Methadone for a Sunday without the drug of a Barça match: Xavi’s press conference. It is the first after the institutional pirouette that culminated in the renewal of the coach, who took refuge in the ancestral saying “rectification is for the wise”. Two minutes later, memes were already circulating that transformed the phrase into a “rectification is of Xavis”, grotesque as certain moments of the sequence that goes from deferred denial to enthusiastic renewal.
The recreational cruelty of the environment is one of the symptoms of the fragility of the moment. Yesterday Xavi insisted again that he faces the future with “all the excitement in the world”. His verbal language, however, did not match his non-verbal language, and vice versa. Xavi seemed to have proposed a change of record. If during the season he alternated between unstable frankness and victimhood based on vaguely real facts, yesterday he premiered a categorical seriousness in the speech, based on the argument he shared with Joan Laporta.
The attitude introduced by Xavi is one of responsible maturity and purposeful distance from the media. It’s like when, after a stage full of misunderstandings, you force yourself to start a new stage without falling into either submission or weakness, which the environment always interprets as a sign of weakness. The attitude, however, does not change the reality. Perhaps for this reason, when those who have to convey the idea that Xavi has “all the illusion in the world” are the same ones who four days ago had to explain that he could no longer stand the electric bench and the servitude it entails, the ‘skepticism is imposed as a method of interpreting reality. The great Stanislaw Jerzy Lec said: “Everything is an illusion. The previous sentence too, of course”.
The episode of Xavi’s renewal is incongruous. If, applying an adult criterion, we interpreted what Xavifa explained a few months ago, we had to believe that she wanted to leave. Now, instead, interpreting the opposite places us in an area that, from experience, we know is unreliable: that of acts of faith and mutant illusions depending on the circumstances. In this matter, Barça has a virtuoso: the president. The consistency between their verbal and non-verbal language is absolute. The problem is that many things that Laporta has stated (that Xavi was not his coach, that he would renew Messi in an asado, that the levers were tied and well tied…) have gone from good intentions to, at best, cases, fantasies Rectifying is for the wise, of course, but also for the frivolous or – as the case may be – enlightened and visionary.
I admit I was surprised that, two hours after Xavi announced he was leaving the club, there were already comments from fellow veterans trading bets that he would stay. Naively, I interpreted it as corporate malice, typical guild cynicism punished by too many years of malice. Now I realize they were right. So when I see that some have started to bet that Xavi, serious or categorical, will not eat the nougat, I want to think that they are wrong and that illusion will win the battle against skepticism.
