No club is enjoying a good spell during the coronavirus crisis, but then again, no club is having quite such a bad one as Barcelona. As the financial downturn begins to bite, the ongoing mismanagement of the club is being exposed, and there aren’t even in any matches in which Lionel Messi can do something brilliant to deflect attention from the chaos in the boardroom.
The presidency of Josep Maria Bartomeu had been under attack for several months before the crisis. Messi is not an obviously political animal, so the fact that he had taken to offering public criticism of the board on a regular basis is significant.