Just about time to face the final absurdity of a totally failed tenure:
It has become a common place that Xavi managed to get Barca to play great football for about 2 months (Febr March 2022) in his first season after quite heavy tinkering both in formations and personnel the first months.
Someone would expect this to grow and improve even more and the team to become top and a real contender for the big prizes the seasons after. However, even his fanboys at the beginning would agree now that since then, the team is regressing with every passing month in terms of football, and won a LL title by amassing lucky 1-0s based on Stegen and defense despite the poor play. This season things have gotten more out of hand in terms of the football we see.
How is it then that he manages to get the team play well after 3 months, but then everything gradually collapsed? The obvious answer is that we don't have a transitional and creative cheat code like Dembele any more, nor a fast forward like Auba, or other squad talk. But that's only the surface.
My two cents on this:
That purple patch was not only Dembele Pedri Auba hitting top form, but was also based on the veterans (Pique, Alba, Busi, Alves the first season) innate understanding of positional principles and play that they had completely internalized since Pep days. (It sounds that I am actually defending them, but I am not. They had to go for obvious reasons, and some decent intensity and a midblock from Eintracht Frankfurt exposed the limits of where we could go with the old guard) But it is a fact that these people DIDN't need any tactical coaching from a tactical POV. just that their legs were gone and their body couldn't follow what their mind was instructing them. On the contrary, what about:
- Cancelo being asked to play the inverted RB that Alvez played?
- Balde being asked to play like Alba in terms of vacating/occupying spaces on the wing and passing at the right moment? etc, etc
They can't do it, because they don't know how to. The squad we have has great potential, but they need tactical coaching to unleash that potential. And there you always see the hand of a great coach, when he manages to teach his players something they don't know already.
Xavi seems totally incapable of doing that. I don't know the reason for that, prob because himself as a player had that exceptional ability to understand almost instictively what to do and where the space is at every moment.
But the problem is he can't understand that others don't see that and need tactical indoctrination through sustained learning to do so. Look now at the usual names suggested for the next Barca coach, like ETH De Zerbi Nagelslman Slot etc, what they have learned their squads and how their hand is always visible in the team they construct
