BARCELONA — The Camp Nou, that Catalan concrete monolith that tricks the mind by appearing double its size when you are inside, gets more tired with every irregular visit.
In the top tier of the Lateral stand, the red seats have been baked in the sun for so long that they have a permanent grey hue. In between the blocks, disintegrating stone steps test your balance and your courage.
Scaffolding and blue tarpaulin cover part of the external fascia, but any work is long overdue. Recent reports claim that Barcelona ignored warnings about mite and fly infestations and the risk of pigeon excrement falling into food preparation areas.
Last week, La Vanguardia reported that matches were hosted at the Camp Nou in 2019 and 2020 despite serious structural issues being identified. Pep Guardiola once used a metaphor about Johan Cruyff “building the cathedral” and everyone after him maintaining it; perhaps the literal interpretation is more appropriate now.
Sitting in a full Camp Nou can be a strange experience. In no other stadium is the split between season ticket holders – the socis – and the tourists more obvious. Behind the Gol Nord, they wave flags of Catalonia, Barcelona and emblems of the club’s history, they shout and they bounce. High up in the Lateral stand, they display flags of the countries from which they started their football pilgrimage and watch other people shout and bounce.
The last time I came here, our block alone had families from Bolivia, Uruguay, Mexico and the USA. Walking into the stadium this week, you could hear English, German and French speakers excitedly discussing what was to come.
They were all implicitly invited because Barcelona posited themselves as a global sporting entity to seek the rewards that such a status affords. Ticket prices were raised. The range of merchandise was expanded to the point of comedic value (the official online store sells 12 different styles of men’s socks and four different bandana designs for women). They exploited foreign markets for social media followers. They did sponsorship deals with Qatar. The phrase that sat at the heart of Barcelona – “mes que un club” – stayed true, but was bastardised. It used to indicate purity; it came to reflect a globalist grab.
The paradox of Barcelona’s expansionist dream is that it was largely built around a hyper-local core. Three of the five pillars of Barcelona’s modern dynasty – Pep Guardiola, Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Sergio Busquets and Lionel Messi – were born in Catalonia and the other two entered La Masia in their early teens. The tourists come over land and sea to watch Guardiola, Xavi, Iniesta, Messi and Busquets. Then Xavi, Iniesta, Messi and Busquets. Then Iniesta, Messi and Busquets. Then Messi and Busquets. Now just Busquets. The La Masia dynasty has died.
Barcelona’s shame will never be experienced through the pain of relegation or liquidation. Elite clubs with the highest revenues – of which Barcelona are certainly still one – are inoculated against their own negligence. You can make a series of clanging mistakes, to the point at which supporters are worried for the club’s existence, and you are still likely to finish in the top four of La Liga. You can lose your first two games in the European Cup for the first time in your history and still have a decent shot at qualification.
Instead you are punished by the emptiness of missed opportunity. In 2015, Barcelona had the world in their hands. They had retained the greatest crop of academy graduates the world had seen for at least two decades. They had moved on from the Pep Guardiola years to win the Champions League under Luis Enrique. They had judged their lavish signings (Neymar and Luis Suarez) well and had found value elsewhere (Jordi Alba and Javier Mascherano in particular).
But in 2014, Sandro Rosell resigned as club president over legal issues surrounding the Neymar deal and Josep Maria Bartomeu. It is a little hyperbolic to suggest that one Josep created a Barcelona dynasty and a second destroyed it, but Bartomeu certainly lacked experience and was infamously hasty to sack sporting directors.
Pick your favourite personification of Barcelona’s gross wastage under Bartomeu. In his new book “Barça”, author Simon Kuper makes the argument for Ousmane Dembele, who was initially selected as a target over then-Monaco winger Kylian Mbappe, despite the assumed asking price being roughly similar. When Bartomeu went to Monte Carlo to organise the deal, as Kuper writes, Dortmund played hard ball and Barcelona caved. The eventual fee was around £135m, including add-ons.
But there are others. Barcelona paid £140m for Philippe Coutinho when they already possessed an elite South American creator. They spent £107m on signing Antoine Griezmann, the best attacking player of their rival, then watched as that rival won the title last season and, to rub salt into the wound, loaned Griezmann back to Atletico Madrid this season to save on his wages. Miralem Pjanic was effectively signed as an accounting trick and soon sat on the bench. Clement Lenglet and Malcom were expensive gambles that didn’t pay off.
The trend running through all of these deals was that Barcelona paid the highest possible price, far more than any other club would have considered sensible. Perhaps other clubs knew that La Masia’s rich seam was running dry. Perhaps they simply knew that Barcelona had full pockets. Or perhaps they worked out that Bartomeu was desperate to impress and so happy to spend lavishly.
Either way, Barcelona ceded their position of strength at the worst possible time. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and revenues were temporarily decimated, the money ran out. Record-breaking revenues had become eye-watering debt. La Liga effectively barred the club from spending any more money it didn’t have, including renewing expiring contracts. One contract mattered more than most.
Messi’s final press conference as a Barcelona player is a definitive day in Barcelona’s history, not least because it marked the moment at which all control was lost. Messi wanted to stay. The president wanted him to stay. The players wanted him to stay. The socis wanted him to stay. But he could not stay. There were no accounting tweaks, no sad-angry pleas to governing bodies that worked. Barcelona lost the best player in their history because they spent close to a billion pounds trying to help him and somehow made the team worse.
The irony of greatness is that carrying a club on your shoulders can inadvertently make you an ingredient in its decay when you leave. We have seen that across Europe, at Manchester United post-Alex Ferguson’s retirement and at Ajax when Johan Cruyff left as a player in 1973.
At Barcelona, they had two of these uber-dominant elements in one. Firstly, La Masia produced a group of four players (Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets and Messi) born only eight years apart who could each have claimed to be an era-defining academy graduate if they stood alone. Not only did that miraculously prolific period create an unfair expectation that La Masia struggled to match, it also led to clubs across Europe studying and replicating the model. Barcelona lost their unique selling point; its uniqueness became its flaw.
Beyond that, Messi stood out within the select group. Teammates and managers were able to absolve themselves of – or were simply not afforded – responsibility because Messi would do it all and become the de facto powerbroker. Barcelona believed that they were becoming a guaranteed global attraction, but how much of that support was simply based around one player?
And to what extent was Barcelona’s dynasty simply a reflection of the excellence of that aforementioned quintet (Guardiola plus the La Masia poster boys)? With one, some or all of them on the pitch or directing those on it, Barcelona have won four of their five European Cups and half of their league titles over the last half-century. Guardiola’s church analogy remains apposite in reflecting Cruyff’s foundations, but by Messi’s debut Barcelona hadn’t won La Liga for more than five years. Again the “mes que un club” line is bastardised. What if they were simply one collection of well-timed graduates, led by a phenom player?
If watching Lionel Messi play for Paris Saint-Germain is an odd experience, watching Barcelona without him is far more unsettling. As the ball is played slowly between midfielders, or Memphis Depay runs in behind on the left wing, you are hardwired to expect the No 10 to arrive at the edge of the box and glide past three defenders. Luuk de Jong will have to do instead. With all due respect, the tourists do not buzz excitedly when he picks up the ball.
They will still come for now, for the bigger games, attracted by the great history rather than the grim present. But the attention span and patience of those once-in-a-season fans will not hold; other super clubs are available. On this occasion, a Champions League fixture against Dynamo Kiev, the top tier of the stadium is barely five per cent full – some blocks of 400 seats are totally empty. The cheapest ticket online was €52, plus booking fee. After kick off you can hear the players shouting at each other. Even allowing for an early start and lesser fixture, that seems extraordinary.
There is a route out of this. Barcelona can rise again. But they are unlikely to be able to do it their way. They will be bailed out by the revenues generated by conquering global markets and climbing into bed with Qatar. La Masia, the club’s ethos and its pulling power are no longer unique. There’s nothing wrong with being the same as everyone else as long as you didn’t once pretend to be different.
The day before the Dynamo Kiev match, Barcelona unveiled grand plans for a huge renovation project of the Camp Nou. Cynics will remark that they heard all this as far back as 2014, so attempting a €1.5bn project at a time when the club is loaded with a similar sum of debt sounds ambitious. The aim is to start work in earnest in 2022 with work completed three years later, forming part of a “Barcelona space” with office blocks and entertainment complexes.
It all seems so fitting somehow. Having spent years allowing their grand old stadium to be eroded by time and weather while simultaneously wasting their advantages on a series of shorter-term missteps, Barcelona now face emergencies on and off the field. No grand gesture, no corporate masterplan, could be more fitting than this promise: To rebuild the cathedral.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3G4kXmR
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