Too Much Revisionism

[Messigician]

Everyone is acting like Rosell and Nike were here to destroy FC Barcelona lol. Let's be adults here and actually talk about that.

First up Rosell I won't go through a history lesson of his time with Laporta but he was always in favor of keeping Pep and Unicef as sponsors now his Nike connection was key.

Ronaldinho signed for Barcelona instead of the Premier League Champions because of his friendship with Rosell, a former Nike executive in Brazi

Neymar signed for Barcelona depsite being a Real Madrid fan and turning down larger wages at Madrid due to Rosell and Cury's Brazilian connection.

Always turned a healthy profit for the club after Laporta's heavy debt, now let's look at the transfers.

Neymar Excellent
Cesc F?bregas Good
Alexis S?nchez Good
Javier Mascherano Excellent
Alex Song Bad
Jordi Alba Excellent
1Brazil Adriano Ok

Overall pretty gold considering the prices spent could argue bargains.

Pretty good overall.

Now Bartoemu public enemy number 1 Lol

First season won a treble; and probably best signings in history of club

Suarez
Bravo
MATS
Rakitic
Etc

Now overall his term has been mixed, problems began after sacking Valverde who was keeping a declining squad competitive


Coutinho (145 million euros)*. Disaster

- Demb?l? (130)*. Awful

- Griezmann (120). Awful

- De Jong (75)*. Excellent

- Pjanic (60). Awful

- Malcom (41). Bad

- Paulinho (40). Excelelent

- Andr? Gomes (37). Bad but good effort made for money

- Lenglet (35.9). Ok

- Semedo (35.7). Awful

- Arda Turan (34). Awful

- Trincao (31). Bad

- Arthur (31). Awful

- Paco Alc?cer (30). Ok

- Neto (26). Ok

- Umtiti (25). Bad but was a bargain before knee issue

- Dest (21). Ok? Might come good

- Junior (18). Bad

- Braithwaite (18). Ok squad player

- Arturo Vidal (18). Great but could have done better

- Aleix Vidal (17). Awful

- Digne (16,5). Good profit and did fine

- Cillessen (13). Good profit

- Deulofeu (12). Ok not much profit

- Emerson (12). Ok not much profit

- Yerry Mina (11.8). Awful cost us unbeaten season despite profit

- Matheus Fernandes (7). Awful

- Pedri (5). Excellent

- Marlon (5). Ok

- Cucurella (4). Good sold for profit

- Denis Su?rez (3.25). Ok

- Murillo (1.2) Bad

- Todibo (1). Good sold for profit

- Kevin Prince Boateng (1). Awful


Overall bad sporting direction with transfers but good revenue made until Covid, lots of trophies won but allowed team to decline and made the self admitted mistake of sacking Valverde for Setien and starting out downfall from the top

Overall not the best but not a complete disaster let's be real

 

[serghei]

The biggest problem at Barca is that if a new board comes after a successful one, they feel this urge to destroy everything that happened before just because that legacy belonged to "the enemy". That kind of politics is the biggest enemy of this club. Rossell and Barto had absolutely no reason to attack anything that had to do with Barca's golden era that preceded them. But they still felt the need to attack the previous establishment to make their mark. And they failed royally.

I don't care what everyone says or what kind of half-baked rubbish sources they indicate. Pep left because he couldn't stand dealing with Rosell & Barto sleazy presidents, the archetype "chip on their shoulder" types looking to make their big entry. 2011 was the inertia of the Laporta era and the connections set at the time. As soon as 2012 came and Rossell started to impact things, shit hit the fan and the club went downhill fast. We keep Guardiola in the club and we win probably a minimum of 5 CLs in 10 years. At a minimum. I suspect more, maybe 6 is not out of reach. He won 2 in 4 years with some immense bad luck, another 3 in a decade is not far fetched in the slightest. You really think Pep handling MSN Barca would have allowed Madrid to make a threepeat .

Barto and Rosell fucked everything up. Guardiola and Barca were a match made in heaven. Criminal that it lasted 4 mere fucking years, for both parties. We lost the most elite manager, and he lost the best platform for his brand of football. You have the best manager in the fucking world and you lose him because of your ego...

Guardiola, Tito, Tata, Lucho, EV, Setien, Koeman. What the fuck. Recipe for disaster. It's like you start from 10/10 and you gradually end up with 5/10.

 

[Messigician]

The biggest problem at Barca is that if a new board comes after a successful one, they feel this urge to destroy everything that happened before just because that legacy belonged to some other board. That kind of politics are the biggest enemy of this club. Rossell and Barto had absolutely no reason to attack anything that had to do with Barca's golden era that preceded them. But they still felt they need to attack the previous establishment to make their mark. And they failed royaly.

I don't care what everyone says or what kind of half-baked rubbish sources they indicate. Pep left because he couldn't stand dealing with Rosell & Barto types. We kee Guardiola in the club and we win probably a minimum of 5 CLs in 10 years. Minimum.

Pep didn't leave because of that lol Rosell bend over backwards to keep him.

Same with Bayern but no manager is above the club until man city where pep has a blank cheque and can forge his legacy.

EVEN STILL! Pep is set to leave and coach a national team he also is adamant he will never coach here again even with Laporta

 

[serghei]

Pep didn't leave because of that lol Rosell bend over backwards to keep him.

Same with Bayern but no manager is above the club until man city where pep has a blank cheque and can forge his legacy.

EVEN STILL! Pep is set to leave and coach a national team he also is adamant he will never coach here again even with Laporta

You are a child believing Pep's bullshit PR reasons. Everyone with a brain knows Pep left because he didn't like working with a board he had no connection with. At City he has control, and voila, he spends more time than at Barca even though he didn't have even half the success.

Rosell and Bartomeu took the club and driven it into a galactico model to make them the heroes for assembling a stellar team. They were on a mission to cut ties from the Laporta golden era to "establish" their own legacy. Their whole agenda was making the club success seem their masterplan, THEIR master plan, not the manager's work. Laporta was less vain, he didn't have a problem with the fact that Guardiola took most of the laurels for the dream team being created, after all HE WAS the biggest piece of the puzzle (not like some clueless fans think that it was all Messi). It's basically Rosell and later Bartomeu trying to impersonate the Galactico Florentino era of 2000-2004.

Pep had such a big aura that Rosell was 2nd fiddle at the time. That was unacceptable. Of course, they had no chance in the public eye going to war with the greatest manager in the club's history so they undermined him silently by veto-ing his options. The 2012 moment needed squad changes. It's a key moment in time where you either vouch for the manager and go with his judgment, or you cut him loose and look to build your own thing. The cycle was coming to an end, so if the board is blocking the rebuild, the manager has no choice but to go somewhere where he does have control over his own team.

 

[Messigician]

You are a child believing Peps' bullshit PR reasons. Everyone with a brain knows Pep left because he didn't like working with a board he had no connection with.

Then why didn't he return when Laporta asked him to

 

[serghei]

Then why didn't he return when Laporta asked him to

It's a bit tough to come back now. Although I do hold a grudge against him for not coming back. I don't like Pep as a person. Same with Messi. I really don't like them, I find them fake to extremes, but on the field, they are brilliant, despite their flaws.

 

[Messigician]

It's a bit tough to come back now. Although I do hold a grudge against him for not coming back.

It's not hard at all, contract was up end of season so now woukd have been perfect time lol.

Face it man he always wanted to forge his own legacy.

To answer your question, the reason he's stayed longer is precisely because of a lack of success, he wants to be the one to bring city their first champions league.


He can have a Cruyff like legacy in the best league in the world with the pep guardiola stadium named after him.

He was never going to be our Ferguson, if it was a board issue he would have returned when Laporta asked him to

 

[serghei]

Anyway, to synthesize. 2012 and 2017 are absolute key moments in the rebuilding process, that could've impacted the present to an astonishing degree. Then 2019, post-Liverpool fiasco, was also a big moment. All 3 moments were managed in a disastrous way by the board.

2012 is the moment when we first sense the complacency settling in after a gorgeous era. An era with utter domination, unlike everything I've seen before or after. The team is just not as committed that year, not as hardworking as in the past. We are more careless, we care less about matching the opponent in terms of work rate, etc. I remember an Osasuna game 0-2 at halftime and outplayed, it was surreal, never experienced the team just walking on the pitch making errors left and right and not even reacting.

Then Pep leaves and we appoint his assistant manager. Big mistake. Come on, Pep is such an obsessed perfectionist, that his assistant manager is never one with anything more than just a consultative role. Everything about that team was all Pep, tactically.

We have a bad few years post Pep, relatively speaking since the domination under Pep was always going to last years at least domestically, with embarrassments like the 0-7 vs Bayern in 2013, with some valid excuses (Tito's illness, although with all due respect, Tito was not a top manager).

Then we hit the jackpot with MSN, maybe the single best thing Barto did in all his time. Let's make this straight, MSN Barca was the dream child of Rosell/Bartomeu. This is what he envisioned (until he poetically lost Neymar and signed the worst follow-up acts in the history of sports: Dembele and Coutinho). But as it is with galactico models, they burn bright, but short. Lasted one year - give or take - before problems of unbalance started to set up, making Lucho (the best manager we had post Pep, I rate him a solid 7/10) leave at the end. He knew very well MSN Barca was very much a players' team where the manager was more or less expected to follow act, not decide the key points.

Then we have an already heavily declining team, riddled with not-so-great transfers. And when the best players in a team are still the ones we had in 2009, almost a decade ago, Bartomeu names a submissive manager (enter EV), and makes the veterans basically the big shots inside the team (no wonder Pique has no shame admitting live they didn't value EV's input too much, he was sort of like the wise grandfather all respect but few obey in the end).

At this point, the chance of a seamless rebuild is already lost, so the present is pretty much a result of 3 bottled big decisions, all the courtesy of Rosell/Bartomeu. Not backing Pep's rebuild plan, not reacting after Lucho was hard done by complacency, and not even reacting after EV's fiasco vs Liverpool, at which point CL embarrassments started to be the norm, not the exception.

So you botch the decision tied with the first sign of trouble, you both the decision at the 2nd big sign of trouble, and you also both the decision at the 3rd sign of trouble, at which point the house is already burning and everyone is laughing at you .

 

[Messigician]

Anyway, to synthesize. 2012 and 2017 are absolute key moments in the rebuilding process, that could've impacted the present to an astonishing degree. Then 2019, post-Liverpool fiasco, was also a big moment. All 3 moments were managed in a disastrous way by the board.

2012 is the moment when we first sense the complacency settling in after a gorgeous era. An era with utter domination, unlike everything I've seen before or after. The team is just not as committed that year, not as hardworking as in the past. We are more careless, we care less about matching the opponent in terms of work rate, etc. I remember an Osasuna game 0-2 at halftime and outplayed, it was surreal, never experienced the team just walking on the pitch making errors left and right and not even reacting.

Then Pep leaves and we appoint his assistant manager. Big mistake. Come on, Pep is such an obsessed perfectionist, that his assistant manager is never one with anything more than just a consultative role. Everything about that team was all Pep, tactically.

We have a bad few years post Pep (with Tito and Tata, colorful names btw), with embarrassments like the 0-7 vs Bayern in 2013, with some valid excuses (Tito's illness, although with all due respect, Tito was not a top manager).

Then we hit the jackpot with MSN, maybe the single best thing Barto did in all his time. Let's make this straight, MSN Barca was the dream child of Rosell/Bartomeu. This is what he envisioned (until he poetically lost Neymar and signed the worst follow-up acts in the history of sports: Dembele and Coutinho). But as it is with galactico models, they burn bright, but short. Lasted one year - give or take - before problems of unbalance started to set up, making Lucho (the best manager we had post Pep, I rate him a solid 7/10) resign at the end.

Then we have an already heavily declining team, riddled with not-so-great transfers. And when the best players in a team are still the ones we had in 2009, almost a decade ago, Bartomeu names a submissive manager, enter EV and makes the veterans basically the big shots inside the team (no wonder Pique has no shame admitting live they didn't value EV's input too much, he was sort of like the wise grandfather all respect but few obey in the end).

At this point, the chance of a seamless rebuild is already lost, so the present is pretty much a result of 3 bottled big decisions, all the courtesy of Rosell/Bartomeu. Not backing Pep's rebuild plan, not reacting after Lucho was hard done by complacency, and not even reacting after EV's fiasco vs Liverpool, at which point CL embarrassments started to be the norm, not the exception.

Ok but what if Coutinho Griemann Dembele didn't flop

Umtiti knee didn't collapse, Messi wasn't forced to leave because of Covid, FDJ as the Rakitic replacement was pretty good. Pedri signed by Barto too.

Not a bad rebuild no?

I don't think it's on Barto those 3 signings were such a disaster

 

[serghei]

Ok but what if Coutinho Griemann Dembele didn't flop

Umtiti knee didn't collapse, Messi wasn't forced to leave because of Covid, FDJ as the Rakitic replacement was pretty good. Pedri signed by Barto too.

Not a bad rebuild no?

I don't think it's on Barto those 3 signings were such a disaster

The galactico model is a bad one overall, especially when the ones implementing are Bartomeu types, not Florentino Perez (who also got burned in his first galactico stint because he lost control of his club). That's the biggest lesson here.

Coutinho, Dembele, Griezmann. These are name signings. These are done purely by a board, with no input from the technical staff.

Absolutely on Bartomeu without a doubt. The guy lost the plot after Neymar saga.

 

[Messigician]

The galactico model is a bad one overall, especially when the ones implementing are Bartomeu types, not Florentino Perez (who also got burned in his first galactico stint because he lost control of his club). That's the biggest lesson here.

Coutinho, Dembele, Griezmann. These are name signings. These are done purely by a board, with no input from the technical staff.

I mean people wanted Dembele over Neymar as he's a two footed high potential young player who did well for Dortmund.

The market for wingers is dry,it's on Neymar for leaving us late in the window and clubs knowing we are loaded with cash and desperate for players.

Coutinho was hyped as ready to step up and become a world class player and replace iniesta.

Only Griezmann had serious doubts but even still he shouldn't have done as bad as he did for us

 

[serghei]

I mean people wanted Dembele over Neymar as he's a two footed high potential young player who did well for Dortmund.

The market for wingers is dry,it's on Neymar for leaving us late in the window and clubs knowing we are loaded with cash and desperate for players.

Coutinho was hyped as ready to step up and become a world class player and replace iniesta.

Only Griezmann had serious doubts but even still he shouldn't have done as bad as he did for us

Ah, I see this argument being paraded often.

Let me tell you something. I, as a fan, can be excited over any signing, it doesn't cost me anything and it's not my neck on the line if that signing flops or not. It's not my job to analyze the success of a potential target. And to be frank, even with players I like, I rarely invest much in them in terms of analysis and documentation because I don't have the time to follow every Barca target. I'm not paid for it, nothing happens to me if that player fails or not. This is completely the opposite with a board member, a director of sports or any other person who's success or failure is decided by the quality of the transfers being made (among others).

So, if fans liked Dembele or Coutinho, I don't care. It's irrelevant. Highly-paid professionals in the club are paid millions to make sure they analyze the players to a faaaaaar higher degree than some posters on a football forum who have jobs, families, and whole lives outside of the sport.

 

[Messigician]

Ah, I see this argument being paraded often.

Let me tell you something. I, as a fan, I can be excited over any signing, it doesn't cost me anything and it's not my neck on the line if that signing flops or not. It's not my job to analyze the success of a potential target. And to be frank, even with players I like, I rarely invest much in them in terms of analysis and documentation because I don't have the time to follow every Barca target. I'm not paid for it, nothing happens to me if that player fails or not. This is completely the opposite with a board member, a director of sports or any other person who's success or failure is decided by the quality of the transfers being made (among others).

So, if fans liked Dembele or Coutinho, I don't care. It's irrelevant. Highly-paid professionals in the club are paid millions to make sure they analyze the players to a faaaaaar higher degree than some posters on a football forum who have jobs, families, and whole lives outside of the sport.

I mean Barca is run by fans lol so yeah you should expect these signings by now and this shit happens to all clubs

Madrid Hazard

Juventus Arthur

United Everyone until recently lol

 

[serghei]

I mean Barca is run by fans lol so yeah you should expect these signings by now and this shit happens to all clubs

Madrid Hazard

Juventus Arthur

United Everyone until recently lol

For sure, Barca isn't a special case. All big clubs go through bad times. It's just that all clubs go through bad times because some idiots took the bad decisions at some point. For Barca, the idiots are named Rosell and especially Bartomeu. It is what it is.

Take United. Somehow they haven't been able to bring in a top class new-wave manager in 10 years post Ferguson. Moyes, Solskjaer, past-it LVG and Mourinho... Abysmal. A collection of average dudes and dinosaurs that were past their best days by years and years.

 

[Messigician]

For sure, Barca isn't a special case. All big clubs go through bad times. It's just that all clubs go through bad times because some idiots took the bad decisions at some point. For Barca, the idiots are named Rosell and especially Bartomeu. It is what it is.

Sure, but it isn't as if we were singing 34 year olds for 80m lol.

Dembele and Coutinho you could see the logic and if they were a success who knows. Not like Dembele was injury prone at Dortmund