Joan Gaspart wanted to make a point about the generational handover at Camp Nou, and the anecdote he reached for was his own living room. He had promised his four great-grandchildren a Barcelona shirt. Yamal or Messi, he asked. The children did not hesitate.
“Grandad, Lamine, of course! Who is the other player you mentioned?” he said one of them replied, in his retelling on the Barcelona-themed show Solo para culés.
Gaspart, Barcelona’s 36th president between 2000 and 2003 and the man who was in the chair when the club tied Messi to La Masia as a boy, then had to introduce the name.
“Leo Messi. He was a great player, the best I have seen in this lifetime,” he told them, according to Infobae’s account of the exchange.
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“Barcelona is bigger than him”
The living-room story sat inside a much sharper message. Gaspart used the same appearance to attack Messi over the long-delayed Camp Nou farewell, which remains frozen while the Argentinian’s relationship with current president Joan Laporta stays cold.
“He should be careful. I say this out of the historical affection I have for a player I signed when he was 13,” Gaspart said on the show, per Cope.
“Barcelona is bigger than him.”
He went further on the conditions Messi is reported to attach to any ceremony.
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“If his argument is that Laporta is president, and he will only come the day Laporta is no longer here, I would not give him that tribute,” Gaspart said.
The 82-year-old framed the comments as warning rather than attack, insisting the problem was not Messi’s talent but Messi’s priorities. Goal reported his line that Messi is “a great player, the best in the world, partly, I won’t say what percentage, thanks to Barça.”
Yamal already wears the inheritance
The anecdote lands at a moment when Yamal is doing the on-pitch half of the job without caveat. The 19-year-old has been the player Barcelona lean on most heavily in the opening weeks of 2026-27, with Yahoo Sports reporting that he leads the squad in minutes played after eight league matches, with seven goals and five assists in La Liga.
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