In the end it will be Xavi. Xavi urgently, Xavi without wanting him, Xavi because he plays but without enthusiasm. Xavi knowing that he is not Guardiola. But Laporta also knows that he cannot extend the -real- excuse of the disastrous management of the previous board and that he has to face a sports and institutional project. The institutional is underway, on the way for the members to stop being the sole owners of Barça, which already owes the investment bank Goldman Sachs more than half of what it is worth as a club. Sports, which Laporta did not want to specify until next season, will begin to take shape this week. With the water up to his neck and hastily, Laporta
He agrees to go with the flow and gives up what his instincts asked him to do.
-Xavi, to the subsidiary. And let him learn.
This was the president’s idea when a month ago he seriously considered firing Koeman, and his favorite to replace him was Andrea Pirlo. He considers Xavi Hernández somewhat arrogant, and his claim to place family and friends in the club’s sports structure is excessive. His support for the candidacy of Víctor Font does not help to create an atmosphere of trust either, although Pep Guardiola also supported Lluís Bassat during the 2003 campaign, after which Joan Laporta i Estruch became president of the Barcelona Football Club for the first time.
For his part, Xavi has never hidden his intention to coach Barcelona, although he wants to finish squeezing his contract with Al-Sadd financially and have the blessing, to return to Barcelona, of Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad. During the day of yesterday, both circumstances seemed to be close to being solved. But this permanent calculation in Xavi, this somewhat cynical distance with things and people – and also with Barça – is not very compatible with Laporta’s passionate and overwhelming character, which until a few weeks ago only added distance between the two and away the possibility of an immediate return.
In addition, if something bothers Jan, it is that they tell him what to do, and while many of his environment pressured him to trust Terrassa’s, he was tempted by the ability to surprise that he would undoubtedly have had by signing Andrea Pirlo, mythical ex-Juve footballer, but with everything to prove as a coach.
When after the debacle in the Wanda Koeman’s dismissal seemed imminent, Laporta did not dare to make the decision, knowing that if he threw and signed his bet, he would put the score to zero of his presidency. It is true that the current Barcelona team could perhaps get more out of it than Ronald Koeman manages to obtain, but not even Cruyff coming down from Heaven could do anything, with these very tender children, in the serious qualifying rounds of the Champions League.
Laporta’s idea was to buy time, keep Koeman, and blame the previous president – not without reason – for a season thrown away. But what Laporta learned at the Camp Nou after losing against Madrid, and on Wednesday in Vallecas, is that the world never waits and that we are not always the ones who decide when the challenges begin, the anguish, the dramatic obligation to face without network to destination. With the change of coach, what is really significant and new is that the president is in the first line of fire. For the good if it succeeds, and for the raid and the demolition if it fails. Aware of this, Pirlo’s adventure now seems too risky and prefers to go with the flow with Xavi.
He is a Laporta who is no longer the 40 years old he was when he jumped into the void with Rijkaard, nor the 47 years old when he played Russian roulette with Pep. At almost 60, he has received many blows, he is more tired than he used to be, Cruyff is no longer there to act as a guardian angel, and the young Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Piqué or Busquets are not waiting for him in the first team just on the verge of his wonderful football hatching to dazzle the whole world. The years have passed, the clubs have fallen, he has neither that strength in him, nor that talent in the field, and although Goldman Sachs is going to lend us the money we need, on the way to taking over the club’s property in whole or in part , the feeling is of poverty, that we are behind Madrid and that we do not know where to concentrate our efforts, or to build what.
Laporta will now play his presidency with a club ruined by the previous directive, with a coach with whom at the moment he does not quite understand, and in whom he trusts only relatively, and who if it had been for him he would have sent to the lower categories until he showed that he is capable of leading a team in conditions.
The players are who they are, and Xavi will not be able to sign before June. We will see if his inspiration can be a shock, but of course Laporta faces the first project of his second presidency in a much less luminous way than the illusion and strength of that distant 2003, when he made all Barcelona fans believe that we were not only invincible , but we could be immortal.
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