Reports that Xavi is top of the list. That would very likely to be a disaster. Not that experienced, but a big enough name to provide false hope and sustain expectations. Would the Barca faithful be willing to see their club go into a sustained rebuild for at least two years, likely three? It will take at least another year to clear their financial mess, assuming they don’t take any major revenue hits (and they are likely to face some), and then the real rebuild project can get started.
Personally, I don’t think they will put up with it, and they’ll turn on whomever the manager is, regardless of legacy. Xavi would be far smarter to spend another year managing and experimenting, and let that year where the accountants dictate the football count off on someone else’s watch.
I think fans in the stadiums will help Barca bottom line. It all depends on what they do with their regained “wealth”. Do they overpay on wages and transfer fees again? Maybe they are like a lot of addiction sufferers, relapse.
But amongst all the possible options, Xavi would probably be the best for them. Rather than go out and appoint someone with a huge profile meaning expectations would be huge to win immediately, there will be no time for this person to rebuild and connect with the squad etc… Xavi on the contrary has plenty of connections and goodwill in and out of the squad and the club. The fans will be willing to be patient with one of their very own, someone who has been with the club since 11 and won plenty with them as a player, to the fans, he would be a level closer to them then just a legendary player for them like Koeman. With the club, there is no better options for them than Xavi who understands what it means to be the Barca of past where they build great players and squads through their La Masia academy etc. I think Barca would miss a trick if they go out there now to appoint a big name manager.
I think Xavi could work for them, but not right away. Not so sure Barca fans are willing to be patient, not yet. Look at the squads Koeman has been fielding, some of the youngest Barcelona sides since the side that Xavi was a part of.
But that might be because it was Koeman. Once the fans lose faith in a manager, its often hard for them to remain patient even if he has to play the kids. Imagine that scenario here under Hodgson or Brendan for example.
I know Barca are in trouble, but I never felt enough clarity from Koeman. He did well with the Netherlands, but from the moment he was appointed, I don’t think he was the right option for Barca. Just lazily presented as another Dutch-Barca legend, but in footballing terms, he’s far from the Cruyff philosophy (not that it’s the only right one for Barca or, better to say, that it should be a copy & paste). I feel it’s very possible that Xavi does better than Koeman with this group straight away. But the ceiling of the combination of Barca & Xavi for the near future, how good, I’m not sure. Very hard to predict. Not all situations end up like Lampard and Chelsea, but even fewer end up like Pep and Barca. It’s difficult to get timings perfect. Maybe Xavi wanted a new board and feels he could help solving things straight away. From Barca’s perspective, yeah, that’s where there’s more questions at the moment.
Perhaps, but I am not sure Koeman ever got much of a honeymoon. The cracks were clearly visible last season, and they lost even more talent at the end of it. The biggest factor to me is the CL spot (and revenue). As long as that is within imagination this season, their board isn’t going to be patient either. They will necessarily have a short term focus until there is nothing to focus on. It is hard to expect the fans to be more patient than a board.
The way out of this is to lean very heavily on the extraordinary group of young players they have for a season or season and a half, until they can right the financial ship enough to bring in the players from outside they need to plug the gaps. That almost certainly comes with a down year, or possibly 2 and the only way to keep the fans from revolting will be the messaging and focus on the project. I don’t know there is anyone other than Xavi with the credit to be able to pull that off.
A big part of that was the unsettled Directorship issue. He was always Laporte’s man and so was reported to not want to even begin negotiations about the role until Laporte was in place to negoatiate with.
The fact he is held responsible for Suarez’s exit because he was the one who relayed the decision to Luis, despite it being Bartomeu’s call, is I think the biggest representation of how bad a shake he got there. He was not the right man for the job, unless you identify the job as being the fall guy for the old regime and sacrificial lamb for the new one.
The problem there is that it relies on those young players to buy into the project completely, and accept that they won’t be seeing Champions League play any time soon. With the way Barcelona has conducted itself over the past 12 years in the market, I think there will be club lobbing offers in for some of that talent just to unsettle them. The world has changed since the boys at La Masia were allowed to skip curfew on the nights they were dressed with the first team.
The brutal fact is that I don’t think their financial planning has countenanced missing out on CL revenue.