Xavi leaves Barça as Laporta ruins another legend's departure
Just four weeks after Joan Laporta publicly cried foul over Xavi's renewal as Barça coach, the president himself put the guy who hoisted him to the club's presidency out on the street a day before the final La Liga game and with two press conferences to go.
If something can go wrong, Barça has the capacity for it to go much worse than expected. The "soçi" applauds his president whatever he does and even more so if he gives himself a bath of masses for winning the women's Champions League and says that "all the decisions that are taken are for the good of Barça".
It is difficult to back up that sentence with solid arguments, let alone facts. Xavi was called up in the Champions League against Antwerp to include Lewandowski, Gündogan and Araújo. Laporta and Deco made the decision, the coach accepted and the dressing room smelt the blood, or rather the lack of leadership of the man who was a figurehead of the best Barça of the last era.
Barça has become a presidentialist club, but not in the style of Real Madrid, rather led by a populist who does not want to see reality. Laporta hugged a bust of Messi to tell the fans that the Argentinian was going to stay for another season. The result was that the greatest player ever to have played for the azulgrana team left for PSG through the back door because there was no money to pay him. He couldn't return either, even though the president telegraphed meetings at his home with Messi's father that were nothing more than theatre because Miami was closer than Barcelona.
Xavi is leaving for telling the only truth in his time as coach. Not that he is a compulsive liar, but his press conferences full of justifications and excuses for every defeat have not helped him. The sun, the grass, the referee, the opposition... everything worked against him when it was his team that wasn't playing at all. He even went so far as to say that the game and the victories came later after announcing his departure because the players had been liberated. There wasn't a press conference where he expressed anything coherent until it occurred to him to reveal that Barça was in a terrible economic situation and that they were not the same team as 25 years ago, he even commented that they couldn't compete with other teams, and he included Real Madrid in the comparison. That annoyed Laporta who prefers his social mass to live in ignorance with messages from Orwell's novel "1984".
Deco didn't help either when Laporta decided to put Xavi out on the street, even if it cost the club coffers 20 million euros, which, who knows if the coach will forgive in the hope of one day returning home. The Portuguese has taken the reins of the sporting management to set up his player placement agency.
Xavi Hernandez's last two press conferences with the sacking in hand have been a humiliation for a legend. Something similar to what happened to Koeman when he said "this is what it is" referring to a depleted squad where nothing worked.
The player who scored the most important goal in Barça's history suffered inhuman harassment at the club of his life that could even cost him his health after a heart problem days before leaving Barça, also through the back door.
German Hans-Dieter Flick has been chosen to lead the club next season. An outsider to Barça's paranoia, he could either bring some sanity to the club or, who knows, get swept up in it and end up unhinged by Christmas. For the moment, Xavi has to be paid, the wage bill has to be reduced and, it seems, a star player from the youth academy has to be sold. And all without more levers than those activated last summer. If LaLiga decides to treat Barça as it demands of the rest, it is possible that it will suffer even to get into the Europa League, but it is not good for one of the great locomotives of football in Spain and Europe to derail even if its president does not know how to steer it.
