Jen Evelyn describes how Barcelona’s recent fall from grace didn’t just happen overnight, but has been several years in the making.
If you watch the Champions League final 2011 with your eyes closed, even for a few minutes, a frequent, steady sound of the ball being passed around sets the rhythm. One pass, two pass, an olé from the crowd, another pass, one after another and so on. It goes on and on, and it doesn’t stop. That match was arguably one of the greatest exhibitions we’ve witnessed in the modern football. The absolute peak of a team polished to its prime. Triangles here, there and everywhere, positional balance adorned by some of the greatest individual talent of our time. Truly spectacular.
The Barcelona that lost to Valladolid on Saturday afternoon is a mockery of that Barcelona. Close your eyes and what you hear is a pass, a long pause, another pass and then a loud cheer by the home crowd that tells you the hosts won the ball. Open your eyes and you don’t see organized triangles, not a balanced platform nor a clear structure or a core, you see a chaos sitting near the halfway line waiting for a path to heaven to open up out of nowhere. You don’t see players that know their exact mission, you see players roaming here and there, looking confused as to where they’re supposed to be and how they’re supposed to unlock the aggressive defense blocking their way. Once they lose the ball, they’re too far away from each other to start pressing, positionally too imbalanced to win the ball back, and more often than not, forced to defend 1 on 1 with an attacker running at the defense.
It almost looks as vague as a plate of porridge, and at a quick glance it’s hard to tell exactly what’s wrong: the recipe, the quality of the ingredients, or the one stirring the pot. It looks like someone trying to break through a concrete wall with individual fist punches here and there.
“We lacked ideas and made too many mistakes”, said the coach Tata Martino right after the loss. Indeed, they did make mistakes. A total of 77 missed passes in the opponent’s half was more than ever before during the ongoing league campaign. Even the goal they conceded was clumsy, nearing an embarrassment. Even their shots were either way off target or straight at the keeper. No in-between.
If Wembley 2011 represented the peak of the Barcelona now crawling, the one seen at Nuevo Jose Zorilla along with the ones witnessed at Anoeta earlier this season, or more radically, at Allianz Arena exactly a year ago, represent the very bottom of it. In three years, Barcelona has been in a slow downhill, during the course of which they have still managed to win titles, but the downhill has inevitably become more abrupt with time and eventually left the side to look for any dry land to fall back onto.
The lack of structure in the side at present is inevitably a flaw that falls on the manager Tata Martino. The positional play seemed to take steps forward in the beginning of the season but the development hasn’t been as positive as expected. A part of it is surely down to physical issues that are hard to dodge with a squad as small as Barça’s. Pressure to win, play the “right kind of football” and keep the players fresh has undoubtedly affected Martino as well, and the manager has been seen seemingly stressed in front of the press, dodging questions about his Barcelona future. But how much of it is down to Martino, after all, or is he just a casualty?
Let’s roll the tape back to Wembley. The celebration, the praise, the press bowing down to the team’s feet and hailing it as the best ever to grace the fields of Europe. And perhaps they weren’t wrong. But one thing people in Barcelona forgot is that stalling in the world of football is an equivalent to falling behind. The Barcelona board lead by Sandro Rosell had inherited the greatest team in the club’s history, but instead of seeing it as an opportunity to cement the side’s position on top of Europe, the board saw it as an opportunity to cement the club’s brand as the greatest in the sporting world, to spread its influence across all continents, and to make Barcelona the greatest and most profitable business in the world. The business began to run the sporting project.
The glaring need to sign a center back was shrugged upon, “we did win a Champions League after all”, and according to the narrative, it turned into a glaring need to print a sponsor on the club’s jersey for the first time in its history, in order to “stabilize the club financially”.
Meanwhile in Barcelona B – the side that had brought up the likes of Busquets, Pedro, Bojan and Thiago Alcantara to the first team in the recent years – Luis Enrique left after a successful spell and the job was taken by former Barcelona player Eusebio Sacristán. Since then, the B-team has drifted further and further away from the playing style of the first team, and at the same time, has fallen deeper in the Segunda. The gap from the B-team to the first has become evident, the jump from one side to the other no longer is as effortless as it should be in order for the academy to feed its club in the ideal way. But to this day, Eusebio still has his job.
And after 2011, the downward spiral started to gain momentum. The seasons following the dream of the Wembley weren’t what was expected, Barcelona no longer was superior in comparison with its rivals and was knocked out of its throne in both Spain and Europe. The easy escape route was to blame it on lack of motivation. “These players won it all”, they said, rationalizing that they no longer had the hunger. It was too simple. But it wasn’t ever that simple.
The players Barcelona have signed after 2011 are Alexis Sanchez, Cesc Fábregas, Jordi Alba, Alex Song and Neymar. The first two were criticized a lot in their first seasons, but have slowly started to earn their spots in the team and in the big scale of things, certainly represent the future, as well as Neymar does. Jordi Alba arrived for little money and his Catalan background made him an ideal signing, but knowing the health problems of Eric Abidal and Dani Alves’ cemented spot in the team, a small, attacking fullback wasn’t exactly what Barcelona needed. Alex Song never seemed much more than a last-minute panic buy in lack of a new center back that had been hunted the whole summer, and as we now, a year later, know, the twenty million spent on the Cameroonian could probably have been spent wiser.
And how about a center back? How about a striker, the need of one Pep Guardiola already saw in 2009? How about a midfielder to take the reigns from Xavi? What perhaps speaks the most volumes about the abysmal investments made in the team since 2011 is the fact that Thiago Alcantara, the club’s very own answer to the problems related to Xavi’s aging, the perfect (and cheap!) replacement, the example of how well the club’s own academy had filled up for the need of the 1st team, was let go of for no more than twenty million. The same amount that was paid for Alex Song a year earlier. And as it all happened so easily, one is left to wonder whether Thiago’s value to the club’s future was ever really even grasped. Whether the board really even knew what was going on.
Today, although ex-president Sandro Rosell stepped down, his board now lead by Josep Maria Bartomeu still continues. The last weeks have been spent presenting the new stadim remodeling project, “Espai Barça”, and it still remains unclear whether there will be a new presidential election in the summer or whether the current board will indeed continue until 2016 as announced upon Rosell’s resignation.
So after all, the mess that Barcelona currently is on the field is no more a mess than the one in the boardrooms. Should a new board be named in the summer, a new coach would most likely arrive as well to take Tata Martino’s position. Considering this, how surprising can it be that the Argentine feels uncomfortable talking about his future to the press, or that he feels stressed and tired under the circumstances he himself has not created?
Back on the pitch, much of the issues can be explained with a look back in the past. Against Valladolid, Barcelona’s positional play looked much like a disorganized chaos, and to the Catalans’ shock, they in fact lost the battle in the midfield where the game, too, was lost. To react to this, Martino dropped Leo Messi in the midfield behind a front three of Alexis, Pedro and Neymar (and later Cristian Tello) and tried to cover up for the lack of precision play in the midfield. As result, like so many times when Messi has dropped deep, Barcelona lost their reference point up top and looked toothless in attack.
How long is all this Martino’s fault? The lack of investments in the sporting project has been overshadowed by the individual brilliance from time to time, but as the issues become more and more evident and opponents evolve at the same time, there’s only so much the likes of Messi, Iniesta and Neymar alone can do. And in the long run, such irresponsibility leads to wasting what is arguably one of the most talented generations in Barcelona’s history.
Not even the greatest diamonds shine without polishing, even the strongest metals rust without proper care, and even the strongest of forces weaken with time if they’re left to starve without feeding them the proper fuel. And that is a lesson that could prove costly for Barcelona, who crumble in desperate need of changes, starting from the men in the boardroom.
No comments:
Post a Comment