The only thing that Barcelona can’t give Lionel Messi is money

1. The Argentine’s team, Paris Saint-Germain, has banned him from going to Saudi Arabia.
2. Lionel Messi will leave Paris Saint-Germain this summer, but it’s not clear where he will go.
3. The Sorry episode is a lot like how Cristiano Ronaldo’s European career ended.

Lionel Messi’s trip to Paris wasn’t supposed to end with about 400 Paris Saint-Germain fans singing mean songs about him at the French club’s offices.

It could have been worse—they could have gone to Neymar’s house and insulted him from behind his security fence.

After PSG banned Messi, cut his pay, and told him he couldn’t go to practice for two weeks, it didn’t seem likely that he would play for them again. It’s not clear yet if his video apology was sincere and will lead to a change of heart or if it’s just a way to make the club look bad.

It could have also been a sign that Messi needs Paris as a backup plan. If he leaves, he only has two options: Barcelona, which can give him everything except money, or Saudi Arabia, which can only give him money.

It is a sad end to his club career, and he will be joining Cristiano Ronaldo in Riyadh if he accepts Al-Hilal’s offer of an estimated £350 million a season.

He has already taken the Saudi riyal, but it’s one thing to show up for a picture to promote tourism, and it’s another thing to move his family there for a year.

This week, he got in trouble because of one of those picture shoots. He went to the kingdom for the last time when he had a day off from PSG. But last weekend, the French team lost at home to a team in the middle of the table, Lorient. As punishment, coach Christophe Galtier called the players in.

Messi was suspended by PSG because he “didn’t show up to training.” This was a bad idea. It made him the bad guy and took the heat off those who are showing again this season that getting the most famous players in the world doesn’t win you the Champions League or even the Ligue 1 title. On Sunday, they go to Troyes with a five-point lead over Marseille and five games left.

Since then, Messi’s team has said that he didn’t want to stay for another season and had told the club that a month earlier. Paris wasn’t his first choice, but if Barcelona didn’t sign him, Paris could be a good second choice.

He wants to keep playing in Europe so that he can be in Copa America next year. Barca needs to cut their pay bill by €250m (£218m) or bring in that much in new money to be able to sign new players without LaLiga rules getting in the way. If they can’t and stay over their squad spending limit, they have to follow the “40% rule,” which says that to spend £40m, they must first make back £100m.

Mateu Alemany no longer has to worry about this money puzzle. This week, the club’s head of football went to work for Aston Villa. The 60-year-old is a very well-liked coach who put together the team that only needs two more points to win LaLiga.

His exit seems to be because club president Joan Laporta paid more attention to his agents Jorge Mendes and Pini Zahavi than to him, and because he felt that LaLiga wasn’t going to let Barcelona out of its tight financial situation.

Sources close to Messi say he is willing to play for a small pay just so he can bring his family back to where they live. But LaLiga has told Barcelona that no matter how much they pay him, they will still have to report his salary to them at the market rate, which is about €25 million (£22 million) a season.

Barcelona’s pre-season tour of the US starts on July 19, and they want the deal to be done by then so they can get the money.

The club’s reaction to Alemany’s move to Villa this week was to say that he might finish his unfinished work this summer, even though he was moving to Villa, or that Raphinha’s agent, Deco, might take over. It was hard to decide which idea was better.

Messi is expected to spend at least some of the next two weeks in Barcelona. He won’t be parked outside the Camp Nou like Peter Odemwingie did in 2013 when he was waiting for his move from West Brom to QPR to go through, but he will be looking forward to it in a similar way.

Back in Paris, PSG should win Ligue 1 without him, but the city won’t celebrate with fireworks like they did in Naples when they won the title. A wet sparkler will work better. Messi’s club career in Europe is coming to an end, and it’s beginning to feel like the end of his career.