MADRID (AFP) – Lionel Messi said on Friday he will stay at Barcelona, insisting he could never go to court against “the club of his life” but he launched a stinging attack on president Josep Maria Bartomeu.
He accused Bartomeu of going back on an agreement to let him leave for free at the end of last season.
“The president always said that at the end of the season I could decide if I wanted to go or if I wanted to stay and in the end he didn’t end up keeping his word,” Messi said in an interview with Goal, released on Friday.
The 33-year-old striker believed he had a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave for free at the end of the season but Barcelona said that option expired on June 10.
:I thought and we were sure that I was free,” Messi said. “The president always said that at the end of the season I could decide if I stayed or not and now they hold on to the fact that I did not say it before June 10 when it turns out that on June 10 we were competing for the league in the middle of this shitty virus and this disease that altered all the dates.”
Messi added: “And this is the reason why I am going to continue in the club… because the president told me that the only way to leave was to pay the 700-million-euro release clause.”
“This is impossible, and then the other way was to go to trial. I would never go to court against Barca because it is the club that I love, that gave me everything since I arrived, it is the club of my life, I have made my life here.”
Messi had requested to leave the club he joined as a boy following Barcelona’s humiliating 8-2 defeat to Bayern Munich in the Champions League, with Manchester City emerging as favourites to sign him.
His lawyers sent Barca a burofax on August 25 stating his intention to depart but Messi says he made his feelings clear to Bartomeu long before.
”I told the club, especially the president, that I wanted to go,” said Messi. ”I’ve been telling him all year. I believed it was time to step aside.”
”I believed that the club needed more young people, new people and I thought my time in Barcelona was over, feeling very sorry because I always said that I wanted to finish my career here.
”It was a very difficult year, I suffered a lot in training, in games and in the dressing room. Everything became very difficult for me and there came a time when I considered looking for new goals, new horizons.
