Lionel Messi gets painfully honest on PSG tenure

Lionel Messi has spent the better part of the last two years playing for Inter Miami in Florida and is seemingly happy in his new life in the United States. Before that, he spent 17 years playing for Barcelona in Spain, winning a storage unit full of team and personal hardware. In between, though, he played two seasons in France for Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), which he just revealed made him unhappy every day.

“Coming to play for Inter Miami was an opportunity and the way things developed during my last years in Paris, although it was a decision that I had to make on the go, because I had to leave from Barcelona, I went through two years which I didn’t enjoy,” Messi told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I wasn’t happy on a daily basis, with the training, the matches. I had a hard time adapting to all that. I felt called to come to Inter [Miami] because it’s a club that’s growing, very new, with few years as a club.”

Messi moved from his native Argentina to Spain at 13 to train at Barcelona’s famed La Masia youth academy. He quickly made his way up the ranks at the club and made his senior side debut at just 16 in 2003. Over the next 17 seasons, he would go on toscord 672 goals while winning eight Ballon d’Or Awards and 21 major trophies with his club.

Due to financial mismanagement, Barcelona had to sell Messi in 2021, and PSG stepped in.

After years of growing up with the same organization, Messi joined a mercenary PSG squad owned by Qatar Sports Investments, a subsidiary of Qatari government’s Qatar Investment Authority. QSi spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a roster that included global superstars like Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Neymar, Angel DiMaria, Marco Verratti, Sergio Ramos, Marquinhos, and Gigi Donnarumma, among others.

Money can’t buy happiness, though, and it sounds like Messi learned that the hard way in Paris. Luckily, like many before him, he’s finally found new happiness in the Florida sunshine.