The show is weird. A Barça-Madrid in lycanthropic hours, in Dallas, supposedly friendly, designed to promote both brands in a market in eternal expansion. Can we imagine a humanitarian tragedy so powerful that it would justify the organization of a Madrid-Barça match for charity and solidarity purposes? In Dallas, the friendly concept does not prevail, but rather the need to invoice and control the narrative of expectations from the first minute of public presence.
The match? Excellent Ter Stegen and the appearance of new trading cards that promise in a world in which we know that, in preseason, you should never fall in love with the trading cards that promise. In the stands of the stadium, the spectators are more attentive to the cameras, global and individual, than to the game. By the way; the game exudes a tension inappropriate to what the calendar recommends. In the end, Xavi makes an analysis that flees from emptiness and that, on the contrary, tries to mark his communicative spirit. Xavi says that we won’t be so good now and we weren’t so bad before. It is a classic of the obvious, fossilized by currents of complacency that have a lot to do with the way they are presented and edited by the media.
It is symptomatic that Xavi says that we already know what the Catalans and the environment are like. From the outset, because he proclaims himself a participant in an identity with his own tradition and is correct in differentiating the two concepts: the culés and the environment. Does that mean that the environment is not culé? No (I mean yes). Simplifying, we could say that on Sunday the Catalans went to sleep mostly happy for having beaten Madrid while the environment had to attend to principles and participate in a public debate that, more and more, is devoured by the demands of false visibility in social networks. It is not enough to have an opinion about what happens and information about why it happens. The environment also establishes hierarchies and trenches of influence that sometimes force rhetorical contortions that hide the ancestral arbitrariness of sympathies, antipathies, and egos.
Already in the last stretch of the previous season, Xavi opened the melon of this obsession with the environment, which underlines its more -too- susceptible side. Each one manages criticism as they can, and it seems that Xavi needs the support of his own environment to compensate for the prevalence of the other. The other is, let’s be clear, the Cruyffista and/or Guardiolist environment, a factual power that is more flaccid in practice than in theory. It does have an anthropological, footballing interest and, above all, it is part of the atmospheric essence of the club and the team. That the coach interprets the activity in this environment with flashes of paranoia is logical. In fact, the father of the environment concept, Johan Cruyff, invented it precisely for that. Paradox: when Cruyff astutely diverted attention to this spectrum, he was pointing to organized and spontaneous Nuñismo. That, after decades, the environment has become Cruyffista and is a nuisance for Xavi (I don’t think he considers it a threat) confirms that the club continues to be the bloody pot of crickets that inspired, they say, the shape of the shield.