Having won only one of their last nine Champions League playoff matches, Barcelona knew that it would take a long time for a team whose order was aging to overthrow Bayern Munich. The clubs entered the quarter-finals on Friday with five European titles each, but the way Bayern cut and cut up Barcelona showed their pedigree on their own does not win any football matches.
Lionel Messi’s comments that Barcelona was not smart enough sounded like a crisis that was announced midway through the first halfway and in the finale Bayern scored in groups of three. “We’ve come back like a rock now,” said Barcelona central definer Gerard Piqué, summarizing the night he finished his first season without a trophy in the primaries since 2008, a peak year of slow drifts in Europe. Barcelona’s worst European defeat means that, for the first time since 2007, no Spanish club will be in the semi-finals.
A rejuvenated Thomas Mueller scored twice and were given a hand that evoked memories of Germany’s 7–1 loss to Brazil in 2014. That night in Belo Horizonte, Bayern coach Hansi Flick on the bench while the Germans were lending a head coach. It’s more brutal,” Mueller said after Bayern’s 19th direct win. The side sides Alphonso Davies and Joshua Kimmich combined to score; Robert Lewandowski scored his 54th goal of the season and Philippe Coutinho scored a double but did not celebrate because he was on loan from Barcelona. .
Coutinho, projected as the replacement for Andrés Iniesta, is symptomatic of how Barcelona failed in transfers, sporadically prior to the sale of Thiago Alcántara to Bayern in 2013 and since 2014 when Luis Suárez, Ivan Rakitic and Marc-André ter Stegen joined. About 800 million euros were spent on more than 30 players without real impact.
Some like Coutinho have been ceded, others sold. Antoine Griezmann and Frenkie de Jong – “born for Barca as (Johan) Cruyff 50 years ago,” said a Catalan newspaper when he arrived – they stayed out. In Lisbon, Barcelona started in a 4-4-2 line-up so as not to give in to the midfielder and hope that De Jong can be the artist he is at Ajax. “We gave his midfielder virtually no space, we did what we wanted to do,” Mueller said.
Recruiting players is not an accurate science, however, there have been many theories about why Barcelona remains: the over-reliance on an agent, first-team scouts don’t matter, and there are too many safe decision makers. “The directors never knew why the team won, so how would they know now why they lose?” Cruyff’s comment may now sound true for a club that would have thought Pierre Emerick Aubameyang and Timo Werner promised Neymar’s return before signing Martin Braithwaite.
A report published on the online sports website The Athletic also stated that knowledge science, the basis of player recruitment, is not due to Barcelona, even if it has some of the most productive knowledge analysts.
All this led to no substitutes for a group of great clubs such as Carles Puyol, Dani Alves, Javier Mascherano, Xavi and Iniesta who helped Barcelona for much of 2008 to 2015. In 2015, Barcelona last won the Champions League. While the team, in addition to those of the golden generation of La Masia, aged, the average age of Barcelona in 2009 when he won the hat-trick was 25.5 years; it’s 26.6 this season — Messi has tried to evolve everything from one end to a False Nine and a game creator who was deployed as a striker on Friday.
This is not where Barcelona’s upheaval ends. When Ernesto Valverde fired in January, they investigated Xavi and Ronald Koeman. The club’s two legends have reportedly refused, perhaps because the presidential election is scheduled for 2021. Also Mauricio Pochettino. So he came here to Quique Setién who said to get the task “beyond his craziest dreams”. “Structurally, the club wants adjustments of all kinds,” Piqué said.
Barcelona will have to rebuild and Setien is unlikely to be in charge. As in 1987 after the dismissal of Terry Venables, in 2003 after the departure of Louis van Gaal and in 2008 when Pep Guardiola took over the leadership, they will have to do what former President Josep Lluiz Núñez said in 1999: “(We) remember an organization of famous players. But it’s a thing of the past, it’s history now (Barca, A People’s Passion through Jimmy Burns).
In young people like Pedri, Trincao, Monchu, Ansu Fati, De Jong, Ronald Araujo, Jean-Clair Todibo, Riqui Puig and perhaps Eric Garcia, they will have to trust. Tax barriers induced through Covid-19 may mean that Miralem Pjanic and Lautaro Martínez will be their only primary firms before 2021-2022. “If it took new blood to replace that dynamic, I’d be the first to leave,” Piqué said. On Friday, there were six players over the age of 28 in Barcelona’s starting line-up.
“I hope this (result 2-8) will do something. We all have to think,” Piqué said after the darkness hit Barcelona at Lisbon’s Stadium of Light.
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