Well if you thought that Barcelona weren’t going to worry about Lionel Messi ever leaving Barcelona after signing his new contract, we were both wrong. Turns out that a €700m release clause isn’t enough to comfort the nightmares of Barcelona’s financial and strategy director Pancho Schroder.
“We set up a clause which we think is enough to have Messi retire at FC Barcelona,” he said.
“But having said that, we thought a year ago that the clause for Neymar was also good enough to retain the player, and that proved last summer not to be the case.