There’s a new battlefront between Lionel Messi and the FC Barcelona board, we have all the details of this new confrontation between both.
Lionel Messi’s summer with FC Barcelona didn’t go as planned. His idea was to leave the club in order to get a chance to play in the Premier League this season. The initial fax he sent to communicate his decision to leave had a massive ripple effect inside the club. A horde of supporters stormed Camp Nou with demands against the club’s president, they were asking for his head on a platter (figuratively).
But Leo soon realized that leaving wasn’t going to be easy, he decided to stay instead of getting into a legal battle against the club. Now that a little time is passed, the Argentine has a new open front against this board of directors that is led by Bartomeu. The president has the intention to lower the player’s salary by 20% due to the pandemic, but Messi simply doesn’t want to negotiate with him anymore.
There was a plan to get the whole squad together to talk about this new decision, but Messi is disrupting the club’s ecosystem. The captain refuses to agree to anything and he is taking most of the players down with him this time.
Only three players are against Messi.
According to information from ESPN, only three players are refusing to sign a document in which the players refuse to sit down to negotiate this new salary decrease. These footballers are Marc-Andre ter Stegen, Clement Lenglet, and Frenkie de Jong. Other than these three, the rest of the squad is backing Messi over this wage dispute.
We need to remember that the players already took a pay cut when the pandemic started without an issue. Now that Bartomeu can see how difficult the situation has become. The president rolled back on his initial threat to take this salary from the players and agreed to simply delay a portion of their full wages. Messi and his teammates are still analyzing the new proposal as we speak.
There’s a plan in place that grants the players back their salary after three years, plus interest. Barcelona will only deliver them 80% of their wages during this time and eventually pay them back with interest. However, the biggest takeaway from this issue is Messi’s constant battle against the president and his board.
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