Barcelona's Champions League crisis could open the door for Liverpool transfer coup
Wake-up with Liverpool.com: Barcelona are a club in crisis. Their need to sell could see Liverpool swoop in for a transfer coup.
By
Oliver ConnollyStaff Writer
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Barcelona are in free fall. Following their disastrous 8-2 defeat to Bayern Munich, everything is on the table.
By the time you read this, Quique Setién will be fired. Lionel Messi could walk, activating the oft-discussed clause that would allow him to leave whenever he would like for free. Somehow, one of the most expensive squads ever assembled looks like it needs another £400 million remodeling… all while the club is flat broke.
Not content with all that, Barca are also six months away from election day -- slated to be somewhere in March -- where the current incumbent, Josep Maria Bartomeu, is, unsurprisingly, expected to be swept aside.
Running against Bartomeu will be Víctor Font, who is expected to bring former midfield maestro Xavi with him in a bid to channel some of that Pep Guardiola 2008-2012 goodness. Former president Joan Laporta, who ran the club from 2003-2010, is also expected to challenge, with his stated goal being to bring Pep back to Barcelona… or to hire Xavi.
But given the function of elections in the Spanish game both regimes will have to wait, all while Baromeu makes one, last, desperate bid to keep the job this summer (Spoiler: he won’t), meaning it’s unclear exactly
what Xavi whoever the new board opts for will be walking into.
One thing is safe to assume: it will be a club in crisis.
Setien will move on; He was the board’s fourth choice is the first place, an idealist who failed to live out his ideals, reverting to an in-over-his-head pragmatism, a brand of pragmatism that led to the club’s third successive champions league disaster, probably the most embarrassing to date. After Rome and Anfield, that’s
hard.
But where do they go from here? Mauricio Pochettino is the obvious pick, and the one noted by critics as the
best choice. Pochettino has warmed to Barca’s interest after previously saying he couldn’t manage the Catalan giants following his love-affair with city rivals Espanyol. According to
The Athletic , he is now interested in the job — which is nice of him.
And while Pochettino is undeniably one of the finest team-builders and head coaches in the game, someone with a defined style, philosophy, and a bunch of success, does he really jive with this overinflated, middle-aged squad? Will Antoine Griezmann and Sergio Busquets and Ivan Rakitic and Messi and Gerard Pique and David Alba play Poch’s go-go style?
The average age of Barcelona’s squad is 31. These are not young legs; a lack of pressing doomed both Setien and Ernesto Valverde before him. Even if they want to, for the right manager, can those players still crank it to the necessary level? Probably not.
And although Poch does
seem like the imminent appointment, isn’t it odd to take a job when you know full well there will be a new boss in six months who will want to bring in his own guy?
The real issue here is recruitment. The squad is old, overpaid, and lacking in direction.
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Barcelona has made the three most expensive signings in the club’s
history in the past three years, all three in the top-six in football history: Griezmann, Ousmane Dembélé, and Phillipe Coutinho. In the 8-2 defeat, two of them started on the bench and the other played for Bayern, scoring two goals against his parent club as an added bonus.
As an extra insult: if Coutinho goes on to win the Champions League with Bayern, Barcelona will owe Liverpool £5million of the incentive-heavy £142 million deal the sides struck in 2018. Coutinho’s clause is a player-clause that runs while he’s on a Barcelona’s books, and is independent of the kit he’s wearing.
The club has cobbled together a squad of aged, tired veterans, not-good-enough squad players, and out-of-their-depth new signings who fit no coherent scheme or structure.
Add to all of this: The club is in a financial mess. Barcelona had a cashflow issue before the COVID-19 pandemic. As with all football clubs, the pandemic and subsequent recession has accelerated their financial fears.
The club borrowed
all of the money it needed to buy Greizmann last summer -- £104 million -- in cash (not installments) while also continuing to borrow to redevelop the Camp Nou and their training complex.
I remind you: Greizmann is a 30-year-old forward who did not and does not fit in any of Barcelona’s muddled structures.
Bad transfer business has left the club on the precipice. The ageing players the club wants to move on have little-to-no market. Ivan Rakitic may bolt on a cut-price deal, but one player alone won’t fix this disaster. The sole player Barca set a move up for last year was Vidal, who looked set to join Antonio Conte’s Inter on a season-long loan. The issue: Vidal was Barcelona’s best player, non-Messi division; the GOAT wasn’t going to allow his friend and fellow player-who-actually-tries to leave when the rest of the squad looked so bereft of talent and effort.
The club’s loan re-payments or soaring. And as Real Madrid showed last month teams with big loan bills will have to fund the payments through selling assets on the cheap. Madrid allowed highly-rated youngster Achraf Hakimi to leave to Inter for £40 million, well below his perceived value. Madrid had to raise around £40 million in time for July 30th, when a loan payment kicked in; they didn’t have time to haggle or negotiate.
Hakimi was one of the few players of ‘value’ in the squad who wasn’t on ginormous wages and so was coveted by a band of Europe’s top clubs. Knowing Madrid’s financial bind, Inter offered a cheap amount and concluded the deal before there was time for the Hakimi sweepstakes to develop.
Barcelona lacks similar assets they can use to generate the money needed to pay their bills and
then re-invest to revolutionize this squad. The players they want to move are paid too much, and the asking prices are too high, for clubs to have
real interest. They might be able to part with Coutinho if they stump up a massive portion of the wages. There
could be suitors Dembélé, if it weren’t for the pandemic and his injury record.
The remaining crop of players have little re-sale value orare the only few with affordable wage packets.
Here is where Europe’s elite will swoop, and Liverpool can get involved.
Bubbling away behind the Jadon Sancho interest and their scattergun approach to transfers in general, Manchester United have been ahead of the Barca-Crisis game: United have consistently lodged interest and bids for Ansu Fati, the club’s teenage sensation.
Fati has had the best statistical season of any Barcelona debutant in the club’s post-war history, which is something given the two greatest players of all time have played for the club.
Fati is
the guiding light of what a post-Messi Barcelona
might look like. As of now he plays on the left as a wide-forward, all pace and tricks and enjoyment and directness. There have been plenty of false dawns in the late-Messi eras, players who have cropped up as the next
thing, who could supplement Messi and then take the mantle. Fanti isn’t that, he’s the real deal.
United have been smart enough to keep tabs in case Barcelona are forced to sell -- though the club insists he’s going nowhere and they’ll work out a long, long, long, long-term deal with the teenager. Whether they can pull it off or not (they likely won’t), it’s a smart strategy from a club who’ve lacked either smarts or strategy over the past decade.
Fati isn’t the only one, although there aren’t a great deal left. After flogging the likes of Malcolm, Marc Cucerella, Marc Cardona, and Paco Alcácer in the summer, the club started stripped assets in January in order to raise funds
before the coronavirus outbreak: Carles Alena, Jean-Clair Tobido, Moussa Wagué, and Carlés Perez, all 21 or under and considered the future of the club, were loaned out, three with options to buy.
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Some of those may return, but the club will likely have to cash-in this summer in order to raise some money.
Liverpool should sweep in. Relationships may be frayed following the Coutinho deal (though Barca only has itself to blame for that) but such things can quickly be sorted when money enters the equation.
Fati would be the headliner, but there’s Riqui Puig and Ronald Araújo and Pedri, all players that have shown promise amidst this year's mess.
Michael Edwards and co. will steer clear of the top-line stars -- Coutinho, Demblélé, et al. -- but they would be wise to keep a tabs on which of their youngsters Barca will be willing to let go below their market value.
