Barcelona will not be playing Champions League football beyond Christmas for the first time since the Europa League was still called the UEFA Cup.
Xavi summed it up in one sentence: “we’re in the Europa League, that’s our reality”
It is hard to believe that only SIX years ago, under the Berlin lights just 35 miles from Munich, Barcelona completed the treble for the 2nd time in SIX years, beating Juventus to lift the trophy.
They had Iniesta, they had Xavi, they had the famous MSN front three. Of that quintet, only Xavi is still at the club and it hasn’t been a month he was appointed to replace Ronald Koeman.
From treble winners to Europa League underdogs in six years. A Barcelona fan would ask, how did we get here?
If you were stunned by the word underdogs, then you need not be. There’s so much quality in the Europa League this year that the chances of Barcelona winning it can only get slimmer as the season progresses.
Back to how the club whose motto is “more than a club” became merely a club.
First it was Griezmann in Atlético’s last season at the Wanda Metropolitano, then there were two consecutive quarterfinal capitulations in Italy to Juventus and Roma. They fell flat in Liverpool in 2019 and 2020 got no better as they hit the lowest of lows against the same opponents that has now sent them to the Europa League tonight.
The fact is that this was a long way coming. A series of consistent questionable decisions at board level during the Bartomeu era contributed hugely to their present predicament.
First they let their 2015 treble winners age together instead of dipping into their ever reliable La Masia academy to have the correct blend of youth and experience. Following Neymar’s transfer to PSG, the club went for direct replacements in Dembele and Coutinho, to say that they’ve both underperformed, would be an understatement in every sense of the word.
Followed them was another big money signing in Griezmann who, though not as bad as the previous two, didn’t live up to expectations at Camp Nou.
The Bartomeu era threw money around at problems instead of strategically finding solutions. The result? Almost a billion euros in debt which forced them to let Messi leave for free this summer without a fight. I guess you know the story.
There has been three managers in that time too if you exclude Enrique and Xavi.
Ernesto Valverde was sacked while he was top of the League in January 2020, a move you can be sure they regretted bitterly at the end of the season. His replacement, Qique Setien, at his unveiling press conference was explaining how he was walking around with cows in his home town the previous day, begging the question of why he was qualified to replace a manager that was four points clear at the top of the league.
Setien had said: “I thank Ernesto Valverde for leaving me with a side that is top of the league. My objective is to win everything. Everything you can win, this club has no other path to follow.”
Real Madrid won the title, Barcelona ended the season with an 8:2 thrashing by Bayern which cost Setien his job. His replacement, Koeman was unable to oversee a return to roots as was expected for the club and Xavi has now been tasked with doing that. Unfortunately for Xavi, he has inherited a squad that don’t even seem capable of winning the Europa League.
He was right, the Europa League is their reality now but what’s more shocking is that they’re realistically not even among the favourites to go all the way.
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