FC Barcelona will have a new coach next season. The resignation of Xavi Hernández, beyond aggravating a sporting and institutional crisis to which there is no end in sight, caught Barcelona fans on the wrong foot. 24 hours later, details of the reason for the decision and how to communicate it begin to emerge.
Xavi had been weighing his farewell for some time with his wife Núria Cunillera, more in favor of a quiet life in Doha than one governed by stress in Barcelona. They both accepted the offer from Barça with the hope of fulfilling the dream of the man from Terrassa: he was everything as a player in the club of his life and he wanted to repeat that success as a coach.
It has not been possible. Xavi arrived at a very delicate sporting moment, he straightened the team’s course, won a League and a Super Cup, but the momentum that should bring together results and a game at the level of what was proclaimed has not occurred. The third season, which should have been one of consolidation, has meant a reversal that has returned the team to where it came from. Neither game nor results. The last games (triad of wins against Real Madrid, Athletic and Villarreal) have precipitated a decision already made but whose communication was initially planned for the coming weeks.
Xavi’s reasons for abandoning the challenge that motivated him so much are broadly threefold. External criticism, internal criticism (more painful) and a growing feeling of loneliness in the club.
Let’s start with the first one. Xavi, despite knowing the club like no one else, has not been able to ignore what was said about him in the media. A tough skin is an essential characteristic for sitting on the Blaugrana bench and he has been losing layers as the team has gotten worse. The shell has not resisted and has affected the family nucleus, also represented through his brother Òscar, second coach, as well as his father Joaquim, who does not miss a gathering and makes it known. He believes the coach has been unfair to his work, that the League won last season has not been sufficiently valued, ignored to the point of disappearing from collective memory. The impotence regarding the performance of their players, at the same time, was also increasing. “Sometimes I get desperate when we don’t do what he wants to do,” he said recently in a post-match press conference. The mismatch between the orders given and the little correspondence on the grass made him bitter. The problem was not a lack of personal harmony with the locker room: the players, for the most part, were with him. This was demonstrated to him yesterday by many of them privately when he informed them that he was leaving.
The internal criticism has also ended up affecting him despite not coming from those who rule the most. With Joan Laporta he has maintained a relationship that is more of a friend than a work relationship. The dialogue has been open and sincere during these two years and three months. Even when Xavi discussed possible signings with Zubimendi, Kimmich and Bernardo Silva and the club told him that there were no financial possibilities to undertake them.
Conciliator and club man to the point of naivety, Xavi did notice a change last summer with the composition of the new sports commission. The departure of Jordi Cruyff and Mateu Alemany, two executives with whom he understood perfectly and worked day by day as allies, gave way to the appointment as sports director of Deco, with whom Xavi has worked very comfortably despite the fact that the Portuguese has adopted a more equidistant position between the box and the sports city. The coach’s feeling of loneliness has increased, some signings have been concessions rather than requests (João Félix, Vitor Roque) and the lack of unanimity regarding his figure among the members of the new sports commission has reached his ears. . At Barça the walls hear.
Apart from Laporta and Deco, the vice president Yuste, the most affected by Xavi’s goodbye, as well as Enric Masip, deputy to the presidency and personal friend of Laporta, the manager Joan Soler, who introduced himself as “sports vice president” form this commission. in the last elections within the candidacy of Jordi Farré, a candidate who did not pass the signature cut, and Bojan Krkic as the latest addition. Masip and Soler, understand Xavi’s environment, have not rowed in his favor.
“Alejandro, I have to communicate something to the president,” Xavi told Alejandro Echevarría, Laporta’s former brother-in-law and an additional member of the presidential core despite not being either a manager or an executive. “Think about it,” Laporta, Yuste, Deco and Echevarría himself asked him. It was already too late. Xavi, he told them, hopes that with his decision the players will be freed. The Terrassa player remembers an episode in which something similar happened: Radomir Antic urged the locker room (2003) knowing that the Serbian would not continue. Xavi was in that booth.
It is difficult to know how the team will react. As is also guessing what the plot line of this heterogeneous sports commission is, especially now that the coach must be decided starting next season.
It will not be Xavi, defeated by wear and tear that threatened to erode his status as a Barça legend. He leaves before Barça, as a whole, leaves him irreparable wounds.
