Barcelona wants to keep Lionel Messi at the club until he is 36 years old, and they believe that his happiness off the field is just as vital as his happiness on it.
The Barcelona paper According to Mundo Deportivo, Messi, 31, has a clause in his contract that allows him to depart on a free transfer in 2020 if he does not join another major European team.
China, Japan, and Qatar will be among the first to take advantage of the opportunity. And Barcelona is scared of him following Xavi to Doha to play for Al-Sadd or Andres Iniesta to Japan to play for Vissel Kobe in the J1 League last summer.
Lionel Messi remains king of Barcelona, adored by 100,000 fans at the Nou Camp every game and millions more worldwide
Off the field, his life revolves around his family: wife Antonella, boys Thiago, Mateo, and Ciro, and their dog, Hulk.
There is also Ezequiel Lavezzi at Hebei China Fortune and Zlatan Ibrahimovic at LA Galaxy. Messi has a theme park set to open in China in 2020, which could coincide with a move there. And the United States may be preferable for his young family.
There is no scarcity of rich offers, so what makes Barcelona feel he would not go in two years? The explanation lies in his happiness in Catalonia, his home since he was 13 years old.
Messi is no longer the awkward, shy adolescent who initially appeared at the club’s La Masia youth facility. He’s also not the 20-something, slightly gullible butt of Gerard Pique’s dressing-room jokes. The defender used to change Messi’s phone battery and then watch him roam around the locker room wondering if anyone had a charger because his phone was dead despite him charging it that morning.
He is now in charge, the leader. But he remains intensely private and, as Pique once put it, “ridiculously normal.” He prefers to spend his time at home in the little seaside town of Bellamar, just down the coast from Barcelona, with his three boys Thiago, Mateo, and Ciro, his wife Antonella, and the family’s super-sized French mastiff dog, Hulk.
Messi will be able to live a regular life there. He may even walk his sons to school, often in the company of Luis Suarez, who lives on the same complex and has children of a similar age.
The Bellamar neighborhood has long been the go-to gated community for top local sportspeople. It is a seaside town south of Barcelona with four miles of beachfront and is situated back in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean.
Neymar, Javier Mascherano, and Pau Gasol, a basketball player, have all had property here. Philippe Coutinho arrived at the club from Liverpool last year. As Suarez joked last year, Messi is a terrific neighbor with “great security, which helps us all.”
In the luxury of his own home, he may play a game of football with his sons on the floodlit tiny football pitch in the back garden, relax by the pool, stare out over the ocean, and even indulge in the occasional BBQ, but not too frequently if he wants to further his career.
Messi reads with Thiago (left) and the pair breakfast with Mateo during glimpses inside the family home in Barcelona
The family pose outside their beautiful home in the luxury gated community at Bellamar, on the coast south of the city
While Messi’s siblings Rodrigo and Matias, younger sister Maria-Sol, and parents Celia and Jorge spend a lot of time in Rosario, especially his mother and sister, Messi is becoming more anchored in his new hometown.
There are still annual flights to Buenos Aires, followed by a 200-mile journey from the city to Rosario, but his family is just as likely to come to him as he is to them.
Former Argentina captain Juan Sebastian Veron stated that Messi would stay in his room during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa when Argentina’s hotel was full of visiting relatives. He is now a family man who is more inclined to be the focal point of social occasions.
The fact that Messi’s roots in Barcelona grow deeper with time has made clubs more willing to admit that they attempted and failed to sign him at some point.
Khaldoon al Mubarak, the president of Manchester City, recently stated as much. When asked whether there was a player he had attempted and failed to sign, he replied, to considerable applause, ‘Messi’.
And, just as moving elsewhere in Europe has never appealed to Messi, returning to South America appears to be an option he has ruled out for the time being.
When Diego Maradona recently spoke out against him, it was an indication of one of the reasons why. Maradona was expressing a bad image of Messi that is still prevalent in Argentina.
Speaking on the television channel Fox, Maradona said: ‘It doesn’t work to make a leader out of someone who goes to the toilet 20 times before a game. We should not make a god of him any more – he is just another player.’
Maradona swings from defending Messi to criticising him. This latest slight reflects an idea widely held by some Argentine football fans that Messi has lacked character when playing for the national team. It’s that lack of universal acclaim in his homeland that would make him not want to return after he finishes playing.
LIONEL MESSI’S LIFE OFF THE PITCH
Age: 31
Born: Rosario, Argentina
Lives: Bellamar, Barcelona, Spain
Married to: Antonella Roccuzzo
Children: Thiago (6), Mateo (3), Ciro (8 months)
Pets: Hulk the dog
Other close family: Jorge (father), Celia (mother), Rodrigo, Matias (brothers), Maria Sol (sister)
It speaks volumes for the way Messi has gone beyond the boundaries of football that Cirque du Soleil are making a show based on his life. They have done the same in the past for other cultural icons such as The Beatles, Elvis and Michael Jackson.
He recently told Tot Costa radio programme in Catalonia that he did not know what he would do when he retires but that ‘when the time comes when I stop playing, I am sure I will know what to fill my time doing.’ It may be that he just chooses to spend more time at his favourite holiday haunt, Ibiza. He can hire an 80 ft cruiser (relatively modest in size – Roman Abramovich’s yacht is 530 ft) and sail to the Balearic Islands in not much longer than seven hours.
He can even share the £6,500 it costs to hire the boat per day with Suarez and Cesc Fabregas who, with his young family, also joins the Messi clan during the summer holidays.
Fabregas has known Messi since they were both kids at La Masia. The Chelsea midfielder has admitted to deliberately bending down to tie his own bootlaces so as not to be paired with Messi in training after being bamboozled by him on a one-against-one dribbling drill the first day they were coached together.
Messi with his mother, Celia, and sister, Maria Sol, all of whom are frequent visits from Rosario, Argentina.
Even on those comparatively distant summer vacations, Messi is forced to deal with the spotlight and public scrutiny.
Last July, there were phone footage of Messi being mobbed by fans on what appeared to be a deserted beach on the little island of Formentera, just off the coast of Ibiza. As they yanked him from the shoreline, he had to paddle back to his boat.
But he still feels more at home near Barcelona, and the club will be counting on that feeling to be the deciding factor when they sit down with him next year to discuss that final contract, the one that will keep him a Barcelona player until he is 36, and a 23-year one-club man.
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