Josep Maria Bartomeu outlines the events that happened surrounding Lionel Messi’s infamous burofax in 2020 | OneFootball

Josep Maria Bartomeu has revisited the events surrounding Lionel Messi’s infamous burofax in 2020, offering his own account of one of the most dramatic episodes in FC Barcelona’s recent history.

As quoted by Mundo Deportivo, the former Barcelona president said Messi asked to leave in August 2020, but he refused to let him go because the Argentine remained under contract and was still the club’s most important asset, both on the pitch and financially.

His version was blunt:

Bartomeu also claimed Messi ultimately understood that stance. As he put it:

He also offered a striking explanation for why Messi remained for that final season, saying:

“He thought there would be a new board a few months later that would renew his contract. His surprise is when the moment comes to renew and they dismiss him.”

From a Barcelona perspective, that is the most debatable part of the story, because the atmosphere around the club at the time felt far more broken than that sentence suggests. Bartomeu is effectively arguing that Messi did not stay because the crisis was resolved, but because he believed the next leadership would secure his future.

Bartomeu’s time as president of Barcelona was arguably one of the darkest in the club’s history and one that they are still recovering from. To make matters worse, he burned the bridges with Lionel Messi that Joan Laporta later obliterated. To see him justify all that just showcases that he never deserved to be the club’s president in the first place at all.

This is a chapter that the Catalan club would like to forget and let’s hope we never have to go through a similar situation again in the future.