How Barcelona became Rendició FC
Mes Que Un Club. More than a club. That’s how FC Barcelona, and its supporters, has always viewed itself. “We are more than a team of great stars, we are more than a stadium full of dreams, we are more than the goals we’ve scored and more than the trophies that we’ve won throughout our history.”
On August 14, Bayern Munich spray-painted a new word over Mes Que Un Club. The graffiti will be hard to erase in the weeks, months and years ahead. Rendició, the Catalan word for surrender, will forever be associated with this historic 8–2 thrashing. It wasn’t just the end of an era, or a final curtain call. The entire stage came crashing down. All that’s left of a once-mighty team is rubble.
Usually, there is a certain sadness associated with the decline of great institutions. But with Barcelona, there can only be smugness and some glee. If ever a team deserved such a fate, it was Barcelona. There can’t be too many who have booby-trapped their own house with such expertise and then blown it sky high.
Everything about the club, from top to bottom, is worthy of contempt. Josep Maria Bartomeu, club president since 2014, should have quit years ago, or at least had the humility to bring on board competent advisors when the rot set in several seasons ago. Those in charge of recruitment, meanwhile, have made the staff at Fawlty Towers look efficient. Players on fat-cat contracts who sleepwalked their way through the evisceration at Bayern’s hands have long forgotten what it should mean to wear that shirt. The tiny silver linings — like the exciting Ansu Fati — didn’t even start the game against Bayern.
Take a look at Barcelona’s roll call of shame in Lisbon. Lionel Messi is 33, are as Luis Suarez, Gerard Pique and Arturo Vidal. Sergio Busquets is 32, Jordi Alba 31. The average age of the team against Bayern was almost 30, and the stench of decay was inescapable.
Messi will not win the Champions League again, not unless he decides to leave the club he has been with since he arrived from Argentina at the age of 13. Barcelona have the squad to somehow wing it through a La Liga season, but Europe’s elite will rip them to shreds as Bayern did, as Liverpool and Juventus did before them. This isn’t an automobile that can be fixed with a new engine, a lick of paint and fresh tyres. It’s a total write-off.
Rumours will continue to swirl about the coach who takes over from Quique Setien, but whoever it is will either be insane or love the club so much as to overlook its current dysfunctional state. This isn’t a poisoned chalice, it’s a radioactive mess.
Years from now, when business schools study how complacency and arrogance can destroy the greatest institutions, they will offer up Barcelona 2015–2020 as Exhibit A. When they won a fourth Champions League in a decade in May 2015 — with Messi, Suarez and Neymar leading the line — it seemed like another era of dominance was imminent. Instead, they haven’t been back to the final since, watching on as Real Madrid won the trophy thrice in succession.
To pick holes in Barcelona’s decision-making, you only have to look at their headline transfers since that high watermark in 2015. The big arrival that summer was Arda Turan from Atletico Madrid. He was 28 when he signed. In 55 games across two seasons, Turan scored 15 goals. The last couple of years, before he ended his misery by signing for Galatasaray, were more notable for a hospital shooting.
In the summer of 2016, they signed Andre Gomes and Paco Alcacer from Valencia. Gomes is now at Everton, and Alcacer at Villarreal. Neither seriously threatened to be a first-team mainstay at the Camp Nou. A year later, with Neymar heading to Paris Saint-Germain for a world-record fee, Barcelona brought in Ousmane Dembele from Dortmund for 138 million Euros. A few months later, in the winter transfer window, they paid 145m Euros for Philippe Coutinho from Liverpool. Dembele has scored 19 times in 74 games across all competitions, while Coutinho’s Barcelona tally is 21 from 76 matches.
It’s no secret that Barcelona want to move Dembele on. Coutinho has spent the last season on loan at Bayern and his reluctance to celebrate his two goals against his parent club shouldn’t obscure the laughable nature of the event. In the summer of 2018, Barca signed Coutinho’s fellow Brazilian, Malcom. He’s now with Zenit in Russia. A year later, Antoine Griezmann became Barcelona’s third 120-million-Euro player. The scorer of 133 goals in 257 games with Atletico, Griezmann has managed just 15 in 48 appearances for Barca. He too will join the over-30s club next March.
There have been others too. Arthur arrived in 2018 and has now departed for Juve in exchange for the 30-year-old Miralem Pjanic. Frenkie de Jong, who illuminated the Ajax midfield, cost 75m Euros when he arrived with Griezmann and has struggled to impose himself in his new surroundings. Vidal was signed when he was 31. Paulinho cost 40m Euro at the age of 29.
Each of these players cost at least 30m Euros. Not one has had the kind of impact Suarez did when he arrived from Liverpool in 2014. It’s easy, and lazy, to point the finger at Messi and say that he can’t play with them, but surely it’s the job of the coaching and recruitment teams to augment what’s already there.
Whether it was the 3–0 losses to Juventus in 2017 and Roma a year later, or the 4–0 capitulation at Anfield in May 2019, it’s been obvious for a while that Barcelona lack both defensive steel and midfield drive. Samuel Umtiti, who came from Lyon in 2016, has gradually been sidelined. Clement Lenglet, a 2018 summer signing, wouldn’t make most people’s lists of top five centre-backs.
Liverpool used the Coutinho money to buy Virgil van Dijk, the world’s best centre-back, and Allison, one of the game’s premier goalkeepers. Fabinho cost them 39m pounds the same year (2018). Those three signings elevated them from nearly men to the best team in Europe — Atletico’s fluky win at Anfield in March doesn’t change that.
That begs questions. Why didn’t Barcelona try to buy van Dijk? Why didn’t they get Aymeric Laporte before he went to Manchester City? Have they seriously scouted Kalidou Koulibaly? Didn’t Fabinho show up on their radar? Why keep hoovering up attacking talent when the problems elsewhere were so stark? Sacking Setien isn’t going to change any of these facts.
The best-run clubs identify problem areas quickly, and act decisively. Just contrast Bayern and Barcelona in that regard. When Bayern sacked Niko Kovac in November 2019, they were just four points off top spot in the Bundesliga. They clearly felt, however, that Kovac wasn’t the man to take the club forward. But instead of going for a ‘name’ to take over, they gave the job to Hansi Flick, Kovac’s assistant who had also done eight years as Joachim’s Low №2 with the German national team.
Flick won 21 of the last 24 Bundesliga games as Bayern romped home by 13 points. And after being so thoroughly outplayed by Liverpool last season, they have once again looked the team to fear most in the Champions League. Only Manuel Neuer, Thiago, Robert Lewandowski and Thomas Muller remain from the 5–3 aggregate loss to Barcelona in the 2015 Champions League semi-final. Barca, by contrast, had six players from that tie on the field, and Ivan Rakitic on the bench.
Since then, Bayern have brought in Joshua Kimmich and Alphonso Davies as full-backs, a scintillating combination comparable to Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andrew Robertson. There have been injections of youth, pace and energy in other positions too. Despite dominating the Bundesliga, Bayern haven’t stood still.
Transfers are not an exact science. You can get them wrong. Sometimes, an obvious fit turns out to be a disaster. But to get it as consistently and disastrously wrong as Barcelona have over the past six seasons takes some doing. It isn’t just them either. Real Madrid may have won La Liga this season, but have struggled on the continental stage since Cristiano Ronaldo upped and left for Juventus.
Juve themselves bought aging players with no thought of where to accommodate them, and have paid the price for a squad as geriatric as Barcelona’s. Manchester United have been a basket case for years, though the recent acquisitions of Harry McGuire (even if overpriced) and Bruno Fernandes suggest a corner being slowly turned.
It’s fashionable to sneer at Manchester City’s petrodollars and ‘buying’ of success, as if others never did that. What it ignores is how well City have used that fortune, for the most part. They put an exceptional system in place before bringing in Pep Guardiola as manager, and though there have been a couple of missteps when it comes to signing defenders, they have largely recruited superbly. This summer, they acted on last season’s failure to replace Vincent Kompany by signing Nathan Ake from relegated Bournemouth. Leroy Sane’s exit to Bayern was assuaged by the arrival of Ferran Torres from Valencia. There will be more strengthening too before the window closes in October.
For Barcelona, the time for judicious tweaks is long gone. This is wrecking-ball time, and it will need a strong individual as coach to pull off the first steps in a rebuild. If Messi and other senior figures don’t like the changes, they should be told to pack their bags. Indulging individual whims and making marquee signings instead of necessary ones is what got the club into this pitiful state. Without a ruthless new broom, it could be years before Barcelona challenge again.
Simeone’s Time to Tear Down and Build