Xavi Hernández

[JohnN]

Joao Felix is worse than Dembele. And Romeu is much worse than Busquets. Lewandowski is not as good as last season. This indicates quite a big decline in our attack.

In defense, Christensen is having a sub-mediocre season and Balde is even worse. Cancelo is OK, but nothing special.

In many aspects the squad's quality took a hit compared to last season. Let's see if Roque can make up for some of that and if he performs well straight off the bat.

this all sound like excuses.
Joao isn't playing in dembele's place. he plays for ferran. could be argued they are equal so we have more depth there.
Romeu is shit. Busi could not help in big games and was also a liability, but not even in his 50s will he be as bad as romeu. I give you that. we also got gundo though who is a top player.
lewa has no reason to decline this bad. what is the issue there? balde too young to decline. what is the issue? Chris too.
Cancelo is a top player, what are you on about? a clear improvement from anything we had in rb or lb.
the team should be at least equal to last season with an improvement due to the time spent together.
clearly the team does worse than last season. Nd it's not because of squad.

 

[Fati_Future_BallonDor]

Didn't Bayern regress a fair bit in Flick's second season before he left and became Germany's NT Manager? Where he also failed big time btw.

They were worse but thats normal after a cl winning year, Bayern played still very good but unlucky to lose Cl against PSG. Bayern had 31 shots and scored only 2 while PSG scored 3 with 6 shots. In return match they won 1-0 in Paris. After he left them Bayern became as bad as to Kovac times.

He failed at Germany, thats true but Germany feels like Manu, every coach who goes there fails

 

[Fati_Future_BallonDor]

this all sound like excuses.
Joao isn't playing in dembele's place. he plays for ferran. could be argued they are equal so we have more depth there.
Romeu is shit. Busi could not help in big games and was also a liability, but not even in his 50s will he be as bad as romeu. I give you that. we also got gundo though who is a top player.
lewa has no reason to decline this bad. what is the issue there? balde too young to decline. what is the issue? Chris too.
Cancelo is a top player, what are you on about? a clear improvement from anything we had in rb or lb.
the team should be at least equal to last season with an improvement due to the time spent together.
clearly the team does worse than last season. Nd it's not because of squad.

Dembele was the main man in Xavi's system thats why we became worse than last season, a very good coach would find a solution and would adjust his system to his new players but Xavi is too young for that and he has no help (brother knows nothing i suppose ? )

 

[mc_lovin]

Dembele was the main man in Xavi's system thats why we became worse than last season, a very good coach would find a solution and would adjust his system to his new players but Xavi is too young for that and he has no help (brother knows nothing i suppose ? )

Busquets was the bigger loss, but people aren't ready to hear this.

 

[serghei]

this all sound like excuses.
Joao isn't playing in dembele's place. he plays for ferran. could be argued they are equal so we have more depth there.
Romeu is shit. Busi could not help in big games and was also a liability, but not even in his 50s will he be as bad as romeu. I give you that. we also got gundo though who is a top player.
lewa has no reason to decline this bad. what is the issue there? balde too young to decline. what is the issue? Chris too.
Cancelo is a top player, what are you on about? a clear improvement from anything we had in rb or lb.
the team should be at least equal to last season with an improvement due to the time spent together.
clearly the team does worse than last season. Nd it's not because of squad.

This just doesn't make sense to me. Point is Dembele was the main player in offense for Xavi's team. He didn't even want Felix by what it seems. Of course the team declined in attack this season as a result. Let's see how Roque does and we can revisit this in the future.

Players decline all the time with age. I suppose Benzema left to Arabia because Ancelotti couldn't manage him well enough anymore by your logic. Old players can decline at any time, it's well documented. Has nothing to do with the manager in most cases.

Balde too young to decline? This has to be a joke. He's yet to establish himself as anything but a promising player. He's just another raw talent that is inconsistent. Had some good 6 months last season, now he's not playing well. This kind of fluctuations are normal for very young players.

Of course the team is doing worse than last season. The players share a big part of the blame for this. As does Xavi because he's clearly not getting them motivated and focused enough like he did last season.

 

[serghei]

Didn't Bayern regress a fair bit in Flick's second season before he left and became Germany's NT Manager? Where he also failed big time btw.

Teams regress and hit roadblocks all the time, it's not a linear upwards path, that's impossible. Even Pep Barca regressed in 2010 compared to 2009, and especially in 2012 compared with 2011. Klopp's Liverpool had the biggest drop of them all. From almost winning a League + CL double to not even making CL places in the following season.

It happens very frequently. By some people's logic, the 2012 Barca team should've been the best of them all because Pep spent more time with the players. When in fact, his best season trophy-wise was the first one. By 2012, the team was mentally spent.

That's why usually, you need to give a bit more time for the managers to attempt to fix these normal problems that appear naturally. If they can't, then they reached their maximum at that team, and you move on to another manager. That's the way Barca usually do it, hence the 3 year span the good managers get. EPL teams usually give way more leeway to the managers.

 

[Gnidrologist]

How long will we have to endure this bum?

 

[JamDav1982]

Teams regressing after reaching a peak is very different from a team who is still in development but winning but with a lot to improve on then getting worse.

Barca were expected to kick on and improve this season.. and could improve even if dont win the league v a stronger Real.

Barca had awful European campaign again, went out the cup in a bad way and were not playing to any real 'expected' Barcelona way.. Very good title win with A LOT to improve on.

This is not in anyway similar to teams that won it all and couldnt do it again really.

 

[JohnN]

I second this.
Pep's Barca reached the top. keeping that is much harder, almost impossible.
Xavi's barca show clear signs of decay without achieving much. the league was a surprise surely but we can all agree we were lucky af too.

 

[JamDav1982]

Busquets was the bigger loss, but people aren't ready to hear this.

Busquets had to go that was not the issue.. the issue was having no DMs in squad and not planning for it at any point.

Busquets has just as old and slow in MLS his time was long up.

The fact he would still start ahead of Romeu says nothing but how bad Romeu is.

An even older, slower Busquets who struggles to compete in MLS would not be making any huge difference to this Barca....albeit would be better than Romeu.

 

[fergus90]

Didn't Bayern regress a fair bit in Flick's second season before he left and became Germany's NT Manager? Where he also failed big time btw.

They played a super high-line which he wouldn't deviate from. Often had to win games 4-2, 3-2 etc.

They only lost 1 CL game in two years under him, that was 2-3 at the Allianz to PSG.

He is a good coach who's reputation has been damaged by the Germany stint. But he wouldn't be able to cope with the Barca politics anyway.

 

[serghei]

Teams regressing after reaching a peak is very different from a team who is still in development but winning but with a lot to improve on then getting worse.

Yea, well, for current Barca, the realistic peak is winning a league title. And for CL lets see if we can maybe get to a quarterfinal. Napoli is a better example compared to our situation, than likes of Liverpool and City running with elite managers and elite squads assembled for some 800-1000 millions.

 

[Fati_Future_BallonDor]

Busquets was the bigger loss, but people aren't ready to hear this.

I hear Busquets, i close my ears with my hands

 

[JamDav1982]

Yea, well, for current Barca, the realistic peak is winning a league title. And for CL lets see if we can maybe get to a quarterfinal. Napoli is a better example compared to our situation, than likes of Liverpool and City running with elite managers and elite squads assembled for some 800-1000 millions.

Dont agree. Barca have a lot to improve on even winning that title and thats what should be seeing.

CL progress will be seen when come up against first decent team more so than by how far get.

Topping a poor CL group and beating a poor Napoli is expected and not success. Probably played better in last seasons CL than this seasons really to this point even though went out in group.

 

[serghei]

They played a super high-line which he wouldn't deviate from. Often had to win games 4-2, 3-2 etc.

They only lost 1 CL game in two years under him, that was 2-3 at the Allianz to PSG.

He is a good coach who's reputation has been damaged by the Germany stint. But he wouldn't be able to cope with the Barca politics anyway.

His next job is gonna be more telling than either his Bayern stint, or the Germany fiasco.

So far... the circumstances he performed under are outliers of any kind of normalcy.