European Super Fortnight
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LOL - Messi aside couldn't have happened to a better team, they have been smug for sooo long and they've been living off that great team from Pep's era for too long as well... The game has moved on, even Pep himself has evolved his game as a manager yet Barca wants to stick to this tiki-taka philosophy 100%. They need to either adapt by blending Tiki Taka with other new modern ideas or abandon it completely. Klopp, Poch, Pep, Atalanta, RB Leipzig are playing the game with a modern set of tactics and philosophies, evolve or die.
PS - Coutinho tried to stifle his happiness for the first assist but couldn't, for him secretly that was a revenge assist.
PS - Coutinho tried to stifle his happiness for the first assist but couldn't, for him secretly that was a revenge assist.
Head coach sacked.
Can’t believe that 😀
Can’t believe that 😀
To me the biggest indictment of Barcelona from tonights game was the fact that Suarez goal was hist first away from home in the CL for over 4 years. If ever you wanted an illustration of a club thats gone stale thats it. A player who mirrors the club perfectly, once great but now completely exposed as a flat track bully
They haven’t played tiki taka football for years.
They’re just old and shit. This kind of beating has been a long time coming for Barca.
Pique was dreadful tonight - all over the place - though I guess he wasn’t alone.
Bayern were amazing. I was worried at 4-2 it wasn’t going to end up being a humiliation the game deserved. Our last hope at preventing City.
Been thinking about this . Didn't VVD and Keita and Lallana also down tools when we came knocking?
I still cant really believe how awful Barca were yesterday. So many mistakes, cut through with ease and how uninterested Messi looked.
Abidal has been sacked as sporting manager, but their transfer policy has been horrendous for years now.
360 mill £ on Dembele, Griezmann and Coutinho.
Abidal has been sacked as sporting manager, but their transfer policy has been horrendous for years now.
360 mill £ on Dembele, Griezmann and Coutinho.
Sssssh irrelevant.
I was just thinking that in a curious way the Suarez transfer saga was what ultimately undid them. Precisely because Suarez was such a success it taught them the wrong lesson – that this type of transfer, buying a star player of another club in a hostile manner by a combination of blatant tapping up and overpaying – is the way to go. They've decided that they were the new galacticos, and were willing to go deep into debt to maintain the illusion.
The problem is, this is not how most of the great Barca teams were built. None of the core players of the team of mid-2000's were acquired in this way; they were not ready-made solutions, they grew and developed together and that's the only way how a style of play like tiki-taka could have organically developed. But seeing how Suarez has slotted in so seamlessly and struck up a great relationship with Messi they couldn't resist the temptation and kept trying to repeat that success by doing the same to us again with Coutinho, Dortmund with Dembele and then pissing off Atletico so much that they had to pay the release clause for Griezmann in full on the last day of the transfer window after being caught illegally approaching a contracted player and somehow escaping with only €300 fine for it from the eternally cooperative Spanish FA. Even worse, after buying the player in question, they had no patience or plan how to integrate them into the side and tried to solve each failure by lurching to a new "ready-made" solution.
Now the reality has finally bitten them in the ass.
The problem is, this is not how most of the great Barca teams were built. None of the core players of the team of mid-2000's were acquired in this way; they were not ready-made solutions, they grew and developed together and that's the only way how a style of play like tiki-taka could have organically developed. But seeing how Suarez has slotted in so seamlessly and struck up a great relationship with Messi they couldn't resist the temptation and kept trying to repeat that success by doing the same to us again with Coutinho, Dortmund with Dembele and then pissing off Atletico so much that they had to pay the release clause for Griezmann in full on the last day of the transfer window after being caught illegally approaching a contracted player and somehow escaping with only €300 fine for it from the eternally cooperative Spanish FA. Even worse, after buying the player in question, they had no patience or plan how to integrate them into the side and tried to solve each failure by lurching to a new "ready-made" solution.
Now the reality has finally bitten them in the ass.
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Oh sorry but that is very clearly not true. They have always been about buying the best around. Since 2000 all transfered in at or near their prime or clearly were generational top talents (I've researched a few ages at transfer (+ or - 1 year depending on birthdate), likely most were very similar) : Riquelme, Ronaldinho (23), Overmars (27), Deco (26), Eto'o (23), Zambrotta, Henry (28), Abidal (26), Pique, Hleb, Ibrahimovic (27), Villa (27-28), Mascherano, Sanchez (22), Fabregas (24), Alba (23), Neymar, Suarez, Vidal (25), Rakitic (26), Dembele, Coutinho, Griezmann and others.
The major issue of course is that if you look at their transfers going back to roughly 2015 onwards ... there are very very few that we would recognise today as being amongst the best in their position of their generation and many that totally flopped. So this comes down to two factors : transfer player identification and player development. If you want to see where it has it all gone wrong for Barca then look at those two positions,
My bet on next head coach is Pooch. Marcelo Bielsa has job security and a city that loves him, he isn't money motivated and by all accounts hates egos, Barca would be a nightmare for him
Apparently Suarez made 24 successful passes last night. 9 of them were kickoffs.
I think the sustainable model is to develop the core of the team through youth team with some precise additions via the transfer market. They've strayed from it in favor of the galactico model, trying to build the core of the team through expensive purchases, trying to mollify their global fanbase before considering how football actually works.
Thiago was case in point – finding a replacement for Xavi was their biggest priority for years and they actually had a perfect player for that coming through the ranks in Thiago – and they let him leave, even failing to play him in enough games to trigger an automatic contract extension. This Bayern game, where Thiago utterly dominated the midfield, was poetic justice in so many ways.
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Has there been much discussion about the winners of the CL having an asterisk after their name? It seems weird that there was a near-obsession with branding us with that, whereas this competition is clearly the most cheapened by the changes. I don't think it should even have gone ahead.
Yes, letting Thiago go was one of the biggest mistakes, Barca has ever made.
I don't think there has been much talk about it.
But then, every single game they play should have an asterisk beside it due to them being a shower of cheating cunts.
This has the feeling of one of those pre-season Asia tour competitions. Calling this the CL is a joke. It's not even remotely the same competition. Still, I hope anyone but City win it.
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