La Liga: Are Barcelona in crisis? Five problems currently gripping the Camp Nou
Thursday 8 January 2015 11:51, UK
Is there a crisis brewing at Camp Nou? James Galloway looks at five problems gripping the Catalan club.
The year may only be a week old but Barcelona have already been engulfed in a storm in the days since Luis Enrique's side slipped to a damaging away defeat at David Moyes' Real Sociedad on Sunday.
Amid plenty of speculation regarding both on and off-pitch matters at Camp Nou – including the future of star player Lionel Messi – we take a look at five of the biggest problems currently gripping the Catalan club.
Instability at the top
The growing sense that Barcelona are a club descending into crisis was heightened the day after the team’s loss to Real Sociedad when they sacked Andoni Zubizarreta as director of football after four years in the job. The former Camp Nou goalkeeper’s sudden departure was followed within the hour by his assistant Carles Puyol, the club legend and ex-captain who only retired from playing last summer.
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The statement announcing Zubizarreta’s departure made clear that the decision had been taken by club president Josep Maria Bartomeu, with the move coming a week after Barcelona’s appeal against the transfer ban imposed on the club by FIFA was rejected by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
"The change in the essence of the team has been put against Zubizarreta, and the CAS decision has also been put down as one of his mistakes because the whole club knew what was happening but nobody took action,” Sky Sports' Spanish football expert Guillem Balague told Sky Sports News HQ.
"On top of all that some of the signings haven't been very clever - why they haven't got a proper centre-back when they knew Carles Puyol was retiring, that has also been put against him. Zubizarreta has for a while been feeling he's been mobbed from within the club, that a lot of people wanted to put the problems of the club down to him."
On Wednesday, Bartomeu announced he had called presidential elections for the end of the season in order “to lower the tension at the Club right now” as it is “disproportionate and doesn’t reflect the reality of the Club”.
Luis Enrique’s relationship with Lionel Messi...
Of the five issues listed here as currently destabilising Barcelona, it’s the apparent tensions between manager and star player which have unsurprisingly been creating all the headlines, initially in Spain and now further afield. The blue touch paper was certainly lit by the events surrounding Barcelona’s surprise defeat in San Sebastian last Sunday, when Messi, Neymar and Dani Alves were left on the bench by Enrique. With the club’s permission, the trio had spent the Christmas and New Year break at home in South America and only returned to training on Friday, three days after the rest of the squad. The reasons for leaving Messi on the bench until half-time have been the centre of frenzied debate ever since, though.
“What happens when a parent asks his child ‘do you want a piece of cake?’ and the parent then gets a ruler and smacks the child’s knuckles and says ‘don’t touch that cake’? It’s the same with Enrique. He offers Messi the holiday and then punishes him by not allowing him to play,” journalist Graham Hunter said on this week's Revista de la Liga.
“On Friday there was a row on the training ground between Neymar and Suarez and also a row between Messi and Enrique, who was refereeing one of those training games. Fine. That happens a lot. But then he doesn’t start Messi and the game is atrocious. Then suddenly Messi has got gastroenteritis and doesn’t train [on Monday]. Now that’s really handy isn’t it?"
Given the events of last weekend, Messi’s failure to appear for that annual open training session at the Miniestadi, which was attended by 11,000 fans, or the later visit on Monday of the club’s players to children in hospitals has been met with plenty of cynicism. With Messi officially on his own sick bed, social media was sent into the inevitable frenzy later on Monday when the Argentine’s official Instagram account started following Chelsea, along with the west Londoners’ players Thibaut Courtois and Felipe Luis. Messi, it should be pointed out, has since returned to training ahead of Thursday night’s home fifth-round cup tie against Elche.
"Messi is in the middle of a power-play and Enrique’s post is in jeopardy, for a number of reasons,” added Hunter, with Spain's daily AS newspaper running with the explosive headline 'Messi’s showdown: Luis Enrique or him' on Wednesday.
So, could the unthinkable happen, and it be Barcelona's record scorer who departs? "For a year now I've been saying he's never been as close as this to leave, but that doesn't mean he is going to leave," Balague told SSNHQ. "It's a possibility that has entered not only his mind and his entourage's mind, but also the club. Barcelona were thinking of selling him six or seven months ago, so all that has been a possibility, still is a possibility, and of course there are clubs that have approached Messi's family to see if they would be willing to go - especially from the Premier League."
...and Barcelona's other stars
Although the manager's relationship with the four-time World Player of the Year has grabbed all the attention since Sunday, Balague insists some other members of Barcelona's squad are also not seeing eye-to-eye with the former Celta Vigo chief.
"There has been a clear divorce between the manager and some of the players," he said. "A lot of people are only pointing out Messi because he missed training, but there are other players who don't believe in Luis Enrique."
Style of play
After signing a two-year deal to replace Gerardo Martino in the manager’s hot seat in May and return to the club he graced as a player between 1996 and 2004, Enrique was charged with bringing the trophies back to Barcelona after their first barren campaign in six years. However, while his side have conceded just eight goals in 17 La Liga games to date, the Spaniard has been criticised for his high levels of rotation having used 27 players in all competitions.
Critically, Enrique is also struggling to communicate his intended style of playing to the squad, according to Balague. “Luis Enrique doesn’t explain things properly. He doesn’t give enough instructions, there is too much confusion about what he wants to do,” he told Revista.
“He only seems to be caring about quick transitions – I’m not saying long ball, but I’m saying about making the attack as fast as possible instead of what made Barcelona really good, which was building all together from the back. So he wants to change the style - that’s fine, but explain it.”
The form of Real Madrid
If you put aside the defeat to Sociedad for a moment, then on the face of it Barcelona’s start to 2014-2015 hasn’t actually been all that bad. They sit just a point behind arch rivals Real Madrid at the top of La Liga, albeit having played one game more, and are through to the last 16 of the Champions League and Copa del Rey.
However, in a league that until recently has been totally dominated by the two juggernauts, second certainly isn’t considered good enough at Camp Nou, particularly when it’s Real who are overshadowing them. Their rivals' unforgettable 2014, when they finally won their 10th European Cup before finishing the year with an astonishing 22-match winning streak, has only served to ramp up the pressure on all aspects of Barcelona's footballing operation.
Watch Barcelona’s next match, the Copa del Rey fifth round tie against Elche, live on Sky Sports 5 from 9pm on Thursday night
