This is what happens when you fire Messi, by Ernest Folch

#fire #Messi #Ernest #Folch

06/05/2024 and las 07:00 CEST

Girona has become the notary of the unbearable decline of Barça, with two indisputable victories and eight goals in two games. No matter how much Barça’s problems are explained today by a mistake by Sergio Roberto or a mistake by Araujo, the truth is that the Blaugrana club has broken all records for goals conceded this year: it has conceded 3 or more goals in a whopping of ten official matches, many of them decisive.

It is therefore not a matter of any circumstantial accident but rather a deep structural crisis, which has been going on for a long time but which accelerated dramatically on that fateful August 5, 2021 when Barça decided to fire Messi in a shameful decision still to be explained, the turning point from which the club precipitated its own self-destruction. The feeling is that Laporta, although it may seem incredible, preferred Florentino’s ridiculous Super League, now clinically dead, to the continuity of the best player in history. Beyond the economic implications, the truth is that the abrupt and The painful departure of ’10’ left the club lost, and with the perspective that time is beginning to give, it is clear that its first consequence has been a total leadership vacuum.

Today Barça wanders around the field without knowing who its reference is, and outside of it the institution exhibits fabulous chaos, represented in Xavi’s grotesque renewal. Messi’s departure also had the effect of dramatically lowering the bar of demands of the entity and its social mass, which little by little has been accepting increasingly trivial objectives.. Barça has long ago abandoned the European elite, it is on its way to losing the Spanish elite, and today’s photo, terribly cruel, shows that it even has problems leading Catalan football.

Without Messi, the club has lost its ability to attract big stars and obviously big sponsors, in a vicious circle that diabolically feeds itself. However, where Messi’s absence is devastating is in the territory of the intangible: the club has lost an important part of its symbolic and emotional capital and, away from the Camp Nou, has ended up disconnecting from its own fans. Barça, without Messi, is poorer and much worse sportingly, but above all it is a club with less personalitywho has had his umbilical cord cut with his own past.

With Messi within the club, even if he played little, Barça would of course have suffered some crises, but they would have gone through them in a different way. With its natural leader inside, it would command more respect, generate countless income, could give valuable advice to the sports management and the presidency, and the fans would compensate for their current disappointments with the pride of having their great standard bearer. But Laporta threw him out, and part of this sludge comes from that dust.

Today Messi is neither here nor expected, and with the broken relations between the two parties, because there is not even a miserable date for the match pending tribute, which we will hardly see as long as this meeting continues. Someone thought that Laporta’s leadership could replace Messi’s leadership, an unrealistic fantasy fueled by an electoral banner and an uncritical mass of fans. Bad business when the club’s reference is intended to be in the box and not on the field. Yes, indeed, all this drama we are experiencing, and more, is what can happen to you when you throw out the best player of all time.