Ernesto Valverde’s joy celebrating the Copa del Rey has a culé derivative. He is the same coach that a few years ago we defined as sad. It was a nuanced sadness. More than sad, Valverde is a man who prefers the appearance of seriousness to populist enthusiasm. He also has an inner life and a curiosity that, as a photographer, drives him to capture the world from a lucidity that is more realistic than bucolic or sugary. That’s why it’s exciting to see him smile and celebrate a victory that he has earned with the same rigor that he tried to use at Barça. It couldn’t be because the team was going through a moment of complacency, with structural dependencies and Sicilian hierarchies that Valverde couldn’t – nor 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 person who was fired who made the job of dismissal easier for them. The day after tomorrow, Valverde, who belongs to the multitudinous category of adopted culés, will want Barça to beat PSG.
Luis Enrique, on the other hand, is a converted culé. He also left Barça after a period in which he realized that they did not let him do everything he wanted. On the day of his presentation, he announced that he was adding a psychologist to the technical team and immediately stressed that it was for him, not for the players. It was an irony that reality ended up confirming, because Luis Enrique had to square the circle: manage the brilliant success of the famous trident – ??Neymar, Suárez, Messi – and, at the same time, exploit a style of communication with the famous environment that He alternated flashes of totally justified sarcasm with diatribes of a severity inappropriate among adults. The day after tomorrow, he has already announced that if he loses against Barça, at least he will have lost against his team. If Schuster ever said that when he coached Madrid…
Xavi is the total culé: by birth, by vocation and by destiny. He knows the club so much that he has 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 elections that calmed the fury of hypertrophied uncertainty. Since he announced that he would end his contract on June 30 and that he would work to compete in the meantime, the team has improved. And the deferred strategy has helped him live without so much stress, with the satisfaction of having opened a new space for emotional engineering. In the cursed realm of rumors, 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 for 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 aware of how the result is interpreted. This time he won’t be alone. For days now, the converted culés, of adoption, birth and destination have done nothing more than share diverse and contradictory speculations about the result.
