Xavi's capital challenge

Barça's popularity is not explained only by its trophies, numerically smaller in any case than those of rivals such as Madrid, which has won 14 Champions for the five that illustrate the Camp Nou museum.

Barça's impact has been due above all to the capacity for seduction of its social cause, synthesized in the motto

, the same one that at the time was capable of associating itself with Unicef, and very especially its status as a thinking and innovative team of the football, in the style of Ajax and the Netherlands national team.

With the exception of Pelé and Di Stéfano, whose signing for Madrid is still being written about and discussed in Barcelona, ​​the best footballers have been linked to Barça.

Maradona was a Barça player like Messi and Cruyff.

And precisely the figure of Cruyff leads the coaches who modernized the game with the

.

No one has updated and given more flight to the work of the Dutchman than Guardiola, a reference coach at Manchester City, after leaving his mark on the Bundesliga with Bayern and conquering the world with Barça.

This explains why Barça is one of the clubs with the most potential to seduce television operators and generate the image rights that it has now partially mortgaged in order to survive after the bankruptcy decreed at the Camp Nou.

The Barça brand has been sustained in the market even without the Messi brand.

The challenge now is precisely that the Barça football culture also subsists after having been summed up in the 10 that today plays for PSG.

Messi left two years ago and Barça will surely play the Europa League for the second season.

Today it is necessary to manage frustration, which is much more difficult than managing expectations, especially when

has been lost on the pitch and in the Camp Nou offices.

Barça has been in a hurry to win without playing, a process that undermines its essence, the same one that Xavi personified in his day.

It is not Guardiola nor does it have Messi.

The Xavi coach is also not the same as the Xavi player in the same way that Laporta is different from the president of 2003.

Circumstances have changed and, however, Barça's game —or its memory— still fascinates spectators, a circumstance that in some way invites them to recover and review the solfeggio patented at Masia and Camp Nou.

The club came to create a methodology area to safeguard a style that put associative football before individualism and, therefore, recommended not to simplify the game or reduce the match to the areas, even when figures like Ter Stegen and Lewandowski are available.

“Space and time determine game situations”, argued Paco Seirul·lo, the director of that area, known as the Barça druid.

"Everything depends on the speed you give the ball," he reiterates at 76 years old, after he was invited to leave Barcelona for financial reasons.

Seirul lo prefers to be grateful and not generate more noise at a time of trouble for the club after the method has been interpreted in many ways and caused surprising starts at La Masia and on the bench at Camp Nou.

The process has evolved in a bad way to the despair of some technicians because it went from winning with style to winning without style until ending without winning and without style, so that there is now more of a rush to win again than to recover style, especially since the only Barcelona goal seems to be to win a Champions League that has resisted since 2015.

The confusion is so huge and pervasive that it threatens to affect Xavi after his team has gone from running to running at Camp Nou itself.

The coach needs to specify what he wants to play or how he wants to win or he will be exposed to Laporta's anxiety.

Whether due to tradition, culture or heritage, Barça's identity is expressed in the game in the same way that in Madrid it is manifested in victory, very evident in the Champions League.

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