Messi's departure from Barca is a mess everyone could see coming

FC Barcelona cannot say it was not warned.
 
It is not yet a year since the last time a curt communiqué from Camp Nou declared that Lionel Messi’s long affair with the only club he has ever played for was over, and yet here we are again, the greatest player on this planet and also, according to all available evidence, any other, slipping from its grasp. To come so close to losing Messi once might be regarded as unfortunate. To do so twice looks an awful lot like carelessness.
 
Of course, the memory of the last journey down this road is sufficiently fresh, and it is still difficult to imagine Messi in any jersey other than Barcelona’s for a reason. Barcelona is more than his team; it is his home. His bond to it is not simply contractual; this is not just a business arrangement.
 
His children cried, last August, when he announced he would be leaving, when he filed the paperwork to complete his decree nisi, and that was enough to persuade him to stay. It looked for all the world as if he would go; his most ardent suitor, Manchester City, was waiting, pen in hand, for his signature. He stayed because he could not, when it came down to it, leave.
 
Perhaps it will work out that way this time, too. Perhaps there is some sliver of hope for Barcelona’s fans to cling to still: that it is an act of brinkmanship; that the club’s brief statement Thursday on its website declaring that it was the “clear intention of both parties” for Messi to remain, to see out his career in Catalunya, laying all of the blame for the breakdown of talks on the cruel regulations of La Liga, preventing Messi from being registered as a Barcelona player until the club has cut its swollen wage bill is a sign that this is just a play.

“Both parties deeply regret that the wishes of the player and the club will not be fulfilled,” it read. Perhaps Barcelona is putting the pressure on. Perhaps the authorities will buckle, offer the club a workaround, make an exception just this one time, as they have done all the other times that either Barcelona or its twin, repelling pole, Real Madrid, is in trouble. Perhaps Messi will stay, again.

 
Or perhaps not. No matter how it plays out, that is the most curious element of the whole farrago.