Former Barcelona president Joan Gaspart has taken the unorthodox approach of criticizing the club’s greatest ever player. His main point of contention is Lionel Messi’s presumed reluctance to be associated with the club while Joan Laporta sits at its helm, prompting the damning question: “Who does he think he is?”

Gaspart should be well aware of Messi’s status. The long-serving club official was president of his boyhood team when Carles Rexach convinced Messi’s father, Jorge, to sign an impromptu contract on a paper napkin in 2000, watching on as the tiny Argentine grew into Barcelona’s leading appearance maker and scorer.

After more than two decades in Catalonia, Messi was not offered a new contract in 2021 due, Laporta claimed, to the financial restrictions facing a club still reeling from the consequence of years of mismanagement which were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Messi has not been back to Camp Nou in an official capacity since. The one time he did grace the grass which he enjoyed more than any other was under the cover of darkness with the permission of a starstruck set of builders rather than any club official.

This distance, Gaspart has argued, is due to his sour relationship with Laporta, who was only recently voted in as club president for another term.

“He is a great player, the best in the world, partly—I won’t say what percentage—thanks to Barça,” Gaspart told the podcast Sólo para Culés. “Therefore, he cannot forget that. Because of that, I’m still giving him a grace period, but a day will come when it will start to bother me if Mr. Messi puts even the slightest obstacle in the way of coming to Barça to say goodbye to the fans.

“Whoever the president may be, he must come and say goodbye to Barça. If Leo Messi only comes to say goodbye the day Laporta is no longer here, and refuses to come because Laporta is the president, I wouldn’t give him a tribute. Who does he think he is? To make coming to Barcelona conditional on whether Laporta is there or not. If Laporta wasn’t there [because of that condition], I wouldn’t attend that tribute.”

“There is only one thing he must not forget,” Gaspart added. “

“Barcelona is bigger than him, and he should be careful, he should be careful.”

“I say this out of the historical love I have for a player I signed when he was 13 and I was Barça president: he should be careful. Barça is bigger than him as an individual.”

What Is Lionel Messi’s Beef With Joan Laporta?

There are two strands to Messi and Laporta’s uncoupling in recent years.

The first was forged in 2021, when Messi was forced to leave the only club he had ever known during a tearfull farewell. Laporta had only recently returned to the helm, taking over from Josep Maria Bartomeu’s disastrous tenure and initially promising to find room in the budget for Messi. But he couldn’t. “It wasn’t what I would have liked—but it simply couldn’t be, for economic reasons,” Laporta would later explain.

Messi clearly wasn’t too stung by this turn of events as, when he left Paris Saint-Germain two years later, he had been prioritizing a return to Barcelona. This seismic move never materialized and the finger of blame has been pointed in both directions.

Laporta argued that Messi and his father, Jorge, “preferred to go to Miami” in 2023. “We prepared the contract and sent it to Jorge Messi,” Laporta claimed during this year’s presidential campaign. “It was mid-March. In May, Jorge came to my house and told me it couldn’t be done and that he would be under too much pressure here.”

Xavi Hernández, Messi’s former teammate and Barcelona’s manager in 2023, sensationally denounced Laporta’s sequence of events. “The president isn’t telling the truth,” he claimed, insisting that “it was a done deal.”

“The president started negotiating the contract with Leo’s father, and we had La Liga’s approval, but it was the president who threw everything out,” Xavi argued. “Laporta told me, verbatim, that if Leo came back, he was going to wage war against him and that he couldn’t allow it.”