Enlarge image
No speed, no goals?
Barcelona's Gerard Piqué and Reals Vinicius Junior discuss (archive image)
Photo:
OSCAR DEL POZO / AFP
In the days before the big game, melancholy was allowed again: The rights holder of the Spanish soccer league shows a documentary about the titanic duel between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. When they broke records, created iconic moments when at their clubs FC Barcelona and Real Madrid they were surrounded by everyone else who had a reputation in world football. When they met regularly for the blockbuster of their sport: the Clásico.
It's coming up again now, on Sunday in Barcelona's Camp Nou (4.15 p.m., stream: DAZN), and the league is announcing record quality in the transmission: 32 cameras, super slow motion, drones, helicopters, new augmented reality graphics, channel options Fan perspective, flanked in Twitch and TikTok. The full program - and yet only anesthetic of the sporting results before the 246th time: The most prestigious and multi-faceted, with around 650 million viewers, the most popular club duel in world football is always an eye-catcher. But in terms of sport it is in crisis.
In 2012 and 2016 there were five players from Barça and five from Real in the world selection of the year.
In 2020 it was only one from each team.
The team of 2021 has not yet been elected, both clubs should have zero nominations.
The best of both sides, Madrid striker Karim Benzema, is still a relic of the big days at the age of 33 - just like Luka Modrić, 36, or on the other hand Sergio Busquets, 33, and Gerard Piqué, 34. Hopes again lie with Real on Vinícius, 21, and in Barça on Ansu Fati, 18, or Gavi, 17.
The continent's avant-garde?
Very old or very young - typical indicators for teams in transition. After a cycle of dominance, the next has to be rebuilt. Where both clubs together won the Champions League seven times between 2009 and 2018, they currently rank seventh (Real) and twelve of the title candidates with bookmakers. After three points from three games, Barça could even fail in the group stage for the first time since 2000, to Bayern Munich and Benfica Lisbon. Dynamo Kiev's experienced coach Mircea Lucescu said after the 1-0 defeat of his team on Wednesday at Camp Nou: "Barça is missing something, I think Benfica is going through." The clammy Catalans are particularly in crisis.
But stars and results are only one thing.
Especially since La Liga is no longer as dominant internationally, but is still highly competitive.
The German Bundesliga, for example, has long been dreaming of Europa League winners like Sevilla 2020 and Villarreal 2021.
And of such an exciting championship fight as last year between Atlético Madrid, Real, Barça and Sevilla.
The real problem is football.
In the past decade, high-speed Clásicos symbolized how attractively the game was interpreted in Spain.
La Liga seemed to be the avant-garde of the continent, even small teams with a fraction of a budget from Barça or Real played on attack, according to the motto: If we have nothing else, we at least offer a spectacle.
Meanwhile, Spanish football tells a different story. Last season, Spain had the fewest goals of all European top leagues. This season the trend has intensified extremely. A La Liga match produces only 2.22 hits on average. In the Italian Serie A - decried as ultra-defensive for decades - the figure is 3.18. Almost a whole goal more per game.
In this respect, style-forming in Spain is no longer Barça or Real, but the third top team, Atlético. There, coach Diego Simeone established himself after taking office in 2011 with radical results football as a counter-revolutionary to the »Tiki-Taka«. A decade later, he took over cultural sovereignty. The majority of the league plays like the current champions: waiting, rather slow, speculating on mistakes made by the opponent and using them efficiently. Even teams that are offensive in themselves, such as the current leaders Real Sociedad, are increasingly submitting to the dictates of efficiency. The leaders scored only twelve goals in nine games.
The defensive style of play is favored by the referees, who often whistle excessively but are tolerant of interruptions and delays - the perfect cocktail for teams who want to destroy the flow of the game.
With only 52 minutes of net playing time, La Liga is again in the bottom of the five big leagues;
and that was exactly the same last season.
At least the national team is impressed
In the midst of such gloomy numbers there is of course a Spanish team whose football is impressive again - the »Selección«. At EM and Nations League, it was probably the most worth seeing in Europe. The situation is comparable to that of the second half of the noughties in Germany, in that the national team was more innovative than the top clubs. Selection coach Luis Enrique was recently asked why this is so. "Very good question," he replied, "but I don't want to sit in the nettles." He's already had enough debates about his idiosyncratic player selection.
If Luis Enrique had answered extensively, he might not have been able to completely avoid the topic of his colleagues. The tendency to courageous, possibly controversial decisions, which is so pronounced in himself, is missing in La Liga as well as fresh impulses from outside. Pep Guardiola has been gone for ten years now, the wave of German coaches - Jürgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel, Julian Nagelsmann - did not spill over to Spain. At Real Madrid, the type of skilled administrator dominates, after Zinédine Zidane, Carlo Ancelotti is now allowed to run again, for whom Everton in England had previously only been enough for a middle-class club. The last Barça coaches were Ernesto Valverde, Quique Setién and Ronald Koeman. None of them are considered to be the new inventors of football.
»The desire to play has been lost in favor of speculation and cynicism«, analyzed Spain's largest newspaper »El País« during the previous season.
"If that isn't stopped, it's the sort of ailment the League can wash down the drain."
Against this background, a Clásico in upheaval is not really the problem - it is rather a rare festival day.
