Agüero hints at 50-50 chances of Messi returning to Barcelona this year

Sergio Agüero, the retired Argentine striker and longtime friend of Lionel Messi, dropped a significant hint during a Kings League broadcast in late March 2023: there was a genuine possibility that Messi could return to Barcelona before the year was out. The claim cut through weeks of speculation about where the world's most celebrated footballer would land once his Paris Saint-Germain contract expired on June 30.

Messi's future had been the subject of constant rumor. Some reports suggested he would not renew with PSG and would head back to Catalonia. Others pointed toward Inter Miami as his next destination. Still others mentioned the Saudi Arabian club Al-Hilal as a possibility. Into this noise came Agüero, who knows Messi as well as anyone in football, offering a more concrete assessment. When asked directly about a Barcelona return, Agüero did not hedge. He said the odds were essentially even—fifty-fifty—but that the outcome hinged on one person: Joan Laporta, Barcelona's president.

"Barcelona is his home," Agüero said during the broadcast. "He should retire there. Laporta needs to make a move, and if he does, Messi comes back." The words landed with force among Barcelona supporters, who had watched their greatest player leave two years earlier under circumstances that still stung. Agüero's suggestion that a return was plausible, not merely wishful thinking, reignited hope in the Camp Nou faithful.

Laporta had already begun laying groundwork. Weeks before Agüero's comments, the Barcelona president had met with Jorge Messi, Lionel's father and representative, in an initial attempt to explore the terms of a potential homecoming. The conversation was exploratory but serious. Barcelona understood it could not offer what Messi earned at PSG—a salary that reflected the French club's financial muscle. But the club believed there was room for negotiation, a middle ground between what it could afford and what Messi might accept to play for the only professional team he had ever known.

Messi's Barcelona story was nearly two decades long. He arrived as a teenager from Argentina to join the club's youth academy, made his first-team debut at seventeen in 2004, and went on to play seventeen seasons in the blaugrana shirt. He won four Champions League titles with the club, ten La Liga championships, seven Copa del Rey trophies, and eight Spanish Super Cups. He left in the summer of 2021 as Barcelona's all-time leading goalscorer with 672 goals across 778 appearances—both club records. In La Liga alone, he had scored 474 goals in 520 matches, a mark no other player in the league's history could match.

The mathematics of his departure had been brutal. Barcelona's financial situation had deteriorated to the point where keeping him became impossible under Spanish league rules. PSG, with its vast resources, had stepped in. Now, two seasons later, with his contract winding down and Barcelona's finances having stabilized somewhat, the possibility of a reversal had emerged. It would not be simple. The salary question remained thorny. But Agüero's assessment suggested that if Laporta was willing to move decisively, and if Messi was willing to take less money to return home, the pieces could fall into place before summer turned to autumn.