Barcelona: the end of an era?
For a long time now, Barcelona have been “the darlings of football romantics everywhere”, said Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday. With their spellbinding way of playing, they have “stood for something beautiful and magical”. But the club’s 8-2 thrashing by Bayern Munich in the Champions League quarter-finals has brought all that to an end. This was more than just a defeat: like Brazil’s 7-1 loss to Germany at the 2014 World Cup, it marked “the defrocking of an ideal”. Barça have suffered Champions League humiliations before, said Rory Smith in The New York Times. Just last year, they lost 4-0 to Liverpool in the second leg of the semi-finals. “But this? This was something else entirely.” It amounted to a “brutal, ruthless, surgical exposure of all that is wrong” with Barcelona.
During the club’s “halcyon days of a decade ago”, when Pep Guardiola was manager, there was a Barcelona way of doing things, said Ian Hawkey in The Sunday Times. Most positions were filled by graduates of the side’s legendary academy, La Masia, where the philosophy of “elegant pass-and-move” was embedded in their DNA. Among those home-grown footballers were Lionel Messi, Xavi and Andrés Iniesta – some of the best players of their time, or indeed any time. But that well of talent has dried up, because La Masia has become “a sort of piggy-bank out of which young players are quickly sold”. At the same time,
Barcelona’s recruitment has been “terrible”, said Dermot Corrigan on The Athletic. In the five years since they last won the Champions League, they have spent more than s800m on some 30 signings, and ended up with the highest payroll in world sport. But too many of those players were illsuited to Barça’s style of play, and not one of them has established himself as a “first-team leader”. Their most expensive signing, Philippe Coutinho (who cost £142m) isn’t even at the club – he’s currently on loan to Bayern, and scored their seventh and eighth goals last week. Meanwhile, the “spine of the team” against Bayern – Messi, Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets, Luis Suárez – are all in their 30s. Of those players, only Messi is still anywhere near his best – and there’s now speculation that he may leave the club.
What has happened to Barcelona is “the potential fate of all superclubs”, said Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian. By “swatting aside most domestic opposition” – Barça have won the Spanish title in three of the last five seasons, and finished second this year – they find themselves “insulated from reality”. But when they finally face decent opponents in the Champions League, their “incoherence and complacency” is exposed. The club have now sacked their manager, Quique Setién, and have replaced him with Ronald Koeman, but that won’t stop the rot. They need to “tear it all down and start again”.