The last season of Xavi At the head of Barça he will go down in history as a complete grotesque. Finally, after the coach announced in January that he would leave the club at the end of this season only to back down a month ago, he has been the president, John Laporta, who has chosen to break the deck. At noon this Friday, the top Barcelona leader went to the sports city John Gamperwhere he met the first vice president, Rafael Yusteand the sports director, Decoand, in a meeting in which both the coach himself and his assistants participated, his brother Óscar Hernández and Sergio Alegre, informed him that he will not lead the team next year. The duel against Sevilla next Sunday at the Sánchez-Pizjuán will thus be the last one in charge of the Barça bench for Egarense, who arrived as the great savior after the dismissal of Ronald Koeman and that, last season, they managed to win both the League and the Spanish Super Cup.
The team’s performance in this campaign that is almost over, however, plummeted compared to the previous season. Above all, in the defensive aspect. A fact that resulted in multiple setbacks, especially in Montjuïc, which led Xavi to announce last January that he would stop being Barça’s coach on June 30. His decision, as the coach himself explained, was intended to relax the atmosphere, which he considered extremely tense, and free his players. The results, despite everything, were not completely satisfactory. And, after the always variable Barcelona environment was filled with excitement with the possibility of reaching the semifinals of the Champions Eliminating PSG, after winning 2-3 in the first leg, and closing the gap with Real Madrid in the League by beating them in the Bernabéu classic, the outcome was very harsh.
The French, in the end, won in Montjuïc by 1-4, in a duel in which Xavi complained a lot about the referee’s performance and ended up being sent off, and the Real Madrid He practically sentenced the League title with a 3-2 that seemed clearly unfair to the Barcelona coach. With this panorama, everything suggested that his departure from the entity was going to be hasty. But, in the end, after it emerged that he was willing to turn back and continue, the president, Joan Laporta, as has been pointed out in the Barça environment, even ignoring part of his board, ended up sitting next to him before the means to congratulate yourself for your change of mind. It’s more. The president even assured that he was betting on a winning project and launched a harangue clearly favorable to the Egarense. «For the club it is a pride to have a coach with the human quality, knowledge and incontestable Barcelona fandom that Xavi has»he added.
Changes
A month later, however, his feelings are very different. According to what was leaked last week, the president did not like one bit some of Xavi’s statements at a press conference in which the coach pointed out the difficulties that the club was going to have to strengthen itself next summer and let it slip that it would take time. to compete head to head with Real Madrid and other European greats. He scratch that Barcelona’s top leader was going to cut his losses began to sound very loud, while the coach assured that they had not told him anything about it. After the victory against Rayo, there was a brief meeting between the player from Egarense and Laporta himself, in which They met to talk later. In recent days, it was pointed out that the final communication of whether or not he was going to continue on the bench would not take place until the beginning of next week. The events, however, have ended up precipitating.
Xavi, a month ago, assured that he was not going to star in a new scare and that he would fulfill his contract. Adding, of course, that this would be the case if the club did not choose to dismiss him. A fact that, then, seemed unlikely and that has become a reality. The relief of him, in this case, will be a Hansi Flick with whom there would already be a principle of agreement that his attitude would also have been definitive, communicating that he was even willing to wait for everything to be clarified, despite having other offers on the table. In the coming days, according to the entity, the technical structure of the first team for next season will be announced.