Some days ago I was besieged by angry comments from Catalan friends and their English sympathisers when I suggested that FC Barcelona currently mirrored the disfunctionality of Catalan politics. Having just come back from one of my regular visits to Catalunya, let me rest my case.
Barca is a team playing without joy, rhythm or system. Neymar has a growing tendency to frown and protest, like a spoilt school kid, lacking the grace and sheer toothy big smile fun that Ronaldino gave us in his heyday. Suarez beats his chest and the turf with frustration whenever his pass goes astray or his team-mates fails to deliver a goal which he has set up. It was not like this in Liverpool, he must be thinking. Xavi cuts a distinctly tragic figure while on the subs bench and no longer commands off it. And Messi-well Messi seems to have lost his capacity to transform a team into poetry in motion.
Barca these days is a team struggling to be coherent, suffering from an excess of rotation, and playing with unseemly haste, only over-elaborating in the final crucial seconds of attack when a first touch would do. In its determination to push the ball up field as quickly as possible and engage in its ‘dynamic trio’-Neymar, Messi, Suarez-, there is no pause, or quick passing other than occasional one-two’s. Barca’s mid-field has disappeared as a creative entity. As for its defence, it remains utterly vulnerable to a well-organised counter-attack, be it Real Madrid, or Celta.
I cannot see this Barca, playing as it is, winning La Liga , still less progressing to the final of the Champion’s League- and I am not alone in my pessimism. An ominous silence now accompanies Luis Enrique, for all his animated gesticulations. The Camp Nou yesterday had a hung-dog feel about it (and there was no Mourinho capable of protesting about the lack of passion of the home crowd as he did yesterday at Stamford Bridge), the fans evidently lacking belief in what they were witnessing, and feeling somewhat awkward with each other after a week that has seen the deep hostility resurface between Laportistas and Rosellistas (as represented by members of the current board).
This is a club struggling to hung on to the credibility of its motto ‘Mes que un Club’– and what it signifies in terms of artistry, solidarity, and democracy- ’, its politics a dead weight round its neck, with some of its longest serving members questioning the ethics of maintaining Qatar-criticised by Amnesty International for its human rights record, and a suspected financier of the head-cutters of Islamic State. I write as someone who became a cule when Barca signed Johan Cruyff under the presidency of Jose Luis Núñez, just one of a number of Barca officials and players who have been embroiled in legal cases in recent times.
But FC Barcelona is a club that has spent most of its history, for better or worse, affected by Spanish politics, both national and regional-and the landscape is a far from stable one right now. Those crying for ‘Independence Now’ in the Nou Camp seem increasingly less vocal-but then that might have something to do with Barca playing badly,losing, and not beating Real Madrid. Even if a majority of Catalan fans of Barca support a right to vote on their future, it must be dawning on many of them that Arturo Mas risks looking like the Grand Duke of York who marched his men up the hill only to march them down again. Esquerra, a minority party that believes Catalunya would benefit from being a socialist republic separated from Spain, and possibly the rest if Europe, wants to dictate the pace of local politics.
It was an illusion to believe that Madrid with Rajoy’s PP in power would allow a referendum to take place on any other terms than one possibly negotiated as part of a reform of the constitution. What remains is frustration and anger, but no resolution of any kind. Catalan politics like Barca’s football is in limbo. In Madrid, the politics looks even worse-but Real Madrid haven’t played so well in years.
