It started in tears. Lionel Messi touched down on the evening of 4 August, flying into El Prat especially. Officially unemployed, he had come to sign the contract that would see him play a 17th season at Barcelona but by the time it began he was gone, like Zinedine Zidane and Sergio Ramos before him. Three of the most significant men in Spanish football over the last decade had departed in a single summer. Yet at his presentation in Paris just two days before it all started at Mestalla, on a day that felt all wrong then and feels a world away now, Messi insisted: “In the end what matters is the teams: Barcelona and Madrid are still there, so are Sevilla, Valencia, Atlético.”
