The systematic destruction of the style book that had defined the best Barça in the history of the hand of Pep Guardiola and Tito Vilanova has been a decadent process in which many factors have contributed from a bad sports management under the baton, especially , by Josep Maria Bartomeu. That’s what Messi once described as juggling: a mess of technical secretaries, sports managers and supposedly cruyffist coaches who weren’t really into it. All this has led to a scenario in which Xavi moves with the tools of Indiana Jones to rediscover dusty concepts after a sustained, unnatural and almost criminal forgetfulness of what was yours and only yours. Barça despised the Holy Grail and the search for the hero’s lost ark is a path full of obstacles seasoned with draconian League regulations due to an economically irresponsible past, injuries and, now, also covid. But Xavi goes his own way.
Watching it during matches is a very illustrative spectacle of the masterclass constant that he teaches the players to recover the travel plan that he has engraved with red-hot iron in his brain since he started training at Barça. To see him is to reconnect with a familiar feeling, a recognizable figure, a “Finally someone at the helm who knows what this is about.” After being repeatedly made to believe that the position game sounds to some people in Mandarin Chinese, based on insistence, he is getting them to start decoding it. Linares aside, which is also important for the reaction of faith in complicated circumstances, what was seen in Mallorca in the midst of the plague of casualties was precisely a coach’s triumph: a blog with an idea that is above all. There is no trace of the theory ofIt is what it is.
From what we are beginning to notice on the pitch, the Barça we once celebrated may be resurfacing in a long-distance race with well-founded wishes. However, Joan Laporta’s optimism, stating that Barça has already returned, has a disproportionate tone that is not very connected to the context in which the institution lives. Let’s be serious: two and a half months ago it had not yet been decided to put Xavi as coach, sports planning is having to be resumed with the season underway and Haaland is being fed as the next song of the summer when ‘are balancing to sign a signed footballer before making him a salary space. Let the grandiloquent messages of the president sound, that the reality is imposed while Indiana Jones continues to the rescue.
