The rabid present places him in the League, ready for the confrontation against Girona at the Camp Nou, a match in which he cannot make the mistakes that penalized him against Real Madrid. Barça has been given the label of champion, but football is burdened by the devil and punishes skids with ferocity.
While the team rushes to forget the defeat of the Cup and regain the pulse of the championship, the club looks to the future, applies for credits, pushes levers, borrows up to the eyebrows and dreams of a productive reshaping of the Camp Nou, prologue to the great times to come.
So far, Barça has been operating with a palmist logic: it solves the problems of the present and prepares for the challenges of the future. But it is the past that returns again and again, an irrepressible drive that takes him back to an earlier time, undoubtedly happier and more pleasant, albeit unsettling. The obsession with the past in football presents the same complications as the return to childhood in adults. It is the most obvious symptom of unresolved difficulties.
Much of the Camp Nou chanted Messi’s name in the 10th minute of the match against Real Madrid. With the advantage acquired at the Bernabéu, Barça had a high chance of reaching the Cup final. On the field, the team included several young people who want to make a career and earn good money, young people such as Araújo, Gavi and Balde, who are being chased by the best clubs in Europe and who are crucial for the progression of Barça. His ears heard the name of a footballer adored at Barça but who plays for another team.
The scene had a Kafkaesque air, if it weren’t for the fact that Barça is immersed in a melancholy loop from which it cannot escape. The past inevitably runs through the heart of Barcelona and nowhere is it more evident than in the boardroom. Since the return of Joan Laporta to the presidency, the most symbolic actions have been presided over by nostalgia.
The multitudinous presentation of Xavi and Alves at the Camp Nou claimed the connection with an exceptional period of Barça, close in time, very far in the cruel reality of football. The appeal to the classics made sense during the turbulent days that followed Koeman’s dismissal and the team’s failures against Bayern and Benfica. It was convenient to relieve the wounds. But time passes and it is not in Barça’s interest to settle into perennial nostalgia.
Barça and Messi will end up understanding each other, as Real Madrid and Di Stéfano understood each other after a breakup. In this case, the club experiences this situation as bereavement experiences with the dead: without forgetting the guilt complex that is felt in the Barcelona world, sharpened by Messi’s resounding success in the World Cup. The grief is likely to be twofold. Messi hears whistles in Paris, in a team that makes him richer but not happier. Another thing is the chance of reunion.
If Barça is determined to look to the future, it will have to abandon melancholy. Messi, this Messi, produces a passionate, but nostalgic relationship. It will ease the pain, but its time has passed. It will come at another time, in another activity, in a future that will be more desirable if Barça once and for all abandons the loop that slows it down and confuses it.
