Originally posted on RealGM | By Colin McGowan | Last updated 8/25/20
Barcelona have been languishing in waking death for years. This is an ostensibly overdramatic way to describe a club that has won four of the last six Ligas, nearly achieving an undefeated season in 2017-18, with a Champions League title in their not at all distant past, but provided you’ve been paying attention to the pitch and the papers rather than their record, you know they’ve grown fat and dyspeptic off unhappy and exhaustingly qualified success. This is the modern Barcelona FC: Winning some stuff is not necessarily satisfactory, given their financial advantages, given fan expectations, given Leo Messi’s now alarmingly dwindling prime. They cannot truly fail and so they have no option but to thrive, which they haven’t in a while. Surely relegated Espanyol and terminally midtable EIbar weep for their betters, but they’re barely playing the same sport and Barça aren’t playing theirs nearly as well as they’d like to. The travails of the mega-rich, etc., but it’s not without intrigue.
First: $420 million. That’s how much it cost Barcelona to start their season-ending 8-2 devastation against Bayern Munich with Antoine Griezmann and Ousmane Dembele on the bench, and Philippe Countinho playing for the other team. The sporting department’s signings in recent years haven’t all been bad, but the bad ones have been spectacularly so. Dembele has wrapped up his third season in the Catalan capital with no small amount of promise, but he’s struggled to find his place in the squad due to persistent injury. Griezmann, who essentially plays the same position as Messi, had a miserable debut season either marooned on the left wing or miscast as a pure striker. Coutinho joined in January of 2018 and was an immediate catastrophe, to the point that he was loaned to Bayern seven months later, quickly demoted to the Bavarian club’s bench, and didn’t contribute all that much to their white-hot 2020 — except notably and humiliatingly, adding a goal and an assist in the meaningless minutes of Barcelona’s demise. He’ll now return to his parent club, because Bayern have no interest in purchasing him permanently. Asked about his predicament after Bayern’s Champions League triumph, Coutinho’s answer was suitably straightforward and hilarious: “I have to go back.” He’ll almost definitely be loaned out again, as if he were a 20-year-old youth product not quite ready to compete at the first team level.
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