Without Lionel Messi, the sporting decline at Barcelona would have set in much earlier, Ronald Koeman thinks. The Dutchman is no longer sure of his continuity as Barcelona coach, as he appears to have lost the confidence of chairman Joan Laporta regarding the present and the future. According to Koeman, Messi was the reason that Barcelona was able to hook up somewhat in recent years, and the sporting decline was also clearly visible, especially in the knockout phases of the Champions League.
“Lionel Messi has obscured everything at Barcelona,” Koeman tells Football International about the attacker, who was unable to sign a new contract with Barcelona for financial reasons and eventually joined Paris Saint-Germain. “He was so good and he won. Of course he had good players around him, but he made the difference. Everyone seems better than he is because of him. This is not a criticism, but an observation.”
Reality surpassed Koeman’s expectation when he joined Messi last season. “I knew how good he is, but it’s still nice to see it up close every day. Everything you would like to teach a football player, in recognizing situations, in the assumptions of the ball under pressure, in ball speed, in finishing; with Messi everything is a ten. Not normal, not normal! When we did a finishing form during training, there were sometimes players who started to pen an easy ball, a bit of fooling around. But with Messi everything was: boom, boom, boom, boom. Never frills, everything functional.”
Messi also wanted to win everything in training, for example during a rondo. “If the ball goes around twenty times, it is an extra turn for the players in the middle. If that happens three times in a row, they will form a hedge and the two who were in the middle then walk through that hedge and get taps on their heads and stuff. I asked Messi if it had happened to him once. “Yes, once,” he said. In all those years. With him, the elderly never lost an exercise of the young. Happened once and Messi was seriously angry about that for a week. Truly, a robber.”
Messi also kept Barcelona in a financial stranglehold with his salary, although Koeman points out that Messi was good for thirty goals and twenty assists last year. “He was an example for the players. When we won the cup… Messi took so many trophies, bigger than this one, but you saw that the Copa del Rey really did something for him this time. With those young players in there, he saw the future of the club. All those guys wanted to take a picture with him, I’ve never seen anything like it. He was and is that big. The fact that he is not here now was a shock to the whole city.”