Xavi, Barça and what did you expect, really? Fantasyland?
It’s been about a thousand years since Xavi arrived, borne into the manager’s cauldron on a carpet of hopes, dreams and notions of “right way” ness, mixed with some “mes que” ness. Today, FC Barcelona sits in eighth place in the Liga table, and contemplating a new life playing on Thursdays in the Europe League.
So what happened?
Well, reality. But let’s go back a ways to understand fully how we got here. It all began with Sandro Rosell deciding he wanted to win a dick-measuring contest with his Genius Manager. So he sold Txigrinski, and put a lock on transfers, claiming that a club that couldn’t afford color copies assuredly couldn’t afford any kinda fancy squad revamps.
One weepy-eyed presser later, a Genius who saw the writing on the wall said goodbye, and Tito Vilanova was named his successor. This was a good thing, until bad things started to happen. Vilanova revved up the attack, advancing the idea of 444 perfect little passes to something more dynamic, more vertical. And quite interestingly, a style that wouldn’t be out of place in today’s football.
Then came tragedy.
Along with the unspeakable sadness came stagnation. Jordi Roura led to the caretaking of Tata Martino, before Luis Enrique the heretic entered the fray. He quite pragmatically decided that with the three best attackers in the game, whyever would anyone mess about with the ball in the midfield for an iota longer than they had to? Get the ball to the horses. And he won a “bad” treble, politically but also tactically as his middle name should have been officially changed to “Where’s the midfield?”
Then came Ernesto Valverde, the exact right manager for that exact moment. They said to him, “Uh, you can have Paulinho.” And he went into the garage and a few days later, out rolled a tank. Won a domestic double, really should have got a treble except for that lost night in Rome.
Valverde being moved on at the end of that season was never going to happen, but it should have, because Mr. Fix-It Man had a limited shelf life. But if you’re going to do that, then you also need to advance (read: overhaul) the team. Otherwise, you keep Mr. Fix-It Man. They didn’t.
The lingering complexity with Valverde is that fixing things doesn’t mean making things better, nor does it mean advancing anything. So Barça functionally stopped advancing tactically with Vilanova took ill. You keep the same players because why change anything when you don’t know what you’re doing? Valverde became Setien became Koeman became Xavi. Every one of them talked about how they wanted to do things, but any way is limited by available personnel.
More crucially, it’s all limited by the way the club and its related entorno thinks about football. There is still this ridiculous idea that if you play the right way, results will come. It’s ridiculous, archaic and rooted in the idea that the “We Color Football” folks also solved football back in 2009. But as with any moving target, that solution was only temporary. Everybody shifted to meet the new threat, but Barça didn’t. And here we are, and here Xavi is.
We have no idea what kind of a manager he is yet, because his options are limited and limiting. Better would have been to have him come in summer, with his own transfers, rather than taking over Koeman’s group. I mean, what might have happened under Koeman? The club struggling to make the Champions League spots, and playing in Europa League? Uh …
Any notions of anything assessing Xavi is ludicrous. But anyone who doesn’t note that his team has put in performances that would have gotten Koeman run out of town on a rail, would be doing reality a disservice. It’s still kids and geezers. It’s impossible to play the right way, even if that way was still viable, because that group can’t play, period. Better teams don’t allow Barça to play. Benfica controlled and dictated that Champions League match to get the exact result they needed. Betis controlled, Bayern dominated.
Xavi is a manager new to European football, tasked with making something of nothing, something old, something new, something borrowed, something Blaugrana. That he isn’t succeeding at that task should surprise no one, even as people aren’t asking the right questions. Frenkie De Jong is the latest question to come up, and why isn’t he playing well, etc, etc, blablabla. In the same breath, many of the same people are alleging that Busquets has “still got it,” without fully comprehending the incompatibility of those two notions. It’s just one example. The best De Jong isn’t possible with Busquets.
Barça also have the worst fullbacks of any big European club, another thing that limits how the team can play. It also has a limited back line, still being led by a Gerard Pique who is increasingly prone to panic and making poor decisions under pressure.
All of which is to say that we don’t know whether Xavi is the right manager, but we can find the reasons that he was hired suspect. “Getting the band back together” is no way to run a football club. It’s got the right vibes, and the Laporta presidency has been all about vibes, except for when it was time to kick a club icon out. But vibes is no way to run a railroad, or a football club.
More crucially, until Barça dispenses with this ridiculous fixation on the past, the present will be impossible and the future doomed. Every last big club in Europe, along with a great many not-so-big clubs, is capable of running Barça off the pitch. Changing personnel without changing tactics leads to the same complexities, so what next, aside from Europa League?
In many ways, finishing outside the top four in La Liga wouldn’t be a bad thing for the club. Something has to happen to shake things up, to make people in power think about different ways, that maybe we should be thinking about how we do things, and our assurance that the Right Way beckons. Maybe.
Or maybe Barça will just keep having small, slow, technically gifted players bounce off of big, fast, technically gifted opponents, and hope for magic that will never come as a long road back is made to stretch toward a bleak horizon by dogmatism and misguided nostalgia.