FC Barcelona has not been able to overcome the group stage of the Champions League, something that had not happened in the Barça club for 20 years. For two decades the Catalans have seen how their team was among the 16 best in Europe, but this season they have hit rock bottom and will have to settle for playing the Europa League. And like every time a disaster like this happens, you look from side to side in search of culprits, but this time you don’t have to look at the bench.
Xavi has only led Barça for five games and is the one who has the least guilt for everything that is happening. The Spanish coach has found himself with a morally sunken team, plagued with casualties, with a lack of goal, with very young players, other very veteran players who have not been able to find a replacement and others who do not have enough quality to play. in this club. Xavi has come so that Barça can regain its identity in a transitional season and with the material he has we will see how far he can go.
And although the inheritance that Xavi has received is a slab and it will take time for him to make the team work as he wishes, neither can Ronald Koeman be singled out as solely responsible for the moment the team is going through. The famous “this is what there is” by Gerard Piqué and which the Dutch coach later used is not a cliché, it is a reality.
If Barça fans need to find their scapegoat, let them look to the current and previous directives. Bartomeu and his team were dismantling the team little by little and season after season the quality of the squad dropped considerably since instead of signing the reinforcements that the team needed, they brought the crack on duty for indecent amounts of money. Joan Laporta is also having to deal with a complicated inheritance, he has taken a Barcelona that is going through the worst economic moment in its history, but in 10 months that he has been president the most notable thing he has done is not to renew Messi, to sign Xavi and Dani Alves with the corresponding show that he put on at the Camp Nou.
Laporta cannot evade his responsibility, he was the one who gave Griezmann, one of the few players for whom Barça could have made good money; He was the one who brought reinforcements that are not up to the level of Barcelona, making a disproportionate and low-level squad that has not been up to the task and he was the one who kept Koeman in his position even though he did not believe in him because he did not have a substitute.
On this occasion, the main culprits that Barça have been left out of the round of 16 are those who sit in the box, not on the bench, and those who go out onto the pitch every week and do not measure up.
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