The interview was during the time of Laporta’s first splendor. Lu Martín made it for Deco, it was very good and had a round and magnetic headline for those of us who blindly believed in the intangibles of the cruyffism. “You can lose a game, but not the style.” The phrase then shone like a newly cut diamond. But, of course, Barça was competing with Vanderlei Luxemburgo’s Real Madrid, who made that gesture like sounding a truck horn in the middle of the games, who did not eat the nougat and who was fired in December 2005 (really, not delayed like Xavi). Then good old López-Caro arrived and Madrid, far from torturing themselves about his DNA, started thinking about the next league, which they won. Deco, in addition to being the only player who was able to score without shooting on goal (that same season he scored five rebound goals), he was then the driving force of that team. And given the newspaper archive, he is also a guardian of essences. But time is cruel to rhetorical heels.
The other day, in Portugal, Barça’s sporting director gave another interview and said the opposite. He announced that the method—whatever it was—was exhausted. And also that we must break with the past. “The new direction is essential and the president agrees with me on this. A profound change is needed.” He was also reported to have said: “We have to discover someone who will break with the past once and for all and move towards a new paradigm.” Then the magazine, who knows if threatened with not having an interview again, rectified and assured that that was not exactly what he had said and that, basically, what Deco really wanted to say is what he would like to say now. But let’s not fool ourselves, it shouldn’t have been very different. And it’s normal, because when things go wrong, you lose patience. Also the style. And at Barça, we could agree, both things have gone down the Montjuïc drain. And by the way, the spirit of the fans has been exhausted (not that of the tourists who were doing the wave on Sunday, of course), who no longer go to the stadium.
The club is completely denatured. First, in space, because they do not play at home and they are the team with the most goals scored on their field. Also in style and results, which have left them ten points behind Real Madrid. But, above all, in the offices, where the feeling of improvisation and the money the club owes to investment funds chills the blood. The management method, however, does seem exhausted. And let’s hope the club’s team isn’t too. But the decline is so pronounced that it is no longer clear that Xavi’s resignation will be the last this season. The Champions League? Napoli are ninth, we’ll go that far, some believe. And Granada? And Villarreal? Eight goals at home. Just one more fact: here in Italy, they are delighted with the giveaway.
Then there is the model, a bore. Barça, long before Cruyff arrived, was already playing based on the tradition of Central European football. The Hungarian, the German. Then in Dutch. Position and touch game. A model, to put it in the words of Deco, not British. The Portuguese, for his part, is a natural son of Mourinho’s early success, with whom he won the Champions League in Porto. Deco was also the agent who brought in Raphinha and the intellectual author of the signing of Vitor Roque for 61 million. What will be his paradigm now?
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