

But that does not mean the romantic impulse is not genuine. Barcelona have come to see Messi as a platonic ideal of their principles, the ones he was reared in from his days as a shy, homesick teenager at La Masia. Through their own colossal mismanagement, the club to which he devoted his career were not able to give Messi the goodbye they wanted or he deserved. It feels a duty to right the wrong.

It would be naive, though, to believe that is the only motivation. Barcelona’s apparent fixation on the return of their king is powered by a swirl of emotions. Affection might be one of them, but so too is nostalgia, in its purest sense, an attachment not to who Messi is, but to what he represents.

So much of what Barcelona have done in recent years has been inspired by a refusal to acknowledge the ticking of the clock, the changing of the seasons.

The pursuit of the European Super League, the appointment of Xavi Hernandez as coach, the mortgaging of their own future for immediate glory – this is the desperate, thrashing reflex of a club that assumed their primacy was the natural order of things, and do not understand why the world has been allowed to change. Bringing back Messi would offer the opioid comfort of a step back in time.

And then, rather more tangibly, there is political necessity, the projection of power. Barcelona are not owned by an individual; they are a members’ organisation, one that function, at least in theory, as a democracy. Joan Laporta, club president, will soon have to seek another mandate from their 143,000 members.

Currently, he would have to stand for re-election as the president who lost Messi. He would much prefer, one would think, to be able to claim to be the man who returned the 35-year-old Argentinian talisman to where he belonged.

Barcelona’s love for Messi is deep and it is sincere. But their need for him – as a symbol of power, as a reminder of what they once were, as a source of quick and easy dopamine, as a way of drawing the eye away from what they would rather you did not see – is greater still.

He has four choices in front of him. They are, at heart, all the same. Barcelona want to use him to clean their image just as surely as PSG want to use him to prove their primacy and Al Hilal want to use him to burnish a nation’s reputation and Inter Miami want to use him to grow a league.

There is no romance at the heart of any of them, none at all. It is business, just business and nothing more. NYTIMES