Break-ups can be ugly, acrimonious, devastating. But worse still is a relationship that is so fundamentally flawed, so irreparably broken, that the ones in it cannot even agree upon a way out. After two decades, some unforgettable football, and 33 trophies, this is precisely the kind of relationship that Lionel Messi and FC Barcelona have come to share — a toxic dynamic that continues simply because it cannot let go, even if it wants to.

Going… going… not gone

On August 25, the unthinkable happened. Messi sent a burofax (the latest buzzword for a legal notice) to Barcelona stating his desire to terminate his contract and leave for free. Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City seemed in pole position to snap up the six-time Ballon d’Or once Barcelona had accepted Messi’s wish, which, of course, they did not.

In fact, Barcelona replied to Messi’s transfer request by stating their own interpretation of Messi’s complicated contract, declaring that Messi could only leave once City or any prospective buyer had paid Barcelona the barely imaginable sum of 700 million euros. The clause for the payment of this fee was deemed to have expired according to the Messi camp, but not according to Barcelona and their beleaguered president Josep Bartomeu.

What followed was utter pandemonium. Thousands of Barcelona fans, pandemic notwithstanding, marched into the Camp Nou premises protesting against Bartomeu and his board. A mural popped up in the Catalan capital depicting Messi as a Che Guevara-esque rebel with the words, “Hasta Siempre, Comandante” (until forever, commander). For those who believed that Messi’s move was a cleverly timed act of power play to force Bartomeu to resign, a sporting revolution was underway. Former Barcelona player and ex-captain Carles Puyol expressed support for Messi’s choice to leave, as Man City tried to do the math to negotiate the biggest switch in football history. Messi did not show up for training under new manager Ronald Koeman, while Jorge Messi, Leo’s father and agent, travelled all the way from Rosario to Barcelona for talks with Bartomeu.

By the first couple of days of September, it was evident that Messi was not trying to engineer a coup. He wanted to leave for good. Having joined Barcelona’s youth academy as a 13-year-old prodigy, Messi, now 33, had never played for any other professional club. But all that was about to change, a Messi-less future had nearly dawned in Catalonia.

And then, on September 4, it all began to unravel. In a volte-face that would have pleased the best absurdist playwright, Messi gave an interview to goal.com, whose definitive purpose was to communicate that he would stay.

The reason: Bartomeu would not let him leave without the 700 million euros payment, and Messi had no intention to drag Barcelona to court. The only way out of the stalemate was for the club’s greatest player to give in to the club’s most scandalous president. From the nouveau riche clutches of Man City, Barcelona had managed to retain the services of Messi.

The end of modern football’s weirdest transfer saga, but not the end of modern football’s most topsy-turvy love story.

Delaying the inevitable

Even before the sheer ludicrousness of recent events, the cracks had begun to appear between Messi and Barcelona. Three gut-wrenching exits from the Champions League in three years — the latest of which came in the form of an 8-2 hammering by Bayern Munich in the middle of August — had proven beyond doubt that Barcelona not only had a on-field crisis, they had an institutional one, too.

Shoddy business in the transfer market, a scattergun approach towards managerial appointments, and above all, an inexcusable complacency towards Messi, assuming that he would never leave, ensured that conditions were ripe for Messi to do just that, leave, and “look for a new challenge elsewhere”. Even if that meant, by Messi’s own admission, “a brutal drama” at home, with his wife and three children reluctant to shift.

It is not as if Messi had not tried his utmost to keep Barcelona competitive. But since the departure of Neymar in 2017, there had simply been too much for him to do, as both creator and goalscorer-in-chief. With their rich philosophy crumbling with every mistimed run, every stray pass, and every defensive debacle, the Barca way had become very similar to the Argentina way — give the ball to Messi, and hope. Just like for the Albiceleste, and despite Messi’s genius, such a plan was never going to produce sustained results.

To add to his weight of carrying the Barcelona team on his shoulders, Messi had to tackle the steadily growing narrative that he was the ultimate puppet master at the club, that his friendships with players defined transfer policy, that his entourage put the club under commercial strains, and that in an era where the whole has never been greater than the sum of its parts across Europe’s elite teams, Messi had become bigger than Barcelona.

The truth, as it turns out, is not that Messi is some diminutive dictator at Barcelona, but that for all his talent and clout, he is only as powerful as the Barcelona board want him to be.

Having said that, in keeping him against his wishes for at least one more year, Bartomeu and Co. have probably just delayed the inevitable — the arrival of the day when the best player in the world is no longer at Barcelona.

The two roads from here

As both a Barca and Messi fan, the last few weeks have been my worst nightmare. To imagine Messi in different colours was painful enough, but to know that he would be leaving Barcelona after playing his last match in front of an empty stadium and on the receiving end of the club’s heaviest defeat since 1946, was straight out of the fiercest depths of footballing hell.

And yet, the news of him staying is no cause for celebration, at least not yet.

There are two ways things can go from here. The first, and the more likely scenario, being that Messi wanders in and out of matches next season as part of a transitional team that is trying to exorcise the failures of past campaigns. Barcelona arrest their decline but do not offer the “winning project” that Messi desperately wants. Come next summer, Messi leaves, most plausibly for Man City, while Barcelona finally flip the first page of the post-Messi era.

The second scenario being that Koeman works a few instant miracles, and out of nowhere, Barcelona are transformed, reawakened as a continental giant. Messi pretends, like Barcelona’s official website, that he never intended to leave, and extends his stay indefinitely. Bartomeu is replaced by a new and more principled president (elections are due in March 2021), and everything is hunky-dory once more.

Of course, neither of these scenarios will materialise instantly. The next few months, possibly the rest of 2020, will unfold with questions hovering like ballistic drones — does Messi still care (even if he says he does), how will the fans react, will the rest of the squad get along with their captain?

Amidst these queries, there are bound to be moments when Barcelona struggle, when Messi shrugs his shoulders and looks to the heavens, reaffirming that Barcelona ought to have learnt how to let go.

But such is the nature of football that alongside these bits of despair, there is also the certainty of fresh, if only temporary, hope. The certainty of Messi dropping his shoulder, playing a one-two, deceiving a defender (or two or three) and curling the ball into the top corner of the net, celebrating once more in the shirt of the Blaugrana. Producing moments when, against both reason and recent history, we are led to believe that Messi and Barcelona are still made for each other.