How Barcelona Lost Its Way

Barcelona could decline and become “the new AC Milan”

Started the decade with a Champions league final, top of club football. Playing attractive football, promoting players from La Masia. Proper way a club should be administered--this Barcelona team was winning machine, year in year out -- they would produce football that would leave fans speechless and opposition manager scratching their heads to break this team down. Not even Sir Alex Ferguson nor Jose Mourinho could do it, they did manage to win against Barca but it wasn't  pretty. Fast forward ten years everything has changed, buying players for hefty fees, youth player leaving for first team opportunities. Where did it go wrong for Barcelona?

Barcelona's crisis has been escalating at an alarming rate. La Liga and the Copa del Rey had become Barca's default, their domestic dominance taken for granted and then diminished by disappointment in Europe. Just over a year on from almost winning the treble, Barcelona  finished without a trophy of any kind for the first time in 12 years. And yet the concern is not so much the many failures of this season but the possibility they could be just the start. The board whose leadership has left Barcelona with a team seemingly neither for the present nor the future.

Rome was bad, in 2018. Barcelona had won the first leg of that quarterfinal easily, by 4-1 at Camp Nou. Few gave Roma much of a chance in the return: a chance to restore a bit of pride, maybe. But Barcelona collapsed, losing by 3-0. Anfield was worse, in 2019. Messi had been as good as his word. Barcelona had cruised to the semifinals this time, and had dismantled Liverpool on Catalan soil. Arturo Vidal, the grizzled Chilean midfielder, had promised to make a particularly personal donation to science if Barcelona did not make the final. Trent Alexander-Arnold took a corner quickly, and Barcelona buckled and broke. But this? This was something else entirely. “The bottom,” was how Gerard Piqué, almost teary, put it. The mighty Barcelona, the Barcelona of Messi and Busquets and Piqué and Suárez, in a Champions League quarterfinal conceded eight goals. It was unthinkable, unfathomable, unbearable. It was as low as they could fall. “The bottom,” was how Gerard Piqué, almost teary, put it.

This was a brutal, ruthless, surgical exposure of all that is wrong with Barcelona. There is no need to reel through that long list — the dreadful recruitment, the total absence of planning, the boardroom infighting, the negligent squandering of a legacy — but, in the space of 90 minutes on Friday, Bayern Munich laid it all bare. This is not a team that can play as it wants to, as it is meant to. It is a team that has come to the end of its line, as even Piqué alluded to afterward, when he admitted that even he will have to leave, if that is what is best for the club. It is not a team that can compete with the finest clubs in Europe any more. It should have realized that at Anfield, really, but it cannot ignore it now. It is a team that needs to be broken up. Coutinho was supposed to replace Andrés Iniesta, just as Arthur Melo was supposed to replace Xavi. Neymar, the man who would play alongside and eventually replace Messi, should be taking the lead now. But he became impatient and Barcelona were powerless to prevent him leaving in 2017. They have become locked in a spiral of loss and nostalgia ever since, desperate to make amends to the point where they tried to bring him back again but did not have the money.

Problems dominate everything, so many they cannot fit on this page.

The current incarnation of Barcelona dates to 2003 and the election of the charismatic, ambitious outsider Joan Laporta as president. He had the air, back then, of a Catalan Kennedy. He saw a need to drag the club forward. He encouraged his subordinates to come up with ideas to increase Barcelona’s flagging revenues. He wanted the team to reflect the place: not just by building the team around the talent flowering at La Masia, the club’s academy. Barcelona has continued to act in that spirit, even as the faces in charge of the club have changed. Laporta was deposed in 2010, and his successor, his onetime protégé Rosell, resigned in disgrace after he was accused of financial crimes in 2014. But in 2017 the club started an innovation hub, with the stated aim of becoming the Silicon Valley of soccer. And in 2018 it laid claim to being the first sports team to surpass $1 billion in revenue. Barcelona, slowly, made the leap from sports team to business. 

When Sandro Rosell stepped down as Barcelona president, some fans were thrilled. It signified the beginning of an honest, organized board.  But how wrong were they? It gets worse from there the board can't hide behind anything. Barcelona are falling apart, but it doesn't bother Bartomeu. Josep Maria Bartomeu asked four of his directors to resign because he didn't feel like he could trust them. Emili Rousaud was the next target, having only been appointed vice-president at the turn of the year and was originally viewed as Bartomeu's successor. There were calls for Bartomeu to resign at the Camp Nou which, luckily for the president, have been halted by football's suspension due to the coronavirus crisis. Bartomeu's aim is to stay in power until the end of his term in June 2021 and, now his distrusted directors are gone, he has the board under control.

If action's are not taken accordingly this maybe a long way for Barcelona to reach the glory days. Without proper leader at the helm, club already looks clueless in transfer-market. With no plan or strategy , they might end up like AC Milan or Manchester United.