Letters from Barcelona: New Era, Old Problems

BARCELONA – Barcelona has been rebuilding, reborn and beginning a new era, from Anfield. Or maybe from Rome or Turin. Probably from Lisbon, or since the last visit of Kylian Mbappé to the Camp Nou and, without a doubt, since this last Wednesday in Munich.

At each blow, at each slap, at each new sinking, he resolves by proclaiming that the bottom has already been reached and that you have to start from scratch. “A new stage is beginning”, was Xavi’s diagnosis. A new stage … With many of the footballers who were the protagonists of the last falls.

From the Barça that was crushed in Lisbon in August 2020 to the one that was danced in Munich, six players repeated in the starting eleven (Marc-André ter Stegen, Gerard Piqué, Clement Lenglet, Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets Y Frenkie de Jong) and the curious thing is that except the French the rest maintain an untouchable status. As they are, subtracting De Jong, the others who have already been in the disasters of Liverpool or Rome or Turin.

Footballers from a past, increasingly distant, glorious and whom Josep Maria Bartomeu’s board awarded with wild renewals and contravening a primordial commandment in first-level football: ‘Renew a player for what he can give you, not for what It already gave you ‘that Johan Cruyff turned into law many years ago, taking to the limit that bet for which he was widely criticized but which is now proven indisputable.

“The management”. Grandiloquent, pompous and serious, Gerard Piqué affirmed on Tuesday that the management of recent years is what has led Barça to the current situation, keeping quiet that those responsible for it were the ones who gave him a millionaire contract renewal in January of 2018 and that, in the middle of the pandemic, in October 2020 and weeks before resigning, they extended him for another two years so that he could recover the salary reduction he agreed to.

Barcelona has taken such care of its stars in recent years that it ended up forgetting first about the team, collectively, and after the club itself. In January 2021, the newspaper El Mundo published the last contract signed by Lionel messi, in which it was discovered that the Argentine star earned 578 million dollars in five seasons plus another 218 simply for signing, as a renewal bonus and loyalty bonus. Almost 800 million dollars of which he still has more than 100 uncollected.

Messi is gone but the debt remains … And yes they are Philippe Coutinho, which between signing and salaries has cost Barça more than 220 million. Y Ousmane Dembélé, now put on stage as a kind of world megacrack without having offered hardly anything in his five-year contract that has resulted, adding the cost of his transfer, an expense of more than 230 million. OR Samuel Umtiti, which in 2018, weeks before the World Cup in Russia to which he was already injured, maintains a gross salary of more than 20 million per year. And so…

Xavi has ahead of him, if he keeps his word and gets the support of the board, a monumental task to change the inertia of Barcelona in a short period of time. He left as a footballer while Bartomeu showed his chest with his proclamation ‘Trident and Triplet’ without paying attention to the fact that it is from the success that the renovations must be carried out and that it is essential to maintain the demand for a squad whose cracks, without competition, are accommodating.

It happened with Jordi Alba, who was signed as substitutes but not threatening before giving him an implausible renewal in February 2019 until 2024 in which, it is said, Messi had a lot to do with it, and it continued to happen afterwards, contemplating the deep drop in performance of a Ter Stegen who knows himself untouchable in the goal …

From Barça, once again, the beginning of a new era is proclaimed without paying attention that it begins with the vices of the past embedded in their skin. And very brave, determined and to a point of suicide, it must be Xavi to shape it or this promise, like so many others in recent years, will be blown away … Until a new disaster.