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Lionel Messi and Barcelona: The end of the battle for the club’s soul

By Keith Lisenbee

FC Barcelona fans gather outside the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona on August 26, 2020 after Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi announced his desire to leave the club. - Lionel Messi's bombshell request to leave Barcelona is expected to spark a legal battle over a multi-million-dollar buy-out clause but also raises the question of which club could afford him in the heat of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Pau BARRENA / AFP) (Photo by PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images)
FC Barcelona fans gather outside the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona on August 26, 2020 after Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi announced his desire to leave the club. - Lionel Messi's bombshell request to leave Barcelona is expected to spark a legal battle over a multi-million-dollar buy-out clause but also raises the question of which club could afford him in the heat of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Pau BARRENA / AFP) (Photo by PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images) /
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Johan Cruyff, Barcelona ex-manager \ Mandatory Credit: Gary M Prior/Allsport /

Barcelona has turned into a radicalized version of its code.

Josep Maria Bartomeu was named the 40th president in the history of Barcelona in January 2014. He was named in his current post to finish the term of Sandro Rosell, who had resigned after allegations of misappropriation of funds of the transfer of Neymar.

His term as club president has been marked by the slow deterioration of everything that the Cruyff revolution, Pep Guardiola, and Lionel Messi had built in the previous quarter-century.

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Bartomeu has hired managers who on appearances seemed to fit the Cruyffian model. However, they strayed so far from its core ideology that it was unrecognizable.

He has also abandoned the La Masia model of bringing in and nurturing young talent from within by escalating current player’s salaries to unsustainable levels and buying talent who could not fit with the team’s playing philosophy because they were never trained in it.

In other words, he turned Barcelona into its philosophical opposite, Real Madrid.

In February, it was reported that the club president directed that a hiring firm be used to promote himself and also denounce Soviet Russia style, Gerald Pique, Xavi (an adherent of the revolution and possible future coach), Carles Puyol, Lionel Messi, and Pep Guardiola.

FC Barcelona issued a strongly worded public statement denying the allegations; however, the damage has been done.

The Barça hierarchy has been battling in public and in private Messi and other current players as part of the philosophical war that has broken out within the club, Catalonia, Spain, and the western world over the last four years.

Bartomeu and the current board at FC Barcelona have deeply resented the individual greatness of Cruyff, Guardiola, and Messi to such a degree that he has nearly destroyed the club in a conservative and radically altruistic fueled ideology.

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