Ernesto Valverde’s joy celebrating the Copa del Rey has a dark side. He is the same coach that we defined as sad a few years ago. It was a sadness with nuances. More than sad, Valverde is a man who loves the appearance of seriousness more than populist enthusiasm. He also has an inner life and a curiosity that, as a photographer, pushes him to capture the world from a more naturalistic lucidity than bucolic or sugary. That is why it is exciting to see him smile and celebrate a victory that has been won with the same rigor that he tried to use at Barça. It was not possible because the team was living a moment of barracks complacency, with structural dependencies and Sicilian hierarchies that Valverde could not – or even wanted – to combat. Legend has it that those who had to fire him were so cowardly that in the end it had to be the fired person who eased the trance of dismissal. The day after tomorrow, Valverde, who belongs to the multitudinous category of adoptive parents, will want Barça to win against PSG.
Luis Enrique, on the other hand, is a converted culer. He also left Barça after a period in which he found that they did not let him do everything he wanted. On the day of the presentation, he announced that he was adding a psychologist to the coaching staff and immediately stressed that it was for him, not the players. It was an irony that reality ended up confirming, because Luis Enrique had to square the circle: manage the glittering success of the famous trident – ??Neymar, Suárez, Messi – and, at the same time, exploit a style of communication with the famous environment which alternated between moments of fully justified fleeting sarcasm with diatribes of an inappropriate severity between adults. The day before yesterday, he already announced that if he loses against Barça, he will at least have lost against his team. If that’s what Schuster got to say when he was coaching Madrid…
Xavi is the total culer: by birth, vocation and destiny. He knows the club so well that he even surprised us with the contribution of the deferred resignation strategy. Josep Maria Bartomeu also used it, when, to put out an apparently catastrophic fire, he announced an election that calmed the fury of an exaggerated uncertainty. Since he announced that he would retire on June 30 and that in the meantime he would work to compete, the team has improved. And the deferred strategy has helped him to live without so much pressure, with the satisfaction of having opened up a new space for emotional engineering. In the cursed realm of rumours, it is said that if he leaves, he could end up at Ajax, with Jordi Cruyff as technical director. It would be pure poetic justice: Cruyff’s son and one of Van Gaal’s sons together in a project that would consolidate an ecumenical proposal of Dutch football identity. The day after tomorrow, Xavi will be, of all the coaches in the world, the one who will most want his team to win and, at the same time, the one who will be most dependent on how the result is interpreted. This time he won’t be alone. It’s been days since the converts, adoption, birth and destiny culers do nothing more than share various and contradictory speculations about the result.
