Barcelona is failing in defense but the team, which has held up against the club so many times in recent years, is now nothing more than a faithful reflection of the institution. The goals conceded in the goal have their equivalent in the juggling to go to the market and register the signings and with the problems of unpaid deadlines of the commercial partners of the Barça Media lever. Titles are always the best attraction for sponsors, so the game model begins to be discussed and winning is prioritized while the debate over the ownership of the entity underlies.
The worst scenario, a season without titles in men’s football, is more than plausible. Expectations were high, after last year’s League and Super Cup, and they are far from being met. If Villarreal and Granada have brought out the colors of the Blaugrana, it is not surprising that a fear of suffering European humiliation again like those at Anfield or Lisbon, be it Naples or in a later round, has taken over. but being in the Champions League quarterfinals is key to meeting the budget.
Xavi arrived at the end of 2021 to put the team in the top four and that is the primary objective again in 2024. Barça has returned to square one despite conditioning 25% of its television rights for the future.
“I think we can win the League. If we get involved in the next two days we will have a chance,” said Joan Laporta on RAC1, in the last interview he gave, after the Terrassa coach announced that he would leave office at the end of the season. But when push came to shove, the reaction and the mini-streak lasted very little. The draw against Granada and the feeling of irregularity make the team not a reliable alternative, but a real mess.
Barça has fallen like a house of cards. His defense cannot even resist the snorts of the rival forwards, who have scored 33 goals against him in the League. They have conceded more than twice as many goals as Madrid, the leader, and have conceded exactly the same as the penultimate team in the standings, Cádiz. Teams like Girona. Atlético, Athletic, Real Sociedad and Betis have better defensive numbers but also some from the bottom like Mallorca or Celta. A bleeding that is penalizing him and that does not stop, neither with Ter Stegen nor with Iñaki Peña.
Forwards like Bryan Zaragoza, Samu, Pellistri, Sorloth, Janssen and Newerton, who are not exactly world stars, were unstoppable for Barça’s weak defense. In this facet, grotesque individual errors coexist, tactical failures such as pressure and poor positioning, and players in dubious form, either due to playing problems like Cancelo or due to a certain laziness like Koundé. Even so, the Frenchman has started 28 games.
If the coaching staff has been able to stop the lack of concentration in the first minutes that cost goals before the two minutes of Bryan, Samu, Vermeeren and Guruzeta, it has not been able to correct the lack of mentality to put in work in the bad sections of the games or in the added times. It is not new that Xavi’s Barça is a team with a glass chin. In 13 of the 26 games he has lost he has conceded three or more goals. The problem is that at the beginning they were done by Bayern, Real Madrid or Eintracht and in recent times by Antwerp or Villarreal.
The chaos on the grass finds no response in the box either. The fact that the ball did not go in has paralyzed the president and the technical secretariat, headed by Deco, has found itself with the hot potato of looking for a coach when it was not expected.
There are no imaginative solutions to the crisis and everything seems to boil down to there being no money in the box. Neither to sign nor to excite and satisfy the future new coach, who may also lose an important player due to a painful sale. “We don’t have money for the investments that other million-dollar clubs make and that discourages any coach who comes here with the desire to win everything. We cannot give him the means to do that, unfortunately,” Deco confessed in the interview with Nascer do Sol magazine. Even the young Swede Bergvall preferred to sign for Tottenham, which paid more.
In less than a month, three years have passed since Laporta’s victory at the polls, and the president will not have any of his pillars of the project left: not even the one who should have been the finance man (Giró, who did not even enter to the board) nor the general director (Reverter), nor the football director (Alemany) and in June Xavi, the first coach he chose after inheriting Koeman, will leave. Now he must make brave decisions again, but more alone.