Lionel Messi explains difficulty with PSG fans

Messi was targeted by PSG supporters during the second half of the 2022/23 season. He has now revealed it is ‘their way of doing things’ looking back.

Lionel Messi has explained how he never truly settled at Paris Saint-Germain and acknowledged the difficulty of playing for the club’s restless supporters.

The all-time legend won the World Cup with Argentina in late 2022 and helped PSG to two Ligue 1 titles in his two seasons in the French capital after a tearful exit from Barcelona in 2021.

Messi was given a two-week suspension for an unauthorised trip to Saudi Arabia which was quickly overturned upon an apology from the forward, while both Christophe Galtier and Marquinhos leapt to his defence from fan criticism.

The move to PSG resulted from Barça’s financial mismanagement and Messi has admitted the quick turnaround that summer had a large effect on his performances.

He told BeIN Sports: “I came to Paris because I liked the club, because I had friends and a lot of people I knew in the dressing room, teammates from the national team or some I had been with before.

“It seemed to me that, beyond what the club was, I was going to have a much easier adaptation than in other teams I could have gone to, so that’s a little bit why I decided to go to the club.

“The truth is that it was a very difficult adaptation, much more than I expected.

“Apart from the fact that I had people I knew in the dressing room and I had relations with them, it was complicated to adapt to a new change. I arrived late, I didn’t have a pre-season. I had to adapt to a new city, which was difficult for my family and for me.

“People started to treat me differently. Part of the PSG crowd, the rest and the majority still treated me as they did at the beginning, but there was a break with the PSG fans.

“It wasn’t my intention, far from it, to generate that break. It also happened with Neymar and [Kylian] Mbappe before. It’s their way of doing things. But I still remember all those people who supported me, as they did at the start.”

Messi will soon jet over to the United States to wrap up his move to Major League Soccer outfit Inter Miami, who were thrashed 4-1 by Philadelphia Union on Saturday to leave them last in the Eastern Conference.