![Prost International [PINT]](https://prostinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PINTtFontLogoRoboto1536x78.jpg)
This is what happens when you mix sport with politics.
It was moments after the final whistle and the Catalonians were reeling in shock. Their four previous exits from the Champions League had been embarrassing enough, but not on this scale. This was a humiliation, an indignity of the highest order, an 8-2 defeat to Bayern Munich.
Gerard Pique, once widely viewed as the best defender in the world, was on media duty. The rest of his teammates had hurried down the tunnel to escape the camera lenses as fast as they could and it was the 33-year-old who had to front-up.
“We feel devastated, although shame is the real word I’m looking for. We cannot afford to compete like this because it’s not the first, the second or the third time that something like this has happened,” Pique told the on-pitch reporters.
“The club needs changes on a structural level. If new blood needs to come for the club to change course then I’m not untouchable and I’ll be the first to leave if needs be, because it seems as if we’ve hit rock bottom.”
The aftermath of this is likely to be a chaotic, mud-slinging affair. By all accounts, manager Quique Setien was sacked before the team had even got back on the coach while president (until February 2021 anyway) Josep Maria Bartomeu, has already issued a statement admitting changes within the club will be made.
? @jmbartomeu
Statements on Movistar+ pic.twitter.com/BOCQfUiCRj— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona) August 14, 2020
But what acts as the most bewildering is how Pique and Bartomeu appeared so clearly taken aback at such an embarrassment, as if they had never seen it coming. It’s all well and good to say changes will be made, but those should have been carried out years ago.
Pique’s “rock bottom” comments will hit the headlines and perhaps serve as sympathy to some of the long-standing Barca players. But in truth, they have long been plummeting towards a downward spiral that every person inside the club should have seen such an jolt coming.
They have been sleepwalking into this hellacious, almost murderous beating for years. The La Masia’s production line has ran dry and the ethos of which the club was built upon by Johan Cruyff and carried to another level by Pep Guardiola, has altogether dissipated. Ever since the latter departed, each managerial change and upheaval upstairs has torn away another strip of the club’s soul.
Barca can no longer rely on superior individual quality to bail them out of the games. For years, they would approach key fixtures in their seasons as if it were a school game, with no organisation or tactical nouse. Well, aside from the give it to “Messi and pray” instruction.
Football now is more a team game than ever before. It is based on profound nuances and devoted methodologies, with each player knowing how their role in the team impacts the collective.
But defeat to Bayern showed there was no way back from this. The holes with the club had grown too cavernous to keep putting plasters over. Stalwarts, legends of the club are on their last legs and should have been replaced some time ago. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is how lost some of current greats appear to be.
On one end of the spectrum you have Pique and Sergio Busquets. Two players who have transcended their positions and won everything there is to win in football. On Friday, they looked mentally and physically gone. Pique’s defensive showing resembled an aircraft Marshall, repeatedly gesticulating which was it was to Marc-Andre ter-Stegen’s goal.
Meanwhile, if Sergio Busquets were a horse, he would be put out to graze. He has been on his last legs since Andres Iniesta left for Japan and Barcelona stopped dominating possession.
At the other end is Frenkie de Jong, who should be the quintessential Barcelona player. From the Ajax youth system, ingrained with a metronomic passing style and a midfield artistry of Johan Cruyff’s ‘Total Football,’ De Jong was one of the few signings in recent years that genuinely fitted into the long-running philosophy of the club. But no, not in this team. Instead of becoming Busquets’ successor, he’s been shipped to the left to play in a more attacking role, which makes no sense whatsoever.
In fact, nothing Barcelona or president Bartomeu has done in recent times has made sense. They mostly get away with it when they play in Spain, as of course, they still have probably the greatest player to ever play the game to bail them out.
Once their glorious, illustrious side began to grow old together, the transitional process should have got underway and recruited more youthful, vibrant players to drag Barcelona into football’s modern age; they didn’t. Not only did they stick with their old workhorses when it was painstakingly obvious most of them couldn’t cope with the tempo the rest of Europe were playing with (4-0 Anfield) they then decided to buy players that were so rudimentary to the principles of Barcelona, it verged on the unbelievable.
When the £107 million Antoine Greizmann arrived from Atletico Madrid at the start of the season, Barca had inherited a very good player. But most people, with any lingering tactical understanding, knew he wouldn’t and simply couldn’t fit at the Nou Camp. After all, he operates in the same areas of the pitch as Lionel Messi, and let’s be frank, Grezimann wasn’t brought in to take the Argentine’s role. So, the false number 9 was dumped out on the left, to provide the width just like an out and out winger.
It gets worse. They do have an out and out winger, his name is Ousmane Dembele. The £135 million pound signing from Borussia Dortmund in 2017, if you can recall. But he barely plays and every window since, the hierarchy have been offering him to any club that would listen.
It just keeps going. With left wing still a burden after Neymar’s departure to PSG pulled the pants down of Barca’s board, Phillipe Coutinho came in for £148 million – you know the world class Premier League attacking midfielder? Well, he then got told to go over to that left flank. A year later and a handful of appearances in his actual position, he was deemed not good enough.
He then got loaned out to Bayern Munich this season and of course, scored two and assisted one last night, despite somehow being still a Barcelona player.
All of this desperately illustrates the haphazard nature of recruitment. Whether it’s those players being misused or just didn’t fit in the first place, Barcelona seem to put a blindfold on and pull the trigger. And in doing so, firing a lot of money into the wind that will never return. None of the signings mentioned are anywhere near their original value now. Their resell value is likely to be a lot lower, if not halved in all three’s cases.
Bartomeu’s words after the game should act as an indication of a cultural reboot at the stagnating club. But that will take years. After signing 30-year-old Miralem Pjanić last month in a swap deal with Arthur – a player who can actually play how Barcelona historically have done – just to balance the books, it shows mistakes are not being learned from.
The club sit in a precarious economic position too, where 86 per cent of the club’s revenue goes on wages, mostly to the over-the-hill or underperforming players. Not only is the side becoming a disaster on the pitch, but off it too. They are financially crippling the club and the impact of COVID-19 means its going to take an endless timescale for Barcelona to be fully healed again. When that time eventually comes, it’s most likely going to have to happen without Messi.
The Presidential election is in February and whoever takes on the mantle will have the most onerous, cutthroat job in world football. Ageing players and kamikaze recruitment has led to anarchy on the pitch and a structural mess off it. And the 8-2 massacre to Bayern Munich was the culmination of it all.
