Ernesto Valverde and the Prison of Barcelona’s Past

That, as much as anything, is what Barcelona Licensing and Merchandising is stamping on scarves and mugs and tchotchkes and selling around the world: not a crest or a logo, not the success of now, not even the style of now, but the sense of what Barcelona is supposed to represent. Those values were not defined by that team of Xavi Hernández and Andres Iniesta and, of course, Messi, but they were embodied by it.

That is the revenue stream that Barcelona wanted to bring in-house: memory. It is a lucrative business, it turns out, but it is also a considerable burden. Like all superclubs, Barcelona has to win. Like all superclubs, it has to win with style, or at least something that can be spun into style. Unlike all of the others, though, Barcelona has to match up — in its own mind, and in those of its fans — to a very specific image of what it was, just a few short years ago. It has to make them feel as they did then.

Valverde passed the first hurdle. He fell at the second. He got nowhere close to the third. To some extent, that was not his fault: Xavi and Iniesta are long gone. Messi remains, of course, as wondrous as ever, but he has found himself let down, increasingly, at an institutional level: directionless, almost random recruitment of players; uninspired coaching appointments, and an aging squad, at times distracted and often over-empowered; a board that has no clear vision of the club’s direction, at least on the field.

Perhaps Setién will fare better. He seems a more natural fit, certainly — where Valverde has always been a pragmatist at heart, his successor has spent his career, as El País put it, “in love with the ball” — though his credentials are oddly threadbare for a coach of the biggest and now richest club in the world.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/sports/soccer/barcelona-setien-valverde.html?emc=rss&partner=rss