A new Champion League season will start tomorrow, and Barça will face familiar and scary faces. Bayern will arrive to Barcelona, and it’s fair to say that the Catalans will be a clear underdogs in the match. Moreover, I see many fans ask for a minor loss and ‘Not another humiliation’. Yes, the current state of our club is very bad, and Bayern is a better team. But in no way we should come to this game to just avoid humiliation.
The 8-2 loss to Bayern was an important turning point for Barcelona. After years of slowly ruining everything related to this club, Bartomeu and his board received a massive blow that the fans will remember forever. Furthermore, this loss was a wakeup call to change many many wrong things in our club.
What changed since then?
Many things, but maybe not enough. The humiliation vs the German team was just another yearly humiliation for our team. Minutes after the game ended, Pique said that the club has to make many changes, and he was the first to offer to leave.
13 months later, and Pique is still part of this squad. But the coach, president and many players are no longer part of the club. Suarez, Vidal, Rakitic, Semedo, Messi, Griezmann and others left, and Laporta is leading a total revolution to heal the club.
It’s fair to say that the change only started. Although our team is full of talent, it’s early to think that they are ready to compete with the elite teams. Moreover, Koeman as a coach failed against every other elite coach. So it won’t be easy to win.
At the end of the day we need to remember that we are still FC Barcelona. Therefore, the first thing to do is to be loyal to our DNA, and play like we know best. I don’t want to see Koeman lining up with some sort of deep defensive line, trying to just survive the game. We are not Southampton.
Loyal to our Style
1 hour before the match vs Bayern, I saw the the Barcelona line-up and tweeted this:
The reason was that just like in the losses vs Roma and Liverpool, once again our coach decided to play with 4-4-2. For a club like Barcelona, changing the formation like that would mean probable disaster.
Our players play with a certain style since they are kids. So you can’t suddenly change everything and expect it to go well. It’s not FIFA.
Personally, I expect Koeman to resort to the 3 at-the-back formation, which is more defensive and still familiar. But more on that in the tactical updates prior to the game.
A look at the future
After a busy transfer window, the club did a very big step towards healing. However, we’re still not there. Our youngsters still lack experience, and you got to give them time. Moreover, our injury list is very big, and it just got bigger with the recent relapse of Braithwaite.
We have to keep on improving, and use this season for our youngsters to get first-team experience. In the long-run we will gain much more from that.
