It would appear that Lionel Messi lost a few battles, but ended up winning the war. Following a board meeting on Tuesday, Josep Maria Bartomeu and his board will resign from their positions at Barcelona. The decision comes after a vote of no confidence was presented with more than 16,000 signatures.
Bartomeu’s presidency lasted six years, after taking over for Sandro Rosell in 2014, and it could be argued that his presidency was seen as a massive decline for Barcelona. While the team has won championships under Bartomeu, internal cracks started to show among the clubs' key figures and poor results on the field led to the vote of no confidence.
In his six years in charge, Barcelona won only one Champions League, recently the club parted ways with Luis Suárez, Arturo Vidal, and Ivan Rakitic. The final nail in the coffin was the 3-1 defeat to Real Madrid. Here are some of the slip-ups of the Bartomeu era.
Neymar’s departure and Legal Issues
When Neymar and his representation activated his €222 million release clause to leave Barcelona for PSG in 2017, the club received payment directly from PSG rather than going through the proper channels, the sum had to be deposited to La Liga and then sent to the club. La Liga refused the initial payment as a violation of FIFA Financial Fair Play, the sum was then sent to Barcelona. The drama from the transfer resulted in court cases between the club and the player over bonuses, which Barcelona won. Nonetheless, both the player and club were put in a bad light and the transfer was seen as a type of shady deal in soccer.
Social media Barçagate scandal
The rift between the Messi clan and Bartomeu began to take shape when in 2019 it was leaked that the Barcelona board had hired a social media company called I3 Ventures to create and manage social media pages to discredit players like Messi, Suárez, Pique, and former manager Pep Guardiola. The campaign also tried to make the board look favorably in the realm of public opinion. It was investigated that the club paid I3 Ventures 1 million euros to conduct the social media actions.
The fallout from the scandal resulted in tense meetings between the president and key players, but ultimately, for the time being, the scandal had cold water poured on it, but it began to show a rift between the board and some of the Barcelona players who had been with the club a long time, namely Lionel Messi.
Paying over 100 million Euros for Dembelé, Coutinho and Griezmann
Barcelona’s recent big-money transfers have to be considered flop signings, Philippe Coutinho played only 57 games before being loaned to Bayern Munich, Ousmane Dembélé has only scored 12 goals in 54 matches and was seen as the replacement for Luis Suárez. Antoine Griezmann is an even stranger case, one of the best players in La Liga in the last few years and the best player of the 2018 World Cup has found himself not even starting at Barcelona with only 9 goals in over 40 appearances.
Messi Scandal
The last straw for fans was the now-famous Burofax scandal in which Lionel Messi requested to leave Barcelona as per a handshake agreement with the club. The result was a public relations nightmare for both player and club. Messi trapped by his contract requesting to leave, while the club asked for astronomical sums to have the player be bought out. While Messi stayed, it was played as he was staying because he had no choice. For Bartomeu and the board, it was a moral victory of just being able to keep Messi after breaking the team apart following a disappointing 2019/2020 season.
