New york psg

Messi won the competition four times with Barcelona. Unlike Barcelona, though, P. And it is doing that by spending money. A lot of money. Messi, for example, is joining a team that this summer added the Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, the Netherlands midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum and the Real Madrid captain Sergio Ramos. It is unclear just how P. Its hand strengthened by those successes, P.

With its debts mounting, its revenues still crippled by the pandemic and La Liga unwilling to offer relief, Barcelona had no choice, Laporta said, but to let its best player go. And both have been constructed as platforms for and monuments to individuals. The only differences, really, are that the individuals at the heart of the P. City had the ball. Or, rather, most of P. Gueye and Herrera and the indefatigable Marco Verratti closed down spaces and put out fires.

Then Messi got the ball. It is here that Messi has always come to life. He was at full speed, but there was no sense of haste; it seemed he was waiting for all of the other moving parts of the scene to be just so before he played his hand. He waited. When Messi signed with P. He did not, after all, want to leave Barcelona: He made that perfectly clear.

The greatest player of his, or perhaps any, generation had been forced to leave only because of the suicidal economics of the modern game. When it emerged that Barcelona could no longer pay him, he had little choice but to sign for one of two clubs. Only P. There was no romance here; it was cold, heartless business, nothing more. The chemistry has not been immediate. It could only have been Chelsea or Manchester City or Paris. To some — and not just those who hold P. That it will be captivating is not in doubt.

And doubtless profitable: The jerseys will fly off the shelves; the sponsorships will roll in; the TV ratings will rise, too, perhaps lifting all of French soccer with it. It may well be successful, on the field; it will doubtless be good to watch. But that is no measure. So, too, is the sinking of a ship. That the architects of the Super League arrived, in April, at the wrong answer is not in doubt.

But the question that prompted it was the right one. The vast majority of those dozen teams knew that the game in its current form was not sustainable. The costs were too high, the risks too great. The arms race that they were locked into led only to destruction. They recognized the need for change, even if their desperation and self-interest meant they could not identify what form that change should take.

They worried that they could not compete with the power and the wealth of the two or three clubs that are not subject to the same rules as everybody else. They felt that the playing field was no longer level. They believed that, sooner or later, first the players and then the trophies would coalesce around P. It was sooner, as it turns out. This is the week when all their fears, all their dire predictions, have come to pass. There should be no sympathy, of course.