More than a decade ago they let me into the treasure cave. I was a young journalist, who had just settled in Johannesburg with more desire than head and I received a call from Verne Harris, head of the memory center of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Weeks before he had interviewed him and Harris, who was almost sixty, wanted to send a message to a boy who was the age of his children. “We are putting order to Madiba’s memories, come take a look.”
I suddenly appeared in Vietnam. The foundation’s archives were filled with hundreds of cardboard boxes and items of all kinds. On top of a table, a wrinkled Argentine national team jersey dedicated to Maradona rested alongside dozens of paintings, letters and some old boots, which Madiba had used in his clandestine military training in North Africa.
As I helped Harris move some boxes, the archivist told me stories about the anti-apartheid hero’s leadership. Madiba, as he wrote in his memoirs, assured that a good leader is like a shepherd who remains behind the flock and allows the most agile to go ahead, without realizing that they are being directed from behind. But Mandela demanded more: when some danger approaches, a wild beast, a storm or a cliff next to a narrow path, the shepherd must stand in front and defend and direct the group.
The beasts are already stalking Barça. Struck by economic hardships, the probable arrival of Mbappé to Real Madrid suggests that the whites are going to form a team with the makings of legend. The French star would share the grass with Vinícius, Bellingham, Valverde, Rodrigo, Tchouaméni, Camavinga, Brahim or Endrick. What scares you the most? That the oldest of them is only 25 years old.
Faced with a danger of such magnitude, the culé team needs a coach without fear of facing the storm. A leader.
Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp, who has announced a sabbatical year, could fit that profile if he felt like giving up his year off in exchange for getting into the heart of a hurricane. Barça, with hardly any room to make important signings, needs a coach who will not bow down to the typhoon winds. There are not so many. Beyond contrasting characters such as Luis Enrique, Arteta or Tuchel, new talents appear from the board such as the leader of Leverkusen, Xabi Alonso, although his white past and soldier of Mourinho makes him a perhaps impossible option. Then there is another impossible leader: the best in history and who is also a culé, Pep Guardiola.
Nelson Mandela’s most famous quote is a Blaugrana wish today. “It always seems impossible until it is achieved,” said the South African hero. Barça, more than ever, needs the impossible.
