Imagine for a moment you’re Lionel Messi. You’re the best footballer in the world today, and in the eyes of many the greatest to ever play the game. You’ve been in a spot of bother with the Spanish authorities recently, but it’s nothing that your PR team can’t smooth over.
On an unrelated note, here’s a picture of Barcelona’s no. 10 cuddling an adorable puppy.
But things can get a little taxing at times – if you’ll pardon the pun. The Catalan giants want to offer you a bumper new contract to keep you at the Nou Camp for a few more years. The problem is you don’t know whether you want to stay in Spain forever.
Do you ask for a huge salary hike? Honourary season tickets for your cousins? A statue of you outside the ground? A birthday cake? THREE birthday cakes?
If reports coming out of Spain are to be believed (and, truth be told, they probably shouldn’t be), Lionel Messi has decided to ask the club to insert a clause in his new contract that will allow him to jump ship to a club of his choosing at the drop of a hat.
The sweet part – and jokes aside, this really is a awesome thing to hear of a decorated superstar like Messi – the club in question is his childhood team Newell’s Old Boys, from whom he was pinched by Barcelona at the tender age of 12.
If it were any other player, it would be a safe bet to assume that the club to which he’s contracted would laugh him and his agent out of the building. But Messi isn’t an ordinary player (and Barcelona are, after all, mes que un club).
That being the case, it’s not totally unrealistic to suppose that the Barca hierarchy would be prepared to indulge the demands of their Argentine superstar. And what a precedent it would set.
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