The incontinence of Laporta, just as voracious at meal time as at work, a man of life and also a lively man, blinded by wanting to fix a years-old matter in a second, and the impatience of Xavi, eager to know what would happen to him. a future that he no longer controlled despite feeling that he is the repository of the essence of Barcelona fans, caused an outcome that was both expected and inopportune, more than anything because it occurred on the eve of the final of the Women’s Champions League in San Mamés. The common good no longer counts when egos such as that of the president and the coach are placed at the extremes, both trapped by the rush in a team that distinguished itself by pause and mastery of space and time, aspects sublimated by Cruyff and later Guardiola and denounced before in times of emergencies by Menotti.
Xavi did not know how to be the coach of Barça after being recognized as the captain of the team that won the Champions League in 2015. The best footballers of a club have not necessarily been its best coaches, as can be seen in Xavi, whose dismissal does not mean that he is a bad coach, but rather that he did not know how to resist the pressure and responsibility of sitting on the Barça bench. Being a Barcelona player does not exempt anyone from having to prove their knowledge as a coach, especially in a team that insists on its aspirations of reconquering the Champions League. Not even the conquest of the last League has served as a safe passage for Xavi to experience the club’s 125th anniversary on the bench of the new Camp Nou, which still does not know when it will be inaugurated, a circumstance that forces him to continue in Montjuïc.
The Barcelona coach, who was still the coach until this Sunday in Seville, has assumed so many functions as a Barcelona player in a moment of general misrule that he forgot to act as a coach and, therefore, to mark distances with the fans and also with Laporta’s board. It’s a bad thing when skills are mixed and you no longer have to knock on the door to enter the different offices simply because everyone feels blessed to be Barça fans. Familiarity and proximity are bad company when distance and professionalism are required to get the diagnosis and solution right, which does not necessarily happen with an exercise in nostalgia summarized in the banner “Want to see you again” that Laporta hung very close to the Bernabéu. .
Xavi has been conditioned more by his own environment than by the Barcelona player and his ambition to save Barcelona was more powerful than his ambition to respond to the position of Barça coach. The rescue was a challenge that the president took on as soon as he returned to the Camp Nou. Xavi, in this sense, has not had the leadership or the charisma to compete with Laporta, but rather he has been used as another victim of the post-Messi era, surely as harsh as that of the postcruyffism and of the dekubalization, a term coined by the father of the Barça story Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Xavi has wasted too much time in identifying the conspirators or those who want him ill – with the excuse that no one will achieve the glory of Cruyff or Guardiola – than in gaining in adversity the necessary charisma to lead the dilapidated Barça from La Masia.
Used as a bag for Laporta’s blows, such that he was a pardon for the condemnation of anonymity or Qatar’s waiting room, Xavi has not been able to protect himself, to be a shield for himself, since that day of the 3-5 against the Villarreal when he announced a delayed resignation – until June 30 – that was assumed by Laporta not because he believed in the coach but in the legendary figure of Barça. The misunderstandings did not stop happening since then, until a false coexistence was concluded, forced more by necessity than by conviction that did not last even a month, due to the lack of trust, especially on the part of Laporta. Xavi has suffered the same fate as Koeman in a club where decisions are made at the wrong time and are already threatening to reach a president who returned in 2021.
Now it is no longer enough for Laporta to improvise, nor to invoke nostalgia and the intangibles of the club, nor even to feed on the conflict, often expressly generated, but he needs to apply common sense, delimit responsibilities and know that to be more that a club must first know what it means to be a club, something also forgotten with the move from Camp Nou to Montjuïc.
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