Outside, in the bright Parisian sunshine, the world’s news media lined up on the edge of the field at the Parc des Princes. Producers fiddled busily with cameras and boom microphones. Reporters chattered away, dutifully filling airtime before their designated interview slots.
They were under strict instructions and constraints: three questions apiece, a few minutes, no more, to mine the details of the biggest sports story of the summer, to get to the heart of a transfer that ended one era and ushered in another. And then their time would be up, and Lionel Messi would have to move on.