2023-12-26 13:46:30
Barça ends 2023 confused, with more doubts than certainties. The team led by Xavi Hernández has had a year of contrasts in which it has been able to return to the path of titles with the league championship and the Spanish Super Cup, but in which it has also seen the old ghosts reappear. The defeats against Real Madrid, Girona and Antwerp in the last two months have left the Blaugranas in a mental slump from which they have not yet recovered and which they must resolve before the tournament resumes regularity after the disconnection Christmas. They need to react after the lead is already seven points away.
«The League title gives us stability and security to continue believing in the project. This is not Xavi’s League, but of the players, of Barça. “We have been a team, that’s the word,” said Xavi minutes after breaking with all the mantras that the culé club had been carrying for years with the achievement of the championship that confirmed the possible change of trend in the club. And that day the Tarrasa coach emphasized that balance that had been lacking in the entity for a long time and that summarizes very well what was being a relatively calm year for the culé team, at least if it is compared to the tidal wave that was coming. dragging
That day at Barça, who was going to say it now, it was all ideal. The culés managed to abstract themselves for 38 days from all the problems that day after day surrounded the club’s current affairs. The economic crisis and the scandal caused by the ‘Negreira case’ eroded the image of the Catalan entity, but not that of a team that was the most regular and that knew how to focus on the only thing it could control, what happens within the field of game. There, Xavi’s Barça was the best. He achieved 88 points, scored 70 goals, only conceded 20 and left the feeling that the project could go further if he found the right pieces to reinforce the group. With that plus he also intended to make a leap in European competitions, the great owe of the Blaugranas in recent times.
Failures in the Old Continent
If winning the League and the Spanish Super Cup was a mood boost, losing in the Champions League and the Europa League was an even bigger downturn if possible. Barça was not up to par in the Old Continent for another year. The culés fell in the group stage of the top continental competition and then hit it again in the second competition against Manchester United. Those two blows are still being blamed by a team that, this time, has made it to the round of 16 in the Champions League but whose legs continue to shake when they hear the music that plays when the best players on the planet play. Overcoming this trauma will, without a doubt, be one of the pending issues for Xavi’s team heading into 2024.
Another important aspect for Barcelona will be to recover the DNA, the how that Xavi has emphasized so many times since he first sat on the Barça bench. The League of ‘unocerism’ and the ups and downs suffered in the first half of the competition this year have given light to a debate that continues for another year in Barcelona. In times of crisis, does the result or the style matter more? That question resonated game after game, first at the Camp Nou and now in Lluis Companys who continues waiting for both elements to come together to improve his attendance at the stadium. And the move for the Blaugrana has meant reducing the number of spectators to less than half and yearning for times when for visitors going to Barcelona was worse than a visit to the dentist.
Precisely the low attendance at Montjuic promises to be one of Barcelona’s headaches for the immediate future. The culés will not return home for the remainder of the season and they will, if everything goes as planned and without the stadium being full, in November 2024. By then, the culés hope to have straightened the course in what remains on course and thus resembles that block that recovered the path of titles for the Barça entity.
#Barça #closes #year #immersed #sea #doubts