Pulling financial levers and sniper precision, Barça has a few weeks to solve a critical problem for its future, which is none other than the design and composition of its squad, damaged for years by a lethal mix of wasteful and disastrous decisions.
Down the drain went the money and its position on the European scale. They are years of vertigo in football, which does not wait, nor has compassion, for anyone. Teams that made history are now on the side of the road, brought down by their economic incompetence or by geographical misfortune.
It is not difficult to name these teams and countries: Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven (Netherlands), Benfica, Porto and Sporting de Lisboa (Portugal), Celtic and Glasgow Rangers (Scotland), all giants of old European football, but hurt by the small size of their leagues. Barça belongs to another sphere, a country of 50 million inhabitants where one of the most recognized championships in the world is played.
Barça has plenty of prestige and a market, but suddenly it lacks money, and that means a drop in opportunities in the great transfer bazaar, which is already underway. Their historic peers (Real Madrid, Liverpool, Bayern) and the new giants (Manchester City and PSG) have already gone fishing, high-altitude, of course. PSG renewed Mbappé, Madrid have signed Rudiger and Tchouameni before embarking on new adventures, Liverpool paid Benfica a fortune for the Uruguayan Núñez and Manchester City was ahead of everyone in hiring Håland.
All these clubs can afford lavish spending and even fail in their decisions. Your economy works and the results, too. If you want to recover lost ground with them, Barça will have to deny the biblical parable. Either he manages to get the camel through the eye of the needle or he exposes himself to a new regression at the European level.
Milan, which officiated as a great patron in the 1990s and at the beginning of this century, dissipated in the ether for a decade and is only now beginning to rear its head, but it is no longer the same. When you lose your footing in today’s football, of gigantic economic proportions, the recovery is exhausting.
The size of the camel – a wide and competent group of signings – is as big as the narrowness of the passage offered by Barça. The League will begin in August, almost a year and a half after Laporta’s election as president, pressed ever since by his limited room for manoeuvre. The team saved the priority challenge – to qualify for the Champions League – but the sensations have not improved.
The leaders seem to know what they want: a deep immersion in the Cruyff model, but this claim will be difficult to achieve with the catch-all that is the current squad. Johan Cruyff took almost three years to gather the right players to take off. If something demands the model of him, it is the specific player, maximum specialist in the knowledge of the game, from the goalkeeper to the left end.
Barça lacks this kind of footballer, and those who know Latin – Busquets, Piqué, Jordi Alba – are in the final stretch of their careers. Except Pedri, and somewhat less Gavi, there are no players who know the complex algebra of Cruyff. This template is a monument to dispersion. Most of its players promise few guarantees of adaptation to the model. Although people want names and yearn for figures, that class has passed a crowd and the picture has worsened every year. This time, Barça has no margin for error. He has to do in five weeks what he didn’t do in five years.
