Barcelona director suggests Lionel Messi needs good teammates and that soccer is a team sport, is quickly fired

You just wouldn’t believe what Barcelona’s academy and “institutional relationships” director Pere Gratacos had the temerity to say about Lionel Messi.

Are you sitting down?

OK. Here it comes.

He said that Messi needs good teammates to be at his best.

“Barcelona are not here only because of Messi,” Gratacos said on Friday at the draw for the quarterfinals of the Copa del Rey. “He’s very important but it was the team who won [against Athletic Bilbao]. Without Neymar, Luis Suarez, Iniesta, Pique and the others, he wouldn’t be such a good player.”

Can you believe that? So rude.

How dare he suggest that even the world’s best player needs good players around him to get the most out of his own abilities? What possesses him to imply that soccer is team game? And what enormous nerve does it take to underscore the plainly apparent point that the reason Messi, for many years, wasn’t as good for Argentina as he was for Barca may have had something to do with his inferior supporting cast?

No, this was beyond the pale. And this would not stand.

Just hours after Gratacos’s comments, Barca announced that he’d been fired because his views “do not coincide with those of the club.”

Gratacos had been a director since Jan. 2010. He’ll still be kept on to oversee La Masia’s redevelopment, so the firing appears to be more for posterity. It seems like it’s actually a demotion.

While he didn’t say anything remotely offensive, he had accidentally wandered into a high-stakes game. Messi and Barca are in talks about renewing his contract. The 29-year-old superstar, who has never played for another club at the senior level, has a deal that expires after next season. And there really isn’t anything Barca won’t do to renew it — and rightly so. There has only ever been one Messi, the greatest player of all time.

Yet Barca keeps getting in its own way. Just a short while ago, club CEO Oscar Grau said of the contract negotiations that it was “a matter that has to be analyzed with a cool head and common sense.”

This perfectly innocuous utterance apparently inflamed the Messi camp and the locker room, in which the tiny Argentine wields enormous influence. “We want to have the best, but we must always prioritize,” Grau said. “The objective is for the best player in the world to stay at Barcelona and it’s the same with everyone, although especially with those that were formed in La Masia, who I think should retire here.”

Again, a perfectly harmless argument, especially in the context of the negotiations for what may well be the biggest contract in soccer — and perhaps sports — history.

But exceptions were nevertheless taken in the lightly flammable and uber-sensitive relationship between Barca and its star players. Never mind that Grau also said that they were “keen to get it done and I am sure we will find the formula” and that he believed that “when you have the best it would be stupid to let him escape.” Club president Josep Maria Bartomeu has even gone as far as saying publicly that Barca will likely make Messi the world’s best-paid player again.

Local sports tabloid Sport, which is always firmly in Barca’s camp, quickly ran a column telling the club’s executives to just shut up, while pointing out that Gratacos was an ardent supporter of Messi’s introduction into the senior team when he was a teenager and Frank Rijkaard was the manager.

To be continued, surely, because at Barca, the next crisis is only a few innocuous words away.