Barcelona made it all about the Champions League and after surrendering La Liga to Real Madrid, now it is all they have left. Winning the title last season for the eighth time in 11 years was never going to be enough. Winning the double had not been either the year before. La Liga and the Copa del Rey had become Barca’s default, their domestic dominance taken for granted and then diminished by disappointment in Europe.
A mess of a season could still be saved by the Champions League but even the most optimistic of fans expect the worst against Bayern Munich, Barcelona’s probable opponents in the quarter-finals.
Many, including Lionel Messi, are worried even about getting past Napoli, with the pandemic-delayed last 16 matchup poised at 1-1. “I said long ago that if we continued in this way, it would be very difficult to win the Champions League and that has been shown to be the case in La Liga too,” said a frustrated Messi after the loss to Osasuna on Thursday.
“If we want to fight for the Champions League we will have to change a lot because otherwise the match against Napoli, we will lose that as well.”
Just over a year on from almost winning the treble, Barcelona look set to finish without a trophy of any kind for the first time in 12 years.
And yet the concern is not so much the many failures of this season but the possibility they could be just the start.
Messi is 33 and his anger is directed primarily at the board, whose leadership has left Barcelona with a team seemingly neither for the present nor the future.
There has been no succession plan for Messi since Neymar joined Paris Saint-Germain in 2018 and that world record fee has been squandered on players that have failed to settle or been sold to balance the books.
Antoine Griezmann bought for 120 million euros, left Atletico Madrid for the Camp Nou and what he thought would be the pinnacle of his club career. Yet earlier this month, he was reduced to coming off the bench, against Atletico, in injury-time.
And it is not just Messi nearing the end. Gerard Pique, Sergio Busquets, Luis Suarez and Jordi Alba are all 31 or older.
