Philippe Coutinho looked embarrassed but nowhere near as embarrassed as Barcelona were, shame burning inside. There was a hint of pity as he stood gazing down at Gerard Piqué and Clément Lenglet, both on their knees, and feebly, apologetically raised a hand. A glimpse perhaps of the horrible realisation dawning – on loan from the Camp Nou, this is what the Bayern Munich midfielder has to go back to – there was something sorrowful in the gesture, symbolic too. “Now we really have hit rock bottom,” Piqué said a few minutes later.
At half-time on Friday’s historic humiliation at the hands of Bayern, a camera peering through Barcelona’s dressing room door revealed Lionel Messi sitting, staring at the floor in silence. Leaning against the frame was Marc-André ter Stegen, watching people walk past. It was just a moment, sure, no more than a snapshot, but Messi looked defeated, broken. Four-one down, there was no rebellion to lead and no way back – not in Lisbon, anyway. The question now may be whether there’s any way back at all. And if this is The End, how to begin again.
Early in the second half Luis Suárez scored his first away goal in the Champions League for five years, but it was no bugle call and of no concern to Bayern, who added a fifth and a sixth. Then came the seventh, scored by the most expensive player in Barcelona’s history. The second most expensive, Antoine Griezmann, had started on the bench. The third, Ousmane Dembélé, didn’t get on at all. And then Coutinho did it again.
Between them, they have cost more than €350m already and there will be more. Coutinho is not the first loan player to score against the team that owns him and there is no great shame in that, but if he wins the Champions League with Bayern, Barcelona will reportedly owe Liverpool €5m more. The Champions League victory clause attached to his €120m-plus-€40m move from Anfield – a move that happened six months later than they wanted – did not specify that it had to be for them. If true, they’re effectively paying him to beat them, which would be so very Barcelona somehow; his goals were a suitably pitiful end.
A predictable one, too. Barcelona have not finished a season without a trophy for 12 years, before Pep Guardiola came. In February, Messi warned that they were not good enough to win the European Cup. This was the heaviest defeat they have suffered since 1946 but it was not a one-off, nor a freak occurrence. Given the depth of their problems, the surprise might have been that Barcelona got this far. Messi had warned that, carry on as they were and they wouldn’t beat Napoli and victory only postponed the pain, which many suspected it would.
“[Reality] can’t be hidden any more,” Piqué said after the Bayern defeat when he spoke and Messi did not. “[It was] a horrible game, a terrible feeling … shameful – that’s the word.”
Piqué spoke for barely a minute and a half, slowly, quietly, but with a clarity and an honesty that laid bare the crisis. “You can’t compete like this, you can’t go around Europe like this,” he said. “It wasn’t good enough in Europe and now it’s not even good enough in the league. It’s not the first time, or the second, or even the third.” Four-nil in Paris, 3-0 in Turin, 3-0 in Rome, 4-0 in Liverpool and now this.
Barcelona have not won the competition since 2015, Messi’s prime years gone. He’s 33 now and must wonder what he has done to deserve this. That might be a more pertinent question than it appears, the question of his culpability being raised now. And yet real blame must be directed above. If a weak president and his directors did all they could to make Messi happy, as is often claimed, they achieved the opposite. The relationship between dressing room and boardroom is broken. There is no trust and it is no wonder.
Since 2015, Barcelona have spent almost €1bn on 29 signings. It’s not a reach to suggest that, for many reasons from a lack of opportunity and time to a lack of fortune, ability or character, not one has been an unqualified success. In 2017 they lost Neymar, not just a player but their succession plan. Made desperate by his departure, publicly weakened and humiliated, the €222m PSG paid for him has been thrown away. They tried desperately to replace him, to the point where they tried to buy him back – but had no money to do so. “I don’t know if they have done everything they can to sign him,” Messi said.
Their wage bill is the biggest on the planet, transfer fees tossed about and new contracts gifted, spiralling into a situation in which at the end of June, as the financial year closed, they swapped Arthur Melo for Miralem Pjanic. Supposedly two separate sales, the deal was nothing to do with football and everything to do with money, designed to rescue the board from responsibility for failing to fulfil the budget, the accountancy more creative than the players.
On Friday, Arthur was not available – pushed out initially against his will, he refused to play having been sold. Quique Setién, who had resisted pressure from the board to ostracise him, could not use him. He chose not to use Riqui Puig, Ansu Fati or Dembélé, or lacked the autonomy and authority to do so. In the final minutes of the match, if it can be called that, the man who came because four other men said no, stood with arms stretched across the bench like a man crucified, which he will be. Another one sacrificed, he noted afterwards that he has only been there six months, an inescapable fact some will try to escape.
Piqué wasn’t one of them. “I hope some good comes of this,” he said. “I think the club needs changes and I’m not talking about the manager or the players; I don’t want to highlight anybody. I think structurally the club need changes of all types. No one is irreplaceable: if we need new blood to change course, then I’m the first to go, to leave it. We all have to reflect decide what is best for the club, for Barcelona, because that’s the most important thing.”
Setién will be the first, Piqué knows. He will not survive. He will be gone by Monday morning, in fact. Nor, in all probability, will Eric Abidal, already the fourth sporting director in five years, a man employed for the wrong reasons and unpopular within the very dressing room he was supposed to reach. Many players will not survive, either. Or at least that is the plan. Nor should the president Josep Maria Bartomeu – make no mistake that is part of what Piqué was getting at – but while he is under pressure to resign he resists for now.
Next summer there will be elections and Bartomeu cannot stand. The man he prepared as his successor was among six directors who resigned during lockdown, a continuity candidate no longer clear. Even if Bartomeu does bring elections forward, the likelihood is that would be to spring 2021: that way, there will be time to seek a way of balancing the books and protect the outgoing board from liability when a new regime takes over. That way, he will proclaim publicly, there is time to restructure. To start over again.
Bartomeu insisted on Friday that some decisions had already been taken, but declined to reveal them. Barcelona’s average age against Bayern was 29 years and 329 days. And while focus on age is perhaps a red herring, they do have a tired, indulged squad. Parallels have been drawn to 2008 when Guardiola arrived insisting that Deco and Ronaldinho had to go, but real change requires a shift in culture and demands an imagination, determination, conviction and energy it is unclear this board has. It takes resources and they lack a plan of which there is little real evidence.
Bartomeu’s original preference for coach was Mauricio Pochettino, who once said he would rather go and work on a farm than manage Barcelona – which is why some board members are warning the president off. The former Spurs manager must also consider if this is the time or place, aware that presidential elections might condition and curtail his stay. Xavi Hernández turned Barcelona down in the winter, and has linked his future to Víctor Font, the leading opposition candidate. “There’s a lot of noise and non-sporting issues,” Xavi said. Ronald Koeman had already said no before, but new conversations have begun now.
Whoever comes it in will want to know the tools they have, the squad suddenly exposed. Revolutionary ideas form – sudden visions of a new generation, a whole new team. Messi must lead the kids rather than cling to the old guard, it is said. But does he want to? Only four, maybe five players are considered untouchable by the club and, while there is some wavering for the first time, Messi is one of them. But his contract expires next year and he is in no hurry – still less under Bartomeu. Ter Stegen is another and, the 11th best-paid player in the squad, unimpressed at so much of what he sees inside, he is also undecided.
How much commitment do you really have with the kids? Patience is a virtue but Barcelona, like all super-clubs, don’t have the time. So, you buy, but how do you pay for Lautaro Martínez, say? It’s easy to target departures, draw up blacklists, and feed headlines, but making it happen is another matter, as Barcelona have found repeatedly. And if you don’t get players out, you can’t get players in. Who wants Semedo, Junior, and Umtiti? How do you find a place for Suárez at €15m (£13.6m) a year, Busquets (€9.36m), Alba (€5.2m), Vidal (€8.58m), or Rakitic (€7.8m)? What do you do with Dembélé, on €9m? Or even with Griezmann?
As for Coutinho, after a year on loan because they couldn’t sell him last summer, Barcelona had hoped to succeed this time, clinging to the Premier League’s largesse. But like everything at a club whose weakness is now notorious, collapsing into crisis, the only certainty is that they won’t get the €160m he cost and it’s possible they won’t get anything at all. Perhaps they’ll keep him. He is, after all, the only person at Barcelona to emerge from Friday night with any credit, the last man left standing in Lisbon.
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