The show is strange. A Barça-Madrid in lycanthropic schedule, in Dallas, apparently friendly, designed to boost the two brands in a market in eternal expansion. Can we imagine a humanitarian tragedy so powerful that it justified the organization of a Madrid-Barça for charitable and solidarity purposes? In Dallas, however, the friendly concept does not prevail, but rather the need to bill and control, from the first minute of public presence, the narrative of expectations.
The match? Excellent Ter Stegen and the appearance of new trading cards that promise in a world where we know that, in pre-season, we should never fall in love with trading cards that promise. In the stands of the stadium, the spectators are more dependent on the cameras, global and particular, than on the game. By the way: the game distills an unseemly tension from what the calendar recommends. In the end, Xavi makes an analysis that escapes the void and that, on the contrary, aims to mark the coach’s communicative spirit. He says we will neither be so good now nor were we so bad before. It is a classic of declarative truisms, 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 it is already known what the Culers and the environment are like. First of all, because it proclaims itself to be part of an identity with its own tradition and it is right when it differentiates between the two concepts: the culers and the environment. Does this mean that the environment is not cool? No (I mean yes). Simplifying, we could say that on Sunday the Cullers went to bed mostly happy for having won against Madrid, while the environment had to attend to principles and participate in a public debate that, more and more, is being devoured by the demands of false visibility in social networks. It is not enough to have an opinion about what is happening and information about why it is happening. The environment also establishes hierarchies and trenches of influence that sometimes force rhetorical contortions that hide the ancestral arbitrariness of likes, dislikes and egos.
Already in the last stretch of the previous season, Xavi started the melon of this obsession with the environment, which brings out his more – too – susceptible side. Everyone handles the 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 Cruyffist and Guardiola environment, a factual power more lax in practice than in theory. It does, however, have an anthropological and footballing interest and, above all, it is part of the atmospheric essence of the club and the team. It is logical for the coach to interpret the activity in this environment with hints of paranoia. In fact, the father of the surrounding concept, Johan Cruyff, invented it precisely for this reason. Paradox: when Cruyff shrewdly diverted attention to this spectrum, he pointed to organized and spontaneous Nunyism. That, over the decades, the environment has become Cruyffist and is anathema to Xavi (I don’t think he considers him a threat) confirms that the club remains the re-consecrated pot of crickets that inspired, they say, the way the shield.