Barcelona’s worst ever defeat in Europe, an 8-2 mauling at the hands of Bayern Munich, will signal the end of Quique Setien as coach but it feels like the end of more than that.
Setien may not even
survive the weekend but the fact a second sacking in eight months would be the
least of Barca’s worries says it all.
“It’s too soon to
say if I will continue or not and it doesn’t depend on me,” said Setien.
“The club needs
changes,” said Gerard Pique. “Nobody is untouchable, least of all me. Fresh
blood is needed to change this. We’ve hit rock bottom.”
Lionel Messi was
supposed to win it alone, the Argentinian charged with somehow masking the
failings of an entire club against the most formidable team in Europe.
It was a desperate
hope, swiftly dashed by a ruthless Bayern side, whose demolition exposed
Barcelona’s ageing team for what Messi has been saying all along: they are
simply not good enough.
He said it in
February and again in July, when a rant in the aftermath of handing Real Madrid
the title turned into a brutal, but honest, assessment of their season.
Messi saw the fall
coming but it was too late to do anything about it and the question now is
whether he wants to be part of the process of recovery and renewal.
Most have assumed
it would take something cataclysmic for Messi to leave but at an elite football
club, what could be worse than this?
This was more
painful than the capitulations against Roma and Liverpool, when carelessness
and fragility deprived Barcelona of a genuine chance to lift the Champions
League trophy.
But they were
shocks because Barca were contenders. This time, nobody expected them to beat
Bayern. Many expected a thrashing but few could have predicted the severity of
it.
The humiliations
started in the fourth minute and kept coming until the 89th.
They began even
before kick-off when the starting line-ups were announced, with three Barca
signings bought for more than 100 million euros each all sitting on the
bench.
One of them,
Philippe Coutinho, was on Bayern’s bench and he came on to score twice against
his parent club, the first even seemingly with reluctance.
Brave decisions await
Messi, at 33, knows
his end is near but he will choose when it comes. Others may not be so lucky,
with Pique and Luis Suarez also 33 and Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba 31.
All of them have
played a part in Barca’s golden era but that era feels a long time ago now and
if this team is to regenerate, brave decisions will have to be made.
Frenkie de Jong,
Ansu Fati and Riqui Puig are the future, smothered this season by the failures
of those ahead of them and perhaps ready to be trusted to lead.
If it’s the end of
an era for Barcelona, it is for Spain too. The national team may have long been
overtaken but Messi kept Barca challenging while the Champions League became
the kingdom of Real Madrid.
Not anymore, this
the first year since 2007 that the semi-finals will be without a Spanish club,
and the first since 2005 without either Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.
Who will lead the
Barca revolution remains to be seen, with Xavi Hernandez, Mauricio Pochettino
and Ronald Koeman all sufficiently put off that they rejected the chance in
January. Will they be any keener now?
Barcelona will not
have the money to make big additions, meaning they may have to look
within.
But that would be a
long-term project, which the club cannot guarantee either given their
presidential elections are due in 2021. A new regime could well bring a new
coach too.
A year might even
feel like a long time for the current president Josep Maria Bartomeu, who would
not rule out the elections being brought forward on Friday.
“Today was a
disaster,” he said. “Some decisions we had already thought to take and others
we will think about in the next few days.”
Since 2014, his
board have stumbled from blunder to blunder, all the while alienating the
dressing room and driving this period of chaos and decline.
It began with
Neymar leaving and never being replaced, the frantic attempts to bring him back
then failing because the funds had been squandered elsewhere.
And it ended with a
public humiliation that Messi saw coming. It had been coming for a long time.
