Paris Saint-Germain’s players were still reeling from a shocking defeat to Lorient when they turned up to practice on Monday, only to find that the world’s best soccer player hadn’t bothered to join them.
Lionel Messi, it turned out, was thousands of miles away in Saudi Arabia carrying out his duties for the Saudi Tourism Authority, which pays him a reported $30 million a year to serve as a public ambassador for the Kingdom. PSG, the club that pays him around $40 million a year to help it win trophies and sell jerseys, had no idea he’d made the trip.
So on Tuesday, the club made an example of the world’s best player and suspended him for two weeks for the unauthorized jaunt to the Gulf.
Messi’s camp insists he traveled with the club’s permission. Regardless, the suspension means he will only be available for three more games this season as PSG clings to first place in the French league.
As relations sour between the seven-time Ballon d’Or winner and one of the world’s richest soccer teams, it seems increasingly likely that those will be his final three games for Paris. Reports in France suggest that PSG has lost interest in re-signing the 35-year-old for a third season here, marking the end to one of the strangest spells in modern soccer history.
News of the suspension first emerged in L’Equipe, the French sports daily. The headline on the front page read simply: “The Breakup.” PSG didn’t respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
For all the fanfare that accompanied Messi’s arrival in Paris from Barcelona, as the Qatar-backed club acquired the greatest player of his generation, his time in France has been deeply unremarkable. Messi has failed to lead PSG to the coveted Champions League title it has spent more than a decade and $2 billion trying to capture, despite being flanked by the Brazilian playmaker Neymar and French superstar Kylian Mbappé. More alarming, he has often looked checked out and disinterested—even PSG’s fans have booed him on more than one occasion during his two seasons here.
“He took the jeering very hard,” PSG head coach Christophe Galtier said earlier this year in Messi’s defense.
The situation only got worse over the winter after Messi lifted the World Cup with Argentina in December. It was the one title that had eluded him through his staggering career. And once he had it, little else seemed to matter. Fresh from his storybook tournament—and a lengthy break—Messi eventually returned to PSG in January as a man with nothing left to prove in the game. His indifference was hard to miss. PSG was soon drummed out of the Champions League and French Cup. The club is now limping to the finish line in Ligue 1, where it has lost two of its past five matches and seen its advantage over second-placed Olympique Marseille shrink to five points.
That cushion would normally be enough with just five matches remaining on the schedule, but for the next couple of weeks, PSG will have to hang onto it without Messi’s help.
“The players have to get something going,” Galtier, whose own future is up in the air, said after the 3-1 defeat to Lorient. “There are too many players performing below their level.”
The situation has shades of the ugly end to Cristiano Ronaldo’s time at Manchester United earlier this season. The two players have been linked by otherworldly soccer greatness for more than a decade, but the twilight of their respective careers is taking increasingly bizarre turns.
Ronaldo’s public divorce with United came right at the start of the World Cup, when he appeared on British TV to vent his frustration about becoming a highly-paid substitute. United effectively terminated his contract and left Ronaldo searching for any club that would guarantee both playing time and the astronomical salary Ronaldo felt he still deserved at age 38.
The only suitor prepared to meet both conditions turned out to be Al-Nassr in the Saudi professional league, which made him the highest paid athlete anywhere in the world with a contract worth around $200 million a year in January. Since then, Ronaldo has been banging in goals all over the Kingdom, despite plenty of frustration with the standard of the league.
Now, as Messi appears to head for the exit at PSG, he may be looking at a similar landscape. Rumors have floated that he could join David Beckham’s Major League Soccer project at Inter Miami. But no MLS club could ever match the terms of an offer from Saudi, where Messi’s business ties are already on full display.
He has appeared in ads for Visit Saudi since late last year and maintains a friendship with Turki al-Sheikh, a former political enforcer of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who was instrumental to securing Ronaldo’s signature. Earlier this season, Messi also starred in a PSG exhibition game orchestrated by Sheikh in Riyadh against an all-star team built around Ronaldo.
Since then, Saudi fans and soccer officials haven’t been shy about saying they would welcome him with open arms. Any time rival supporters want to taunt Ronaldo in the Kingdom, they have just one go-to chant: “Messi, Messi.”
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