Sliding out of the Champions League with two goals scored shows the scale of a relentless decline and a long road lies ahead
There were a little under eight hours until kick-off and Joan Laporta had come from Munich cathedral. “You have to have faith,” he said, heading into the Käfer restaurant and out of the snow, but faith is not enough. And although they had always suspected as much, it still hurt when the inevitable happened. Barcelona’s president had asked his players to show “pride” and “dignity”, to demonstrate “who they are”. As it turned out, who they are is a team no longer able to compete with the best. “That’s our reality and it really pisses me off,” Xavi Hernández said.
Maybe that’s been the case for a while. Theirs feels like a footballing obituary written many times before, a chronicle foretold if not always heeded and not always finished. Each episode emerges from the last, The End not actually the end, always further to fall: their former coach Ernesto Valverde refers to how “the disaster of the previous year returned” at Anfield in 2019 and five years of Champions League elimination presents a list in crescendo: Barcelona beaten 3-0 in Turin, 3-0 in Rome, 4-0 in Liverpool, 8-2 by Bayern Munich and 4-1 by Paris Saint Germain.
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