08/14/2021 10:31 PM
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 08/14/2021 10:31 PM
When the Beatles began to leave London and Mary Quant was barely left in Carnaby Street, the legendary Cuban from
Tres tristes tigres
, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, came up with the idea of renaming the famous slogan that distinguished the booming English capital of the 60s by removing some letters, so that
glittering
Swinging London
stayed in
S in in L nd n
.
At the Barcelona Football Club of today, that old club more than a hundred years old (121 years old, not one less) loses some decisive letters of what has been, for decades, its favorite emblem, in Catalan: "
Barça is more than a club
".
After the bitter (for the Catalan team) departure of the Argentine star to Paris, to play for PSG which will perhaps be the last two years of his impressive career, that Barça that knew glory in the past with footballers like Ladislao Kubala or Luis Suárez, and like Johan Cruyff or Ronaldinho, can no longer be distinguished from other clubs even bigger than the dreams that Enrique Llaudet, Miró Sans, Montal or Laporta harbored in subsequent years. That Barça that a clever advertiser called
more than a club
... now has fewer bills (and many more bills of exchange to pay) and is in ruin.
Barça, then, is now
menys than mai
, because not only has it lost the glamor that those footballers added to it (and this one who is leaving) or the best of its coaches (Pep Guardiola), but it does not arouse the confidence that, season after season, he has awakened to a crowd always ready to believe that paradise would come next year.
For Messi's Barça, which has lasted twenty years at the helm of that hope of always being the best, it was uphill, since Guardiola, Tito Vilanova and Luis Enrique (his most advanced successors) left, to win the task to convince in Spain and in Europe, until at the end of this period in which Messi is already leaving him, he had to scratch a cup without great history (that of the King), and settle for placing himself behind Atlético and Madrid in the LaLiga classification.
On the bench, Ronald Koeman, a legend in his defense when Barça won the first European Cup in their history at Wembley with one of his goals.
Lionel Messi is presented to the fans at the Parc des Princes stadium.
AP Photo
Koeman arrived this year at the head of the squad in the midst of a storm that had started, in its final phase of disappointment, in Lisbon, when Bayern beat a team with crossed arms 8-2, in which discouragement stood out ashamed of Messi and his partner Luis Súarez, the Uruguayan who was later sacrificed in the herd of disgust. The team was then trained by Enrique Setién, a Cantabrian who distinguished himself by his tactics, but not by his affection, so that German steamroller sent him to help his Santander cows graze in the peace of those fields, far from the soft lawns of Eden that were not conducive to his Barça.
After that gruesome defeat (in those circumstances, the worst in Barcelona's history, since not only did he lose the game, but also lost his footballing dignity), that expression of disgust from his fallen hero was unleashed. Messi wrote a burofax (never in history has this type of communication been so decisive in contractual relations in football) in which he announced to the then president of the Club, Josep Maria Bartomeu, that he would immediately leave team discipline so badly managed that he hadn't even saved his dignity in recent times. That famous rudeness of the Rosario player, who still aroused the same admiration around him that he unleashed when his brilliant debut took place, convulsed Barça society, which still believed that Barça was
more than a club
So while Luis Suárez was leaving in the wake of Simeone to Atlético de Madrid, his friend from Rosario agreed to stay in the team of his (true) loves.
It began there, renewed the illusion of Messi for the hiring of Koeman to do more than a club again, an escalation of pampering that the star always accepted with his circumspect face, relieved by his own goals or plays, and with the hope, based on the facts, that Bartomeu left the command of a directive rocked by the storm of his scandals.
Among others, the evidence that he had conspired against his own footballers to make them fall into disrepute orchestrated by a company dedicated to destroying reputations.
You could not fall lower, nor that Barça that, until recently seemed full of vigor to present itself as a club without failures, could lose more letters of the slogan that continued (and continues) to preside over the Camp Nou. Transfers that were failures, some glittering, such as that of the Brazilian Coutinho or the French Umtiti, were little by little diminishing their possibilities, dragging behind them the failure of lines that survived thanks to
Messi
himself
, Busquets, Piqué and, above all , to goalkeeper Ter Stegen
, who ended up being the hero even in the (excessive) defeats. Two young men came to the aid of that skeleton that seemed to be waiting for another burial like the one in Lisbon, who still seem to be able to dry part of the tears that accompany the desert to that Barça who belonged to Guardiola. Those two boys are
Pedri
, a canary of roots, now eighteen years old, and his contemporary, also a youth squad,
Ansu Fati
, on whom fell the responsibility of learning from Messi and prolonging him.
In the box (during the entire desert pandemic like the stadium) Laporta went to sit, for whose lure Messi had stayed.
Laporta had been, in the 90s, Ronaldinho's accomplice and then the one who had encouraged the club to be, really,
more than a club
.
He was distinguished by being a man with the attributes (joy, swing) that marked that stage in which Guardiola had finally made a
greater
to Barça, and returned to the presidential fight promising the gold of the Magi.
Before the partners paved the way for him to repeat his luck, Laporta already announced that convincing Messi, who was fulfilling a contract, to stay was eaten bread (pà amb tomaquet, to say it in Catalan).
Already in the symbolic box from which he has seen this disorder, he explained that everything was going well, and that it would be better, because the rehiring of the idol he dispatched it to him in a barbecue.
It was, to put it with a title by the admired novelist Juan José Millás, one more notch in the disorder of the Barça name, in the successive decline of the slogan that proclaimed it much more than what it was, a Spanish club driven to stardom also by its propaganda capacity.
Barça was filled with Messi, for twenty-one years
. Laporta's anxiety to fix a contract that he did not know how to sew was encouraged, it seems, by the eternal Barça rival, Florentino Pérez's Madrid. It seems that this was the one who advised him, in a well-stocked restaurant in Barcelona, the Botafumeiro (the legendary name of the most beautiful symbol of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela and, in the symbolic Spanish language, as they say to a deposit of flattery that spreads over a person), that he did not accept LaLiga's (economic) siren songs, that were going to put Barça in debt for half a century and thus renounce to hire Lionel Messi.
Through that door between tears, which were immediately replaced by his joy when he arrived in Paris, Messi left Barcelona, leaving the soul of a club that has depended on him for two unparalleled decades empty. He has been better than any of his historical antecedents, no one can compare him to anyone else in the world, and he begins a new career that will be looked at from the corner of his eye in Spain by both those who want the evil and the good of the club that depended on him so decisively and to whom he gave as much generosity as big dreams.
When Laporta chose to be Bartomeu's next in a box that today has fewer letters to brag about, the contender who later won was announced next to the Bernabeu, the Madrid stadium, with a provocation: he wished he was, he came to say, to be together, and face to face.
Life acts in theater strokes, as Fernando Arrabal said in panic, so now that Joan Laporta and his new friend Florentino Pérez are truly together.
Who will not be Messi, whose tears (and then his joy) have been caused by one of them or, go to know, by those who are finally together.
And now, definitely, the
arc
is much less than that Barça.
It is, only,
a club, res menys than a club
, now sad as a farewell song from his biggest and most illustrious fan, Joan Manuel Serrat.
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