[Sport] What next for dysfunctional Barcelona after Champions League humiliation?

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What next for dysfunctional Barcelona after Champions League humiliation?

  Bayern Munich, to illustrate just how bad this was, had practically reduced Gerard Pique to tears. The Barcelona centre-half’s voice was shaking as he attempted to find the words for that debacle, in a manner that was at least more successful than his attempts to find Bayern’s forwards.

“This is the bottom,” Pique eventually said.

And yet the great problem for Barca is that, unless there’s significant change, this feels like it can get a lot worse. They are directionless. It was so bad that a scoreline of 8-2 actually felt a bit within Bayern, as if it could have been greater, and ensured the story of Barca’s decline completely overshadowed the potential rise of the new European champions. The Catalans led the headlines after the game.

Disaster, in that regard, is much more compelling as a story.

“Disaster” is also the word president Josep Bartomeu used on Spanish TV. That was another indication of how bad it was. The president felt the need to front up. He knows many of the questions – even some of the criticisms about “the need for change” articulated by Pique – will be specifically addressed to him.

Many around the club will willingly say it’s specifically Bartomeu’s disaster. Others are hoping Lionel Messi – who, to be fair, was mostly poor on the night – will leverage his power to initiate change.

These are of course all comments we’ve heard before, which also points to the problem. Barca have completely deviated from the model that made them an ideal for all Europe a decade ago, and ended up buying big ill-fitting names rather than players that fit into a principle. They became exactly the type of super-club they were supposed to stand against, only with even more dysfunction.

Barca’s decline over the last half-decade has by now been well told, and can be traced through their Champions League eliminations, and some of the line-ups involved. Each of the last four years has involved at least one individual thrashing, and some curious line-ups not befitting Barca. They’ve also cost almost a billion in transfer fees in that time