Lionel Messi and PSG's marriage was doomed from the start - Argentina icon & Ligue 1 giants were always better off without one another

Messi never wanted to leave Barcelona. It was more than a second home to him. He had spent more of his life living in the Catalan capital than his native Rosario and started a family there. The goal had been to finish his career at the only club he had ever known as a professional.

But both Messi and Barca were betrayed by former president Josep Maria Bartomeu, who left the Blaugrana on the verge of bankruptcy with his reckless spending, leaving his successor, Joan Laporta, to try to pick up the pieces with his lever-pulling and legal loopholes.

However, the latter quickly realised that Barca simply could not afford to renew Messi's colossal contract, making a parting of the ways inevitable - contrary to what was being said in public at the time.

The departure devastated Messi. This wasn't like Trent Alexander-Arnold leaving Liverpool. The tears the Argentine shed at his farewell press conference were very real, the emotions heartfelt. Even Luis Suarez, who had gone through his own bitter break-up with Barca, was taken aback.

"I had never seen Leo cry like that at Barcelona," the Uruguayan admitted. "He suffered a lot. It really hurt him."

Given the traumatic nature of his exit, Messi should have taken some time to reflect on his next move before rushing into anything. As he's said himself, there were other offers on the table. Less than two days after his breakdown in Barcelona, though, he was announced as a PSG player.

"We came to an agreement with PSG quite quickly," he told France Football in October 2021. "I was obviously won over by the project, the players it has, the quality of the group... all these elements made it easier to find an agreement.

"Knowing that I had friends in the locker room allowed me to tell myself that things were going to be simple for me to adjust.

"And I was not wrong, because it was very easy to integrate myself, especially because there are many players who speak Spanish like me."

However, while Neymar's presence at the Parc des Princes was a plus, Messi's spell in Paris was almost overwhelmingly negative.

"I had two years where I was so unhappy on a personal level that I didn't enjoy it," he admitted to Mundo Deportivo. "I had that month (in 2022) that was spectacular for me because of winning the World Cup, but apart from that, it was a difficult period for me."

Arriving without a proper pre-season because of Argentina's 2021 Copa America campaign certainly didn't help Messi hit the ground running in Paris. Nor did a mid-season bout of Covid-19.

But the main reason Messi struggled off the field during that first year at PSG was that he was struggling off it.

His problems may have been very much of the first-world variety - Messi was particularly irritated by the traffic congestion in Paris - but it took longer than he or his partner, Antonella Roccuzzo, expected to find a house, which resulted in the family spending six weeks staying in a hotel.

"The children couldn't take it any longer," the forward lamented in Le Figaro.

However, PSG fans rightly expected more from Messi, and not just in terms of goals (he only managed 11 in all competitions in 2021-22 - his lowest tally for 16 years).

Parisians were acutely aware that Messi had a deep bond with Barcelona. But they rather understandably presumed that he would at least attempt to establish some sort of rapport with PSG and its supporters.

Messi has since insisted that he still has no idea why his relationship with the fans "fractured", but he did very little to suggest that he ever had any genuine affection for them.

For example, only once during his entire stay did he go to acknowledge the fans after a game - and even on that occasion, he only did so at Neymar's behest.

Consequently, an underperforming Messi almost inevitably became a target of the boo boys - particularly as he demonstrated in the most scintillating fashion possible at the 2022 World Cup that he was still the most gifted player on the planet.

Inevitably, PSG's frustrated, fervent fans wanted to know where that version of Messi had been while they were suffering yet another embarrassing Champions League capitulation at the hands of Real Madrid eight months previously.

The suspicion was that Messi had been saving himself for Qatar, that he really didn't care about PSG at all and had only joined the perennial Ligue 1 champions as they were the only club willing to meet his exorbitant salary demands.

Just like his good friend Neymar, he was held up as a symbol of everything that was wrong with PSG and their 'bling-bling' recruitment policy.

As one PSG supporter told GOAL back in 2023, "Messi was more of a marketing deal than a sporting signing. He ended up representing everything we hate about the QSI (Qatar Sports Investment) project for the past three or four years".

One can certainly understand the sentiment, as Messi and PSG always had the look of a marriage of convenience, one motivated more by financial gain than sporting success - and thus doomed to fail right from the start.

They did have one thing in common, of course. Both desperately wanted to win the Champions League: Messi had lifted the trophy four times but not since 2015, while PSG were still waiting for their first title.

However, Messi wasn't the solution to the Parisians' problems. On the contrary, he actually exacerbated them, because another superstar was the last thing PSG needed from a sporting perspective.

They already had two forwards unwilling to do any defensive work; they simply couldn't afford to carry another - no matter how gifted. The likes of Vitinha were, thus, left with far too many "chores" to do, resulting in another dreadfully imbalanced PSG team falling at the last-16 stage in each of Messi's two seasons at the club.

It's worth remembering, though, that PSG still wanted Messi to sign a new contract, albeit only for commercial and marketing reasons, so he actually did them a massive favour by refusing to do so.

As well as paving the way for a family-friendly move to Miami that also enabled him to get the old Barca band back together, Messi's exit facilitated a crucial shift in transfer policy at the Parc des Princes that was further aided by Kylian Mbappe's defection to Real Madrid the following year.

Had those two players not been removed from the wage bill, sporting director Luis Campos simply would not have been in a position to invest quite so heavily in the top young talent that helped PSG finally realise their Champions League dream.

As club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi said after the stunning 5-0 rout of Inter in Munich last month, they belatedly learned from their mistakes. And signing Messi was undoubtedly one of them. Just as Messi moving to Paris was a gross error of judgement on his part.

His heart was clearly never really in it and the net result was a very modern, money-fuelled affair probably best summed up by Messi effectively cheating on Qatar with Saudi Arabia, which effectively signalled the end of the relationship with PSG.

It's telling, though, that Al-Khelaifi thanked Messi for the contribution he made on PSG's long and arduous path to Champions League glory, because there isn't any real bitterness on either side going in Sunday's reunion.

We may be talking about the worst rebound in football history here - but the subsequent split has unquestionably proven very beneficial to both parties.