It was a little under eight hours until kick-off and Joan Laporta had come from Munich cathedral.
“You have to have faith,” he said, heading into Käfer restaurant and out of the snow, but faith is not enough.
And although they had always suspected as much, it still hurt when the inevitable happened. Barcelona’s president had asked his players to show “pride” and “dignity”, to demonstrate “who they are”.
As it turned out, who they are is a team no longer able to compete with the best. “That’s our reality and it really pisses me off,” Xavi Hernández said.
Maybe that’s been the case for a while. Theirs feels like a footballing obituary written many times before, a chronicle foretold if not always heeded and not always finished.
Each episode emerges from the last, The End not actually the end, always further to fall: the former coach Ernesto Valverde refers to how "the disaster of the previous year returned" at Anfield in 2019 and five years of Champions League elimination presents a list in crescendo: Barcelona beaten 3-0 in Turin, 3-0 in Rome, 4-0 in Liverpool, 8-2 by Bayern Munich and 4-1 by Paris Saint Germain.
This is different in not being a moment’s collapse – those weren’t either, not entirely – and may not be so immediately traumatic, given that it’s the hope that kills you and that beneath the surface optimism there wasn’t too much of that.
Yet it “hurt”, Sergio Busquets said, and it’s not going away. Ronald Araújo called it “a pity” and it may be the worst of the eliminations, the final point in a relentless regression. In terms of where they actually are, it certainly is the worst and they recognise that now, which is at least the first step.
Many more remain.
For the first time in 20 years, Barcelona have not qualified from the Champions League group stage. They have been beaten twice by Bayern, 3-0 each time and without the German club turning the screw.
“If we had pressed, we could have scored more,” Julian Nagelsmann said, a little apologetically. “It was fun,” Leroy Sané said, which seemed to say a lot.
“It was a big margin and it could have been bigger,” Araújo admitted. Laporta said the players had given “everything they had, and more”. The worrying thing is that he is probably right.
When they were beaten by Bayern in the first game, lining up in a way that appeared aimed only at limiting the damage, the then coach, Ronald Koeman, had talked about being realistic. Afterwards, Gerard Piqué had used the phrase repeated ever since: “es lo que hay”. It is what it is. “We are who we are,” he had added. He insisted the line had been taken out of context, that he had been referring to the absentees – Ansu Fati, Sergio Agüero, Ousmane Dembélé –but it stuck, a judgment on the whole thing.
Watershed moment
Koeman’s realism slipped into fatalism, serving to undermine his team, perhaps even providing an excuse to hide behind. His replacement, Xavi, had consciously sought to break from that discourse, offering optimism instead; offering a different approach too, one projected as a search for lost identity but one that has not had time to take shape and may not have the materials to do so fully. Wednesday night, though, echoed what came before.
“It’s our reality and we have to face it with dignity,” he said.
It is inescapable, after all. This was just another watershed moment among so many; the hope will be that it can be the last. It is not just, or not even, that Barcelona had been beaten twice by Bayern. That can happen.
It is that they were so comfortably beaten, that in Xavi’s words they had not competed, that they conceded six and didn’t score, and that they failed to get out of a group that also included Benfica and Dynamo Kyiv, that it is 20 years since they were knocked out this early. That they are 16 points off the top domestically. This is a result from another age, another reality.
Over the past decade Barcelona have scored 11, 16, 15, 15, 20, nine, 14, nine and 16 group stage goals. This time they have scored two. Twenty-seven players have scored more and three times as many goals have come from players not even trying to score, own goals more common than theirs.
The 27 include Lionel Messi and Antoine Griezmann, both of whom they lost for free, a crisis with very real tangible consequences. Messi has five in this season's competition, Griezmann four. Messi scored 38 last season, 219 over five years. Before them Luis Suárez and Neymar departed too.
What is left, to use Piqué’s words, is what there is and who they are, a gradual diminishing of a team that were great once. Yet goals are just one, simplistic measurement of what is wrong, of where they are. Of their reality. So is the team list which, while it contains expensive and unproductive players they can ill afford, also still includes significant talent and an emerging generation that excites. If their strongest XI is not that good, nor should it be that bad.
An analysis was offered by their opponents – Thomas Müller said Barcelona had the technique but not the intensity to play at the highest level; Nagelsmann noted “a pile of debt that drags them [down]” - and there are multiple elements to the equation, although finances stand at the centre. “
We got ourselves into this mess,” Busquets said. “There are lots of factors that lead us to this. We all know the situation at the club.”
Profound crisis
This is a club slowly broken from the top, the previous president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, building a portfolio of failures that could fill many pages, the new administration inheriting a profound crisis at almost every level that has just got deeper.
A crisis that, for all the doubts about the new regime’s handling of it on the one hand or all the optimism on the other, has no easy fix. For all that Xavi comes with clear ideas, credibility and a determination and authority to act that deepened on Wednesday night, a long road lies ahead. Stories of big, transformative signings, to cite the simplest example, are largely something to laugh at.
All the more so now. Barcelona had budgeted for Champions League progression: missing out on the last 16 costs them €9.6m, missing out in the quarters a further €10.6m, money they can’t afford to lose. Even if they were to win the Europa League, it would be worth only €14.9m.
And, beyond the fact that Xavi said they had to return the club to its rightful place “and that’s not the Europa League”, beyond debates about whether dropping into the continent’s second competition could be good for them and their best chance of returning to the Champions League, who says this team would win it? There are already three better teams in the competition – and that’s just from Spain.
“A new era starts here,” Xavi said.
What it holds, who knows, but an old one finally ended here too, if it hadn’t already.
– Guardain
