Methadone for a Sunday without the drugs of a Barça match: Xavi’s press conference. It is the first after the institutional pirouette that culminated with the renewal of the coach, who took refuge in the ancestral “rectify is wise.” Two minutes later, memes were already circulating that transformed the phrase into “rectify is xavis”, grotesque like certain moments in 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 once again insisted that he faces the future with “all the enthusiasm 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 has alternated an unstable frankness with a victimhood based on vaguely real events, yesterday he debuted a categorical seriousness in his speech, sticking to the argument that he shared with Joan Laporta.
The attitude released by Xavi is one of responsible maturity and purpose of distancing himself from the media. It’s like when, after a stage full of misunderstandings, you force yourself to start a new stage without falling into submission or weakness, which the environment always interprets as a sign of weakness. Attitude, however, does not change reality. Perhaps that is why, when those who must convey the idea that Xavi has “all the hope in the world” are the same ones who four days ago had to explain that he could not stand the electric bench and the poison of the environment, skepticism prevails as a method. interpretation of reality. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec said it: “Everything is an illusion. The previous sentence too, of course.”
The episode of Xavi’s renewal is incongruous. If, applying an adult criterion, we interpret what Xavi explained a few months ago, we had to assume that he would leave. Now, however, interpreting the opposite places us in an area that, from experience, we know is not reliable: that of acts of faith and mutant illusions depending on the circumstances. In this matter, Barça has a virtuoso: its president. The coherence between your 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 at a barbecue, that the levers were tied and tied well…) have gone from being good intentions to, at best, the cases, fantasies. Rectifying is for the wise, okay, but also for the frivolous or – hopefully this is the case – enlightened and visionary.
I admit that I was surprised that, two hours after Xavi announced that he was leaving the club, there were already comments from veteran teammates exchanging bets stating that he would stay. Naively, I interpreted it as corporate malice, typical guild cynicism punished by too many years of backbiting. Now I see that they were right. So when I see that some have begun to bet that Xavi, serious or categorical, will not eat the nougat, I want to believe that they are wrong and that hope will win the battle against skepticism.