I don’t sing, I sell style”, Sinatra used to say. It is a reflection that is valid for football. Barça knows it perfectly. It is the club that has sold the most and best style as a differential factor, not without reason. As was the case with old Frankie, Barça has enjoyed its most brilliant period, and the one that has brought it the most titles, with such a distinctive way of interpreting the game that it invited the arduous debate of the chicken or the egg. In other words, Cruyff, who was a chicken and egg at the same time. With Cruyff at the helm of the team, Barça began to win wildly and recover lost ground with respect to the great leaders of European football. Since then, style has been Barça’s mantra. And there it goes. The last victory at the Bernabéu has deserved more discussion for the unusual way of achieving it – on the border of catenaccio – than for the value of the result. Barça cannot complain about a controversy in which they have frequently participated, sometimes with a point of arrogance. Some of its main spokespersons, and Xavi has been one of them in the last 20 years, have not hesitated to oppose their footballing principles to the dubious opinion that others deserved, especially those located at the antipodes of their ideas. Some names are easy to remember. Javier Clemente, Mourinho and Simeone, for example, representatives of fierce pragmatism, without aesthetic concessions. An exercise as impeccable as it was strictly defensive at the Bernabéu, has served to accuse Xavi of double language. His critics have told him: if you’re Sinatra, you can’t sing in flip-flops. Xavi has defended himself with an interesting argument. “I didn’t want this, but we were careless with the ball and Madrid forced us to lock ourselves up.” It was not, ultimately, a premeditated plan, but the circumstances of the game. Deliberate or not, Barça’s ultra-defensive game – the one with the least ball possession in their last 861 games – has been taken as a heresy by Xavi and proof of his surrender to pragmatism at all costs.
Statements and controversies aside, Barça is facing the monster that Cruyff devised and that Guardiola built down to the last piece. There was a time when Barça was the most unique of teams, a great anomaly that also billed successes without ceasing. That team transformed football like probably no other has. It is not a rhetorical question. To counteract that Barça, the coaches had to internalize many of Guardiola’s basic principles, some so influential that they led to changes in the regulations, as has happened in certain cases of game action by the goalkeepers.
The game is not the same now as it was 15 years ago and the engine of this evolution was Barça. In any category, however modest it may be, you can see teams that combine short from the goalkeeper –whom they use as just another player–, open up the central defenders, raise the wingers, press high and take care of the ball like an unthinkable pampering until recently. . All football took note, learned and used essential concepts at Barça. Now they are applied in England and in Spain, in Italy and in Germany, in the First Division and in the Second Division, with a problem that is extremely difficult for Barça to solve. The previous coaches of the team, and now Xavi, have to reinterpret, speed up and improve a perfectly finished model. It is an extreme challenge for Barça itself, which has suffered in recent years to find its own voice, the unique, differentiating style that separates it from the rest. It’s what happens when you’ve been Sinatra. There is no other like it, and no way to improve it.
