Barcelona created this mess. They are too deep into a hole of their own digging to accept their culpability, but the thin veil of attempted defence barely covers half of the gaping wound. Lionel Messi is Barcelona and Barcelona is Lionel Messi and we will struggle to disassociate the two. This messy divorce, touted last year and now closer than ever to coming to pass, is on them.
The scattergun spending, a shade over £800m in a shade over two years between June 2017 and August 2019, laid the dynamite and lit the fuse. Philippe Coutinho was the first, the most expensive and the most damaging. While Barcelona chased him during the summer before his eventual arrival, the nouveau riche in Paris paid up Neymar’s release fee and wooed him about the benefits of leaving the Barcelona project.
Antoine Griezmann and Ousmane Dembele, both substitutes for the 8-2 Champions League quarter-final defeat against Bayern Munich in 2020, each cost more to buy than Bayern’s starting XI.
La Masia has long been a nagging issue. A series of misjudged coaching appointments, the early sale of certain graduates and the punishment by FIFA for the illegal transfer of Under-18 players all eroded the academy’s untouchable status. Spain’s Under-21 squad for the European Championship in 2019 contained no Barcelona players. Now they have Pedri, but he cannot carry this team alone.
Do not rule out Messi staying; that must be said as a caveat. Barcelona’s exit statement made very clear where the blame should be directed, towards a league whose financial rules they believe have forced their hands around their neck. If this is indeed a power play, a game of 3D sporting-political chess – and La Liga wants Messi to leave only slightly less than Barcelona do – it is a bold one. Barcelona have rolled the desperate dice one last time. It could work.
But that’s not really the point. That Barcelona have been reduced to such public posturing is damning evidence of their own mistakes. The financial elite are given every opportunity, every advantage, to maximise their fabulous opportunity. This is emphatic proof that their mistakes have outweighed even that tidal wave of extra leeway.
There is a deep irony at play here. Barcelona once stood as ‘Mes que un club’, before that term became bastardised into a marketing slogan to claw advertising revenue that fuelled a period of wanton, ill-advised investment. Now they stand for little at all. Messi was their last connection to an ideal that got lost along the way.
And yet it is precisely that issue that irked Messi most last summer. He was weary of being a one-man superclub, holding up a giant concrete stadium squarely upon his shoulders and still unable to stop the slide. In the decade after he turned 24, Barcelona gave Messi one Champions League final, fewer than Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid and the same number as Tottenham.
The irony continues. Last summer it was Messi playing politics, demanding more from those in the boardroom who he believed had let him and the Culés down before he would sign. Now it is the club that are unable to sign him because their mismanagement has caught up with them.
Messi’s departure, if it happens, should leave us all feeling glum. Watching him in this team over the last 12 months was even more hypnotic than seeing Barcelona in their pomp: The worse they got, the more his transcendent brilliance stood out. Never again will we watch the Blaugrana blur as he skipped into full speed to drag a game to his will.
But glumness need not be translated as sympathy. Barcelona are a control experiment for how to mismanage a superclub, one that possessed great riches, history, a global support and the greatest player of any generation and still stuffed it up. If Barcelona were ever going to learn that systemic change was needed, it was by enduring their most painful punishment. It’s just a damn shame we all have to suffer too.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/37kwKNy
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