I think it was during program 330 The Cassock (for a few years now the most influential podcast with the greatest capacity for penetration among the less orthodox Barça fan), when Andreu Juanola, its beautiful presenter, assured that in no way could there be a glimpse of hostile treatment towards Dembélé on his return to Barcelona . “I, no,” he said briefly and in a neutral tone to distance himself from any predisposition to revenge, just the typical contempt for not showing appreciation. The next day, as the Frenchman headed towards the bench with the job done and Barça virtually eliminated from the Champions League, the television cameras focused on Juanola himself in the stands, standing and enraged, while he vented all his anger. podcaster about poor Dembélé, who took advantage of the walk to thank the storm with smiles and applause.
It is not easy to determine when the love between Dembélé and the Barça club was broken, assuming that something similar ever existed. To talk about Barça as a whole is to talk about millions of people incapable of unifying criteria except on rare occasions. Like on Tuesday, for example, when PSG were eliminated against Dortmund and we all thought that the Frenchman was still a bad deal for our interests even so long later. Their Russian roulette football was one of the last burning nails to hold onto to avoid a new global catastrophe, the umpteenth collective surrender, another European Cup in Real Madrid’s showcases. But the bullet appeared too soon, like the Gordo of Christmas in 2004, and any hope of redemption was immediately cut short, perhaps forever.
This Dembélé, bizarre and clueless, represents everything bad about modern Barça: a club ruined by pure improvisation, by intuition and lacking counterweights, especially in the sporting area. Do you know of any other entity in the world capable of almost going bankrupt just a few months after collecting the record transfer fee in the history of professional sports and announcing the highest level of income that has ever been seen in a football club? Well, this is the Barça of the collective delirium that invested in the transfers of Ousmane Dembélé, Philippe Coutinho and Antoine Griezmann the equivalent of half the money that, today, the entire Espai Barça costs.
Nobody knows for sure what the future could hold for the Catalan club, which looks out of the corner of its eye towards that small town of Lugo, I don’t remember the name, which the lottery showered with millions and problems more than a decade ago: money and luck If administered in fits and starts, they always end in a curse. And meanwhile, in Madrid, the white fans await the arrival of Kylian Mbappé without his team having stopped competing in Europe for a single season in recent years, subscribed to the semifinals of the highest continental competition for a cost much lower than of shooting himself in the foot and bandaging the wound with YouTube filigrees.
“He doesn’t know how to speak!” Messi told Mateu Lahoz one day when he insisted on expelling Ousmane Dembélé for protesting. That scene perfectly summarized everything that was to come, everything that seemed impossible to us at that moment, everything that we refused to accept, yet, as our next destiny. This is the final legacy of the best Barça in history… And no head has yet been born to illuminate, even close to, the worst.
You can follow The USA Print in Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
_
