With their latest, most recent 1-0 loss to Athletic Bilbao in the last minutes of stoppage time, Barcelona are looking more and more like a house on fire with the engulfing flames billowing bigger and higher. The late goal has exposed their frailties, eliminating them from the Copa del Rey in the very same week when footballer-extraordinaire and captain Lionel Messi publicly called out club sporting director and former teammate Eric Abidal for sullying the players’ reputations and tarnishing their integrity with his acrimonious comments laying blame for the recent sacking of Ernesto Valverde on the players themselves.
Abidal had given an interview to the Catalan newspaper Sport on Tuesday wherein he had expressed his optimism that Messi would sign a new deal, being happy at Camp Nou. Whilst that sounded politically correct, his following comments lit the fuse to a potentially combustible situation that had been undercurrent for some time at Barcelona:
“Lots of players were not satisfied [with Valverde] and nor did they work a lot. There was also an issue of internal communication. The relationship manager-dressing room has always been good but there are things, as a former player, I can smell. I told the club what I thought and that [I thought] a decision had to be made.”
Abidal added that he had started to look for a replacement for Valverde following the el clásico on 18 December beginning with Xavi Hernández and Ronald Koeman and other candidates before finally ending the search at Queque Setién, whom he had actually intimated wasn’t the ideal candidate of preferred choice.
Messi’s reaction was instantaneous, immedaitely posting a picture of Abidal’s interview on Instagram with a red circle around one part reading: “The man in charge of the sporting directorate explains that ‘lots of players were not satisfied and nor did they work much’.” Underneath, he denied that the sacking was the players’ responsibility and publicly called out the sporting director for sullying the players’ reputations and tarnishing their integrity with his acrimonious comments laying blame for the recent sacking of Ernesto Valverde on the players.
“Honestly, I don’t like doing these things but I think that everyone has to be responsible for his acts and take responsibility for their own decisions,” Messi wrote. “The players [are responsible for] what happens on the pitch, and we have been the first to recognise when we were not good. The people in the sporting directorate should also assume their responsibility and above all take ownership of the decisions they make.”
“Finally, I think that when players are talked about, names should be given because, if not, we are all being dirtied and it feeds comments that are made and are not true.”
The defiant tone of Messi’s response is also obvious, in the context of Abidal’s claim, challenging the latter that there had been no offer made to Xavi to take over after Valverde, effectively accusing Abidal of lying.
It is easily comprehensible why Messi took offense to all that Abidal had publicly laid on the Barcelona players for their dissatisfaction with the former coach and hence didn’t work hard at all under him. This acrimonious assault in fact pointed the main finger indirectly at the captain, Messi himself, as the latter had always been associated with wielding power behind the scenes at Camp Nou.
Eric Abidal’s acrimonious public statements actually amount to a public implication, and indirect denunciation, of the arguable GOAT of modern football as the machiavellian manipulator and puppet master behind the scenes at Barcelona.
How was Messi supposed to take all this in his stride?
Barcelona were plunged into frantic crisis mode when Lionel Messi publicly called out the sporting director Eric Abidal, accusing him of tarnishing the players’ reputation and defiantly challenging him to openly disclose names of players he had accused of being unhappy with Ernesto Valverde, and that they had not been working hard enough under their former manager.
Lionel Messi ‘s public and unequivocal retaliation at Barcelona’s sporting director unleashed a backlash revealing deep cracks hidden within the management structures at Camp Nou. The finger-pointing is about far more than just super egos clashing. It is about gross and errant mismanagement and how football superclubs in this modern era can still function with unbelievable ineptitude and yet hope to win more titles. And when they don’t, the blame game comes inevitably into play in desperate attempts to cover up ugly butts invariably exposed.
In his official capacity as the sporting director of the club, and having been a former player Barcelona player, not to mention ex teammate of Messi, Abidal should have been a lot more discreet instead of giving voice publicly to his own personal observations and opinions. Messi as the main perpetrator implicated was just responding quid pro quo. In fact, it was expedient on him to clear the air of the odious stench that Abidal’s accusations had created.
This breach lays bare the internal division and brings into the open the deep dissatisfaction long felt by many in the dressing room regarding the club’s board of directors. Tension had already been in the air at the club, with growing criticism of the current president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, escalating and accusations of management ineptitude at both corporate and footballing levels.
Barça’s disjointed team structure has been evident for several years. Opponents had repeatedly in the knockout stages of the Champions League run rampant through vast spaces created by the midfield, which was how PSG walloped them 4-0 in the first leg of their last-16 tie in 2017, and Juventus trounced them 3-0 come the following round. In the same manner, Liverpool and Roma were able to successfully overturn 3-goal deficits against them. That notwithstanding, even an unfancied Chelsea side exposed their vulnerability at Stamford Bridge in 2018 with a -1- draw that saw Barcelona struggle.
Abidal was himself already under clear and imminent threat after the way he’d handled the search for a replacement for Valverde. That was compounded by his failure to sign a striker following a transfer window opportunity and instead sold two forwards, Carlos Pérez and Abel Ruiz, to raise funds and make way for a player who never turned up.
The squad is actually weaker and not stronger than when Setién arrived. The day before his arrival, it was confirmed that Luis Suárez was headed for an operation and would be out for three or four months. Apart from the two strikers that had already been sold, Carles Aleñá, Jean-Clair Todibo and Moussa Wagué had gone too. Setién said no problems as Ousmane Dembélé was on his way back to full fitness and would be “flying”. Then the news broke, and the sense of crisis deepened, on Tuesday that Dembélé will be out for the rest of the season with a ruptured thigh tendon while Luis Suárez is also not expected to be back to full fitness until the final weeks of the season at best.
Such were Barcelona’s predicament on Wednesday morning where only 16 first-team players, which were all they had, were available to travel to Bilbao to face Athletic. Samuel Umtiti had to make his own way there as he had to make a court appearance in the morning, having been accused of causing £170,000 worth of damage to his rental flat. Simultaneously, Ivan Rakitic admitted he was unhappy at how Barcelona had tried to force him out while Arturo Vidal’s agents had already begun legal proceedings over a disputed bonus.
All this happening at the same time? And now suddenly on top of all this to be faced with the possible prospect of losing Messi, so often the man holding Barcelona together in recent years, would indeed be a damned terrifying fear for the club. After all, Messi has a clause in his contract that allows him to leave at the end of the season – and for free.
Attempting to beard this particular lion in his den is where even football angels, were they to exist, should fear to tread. It has to be nothing less than sheer lunacy, and blanket idiocy, for a sporting director, mayhaps inept at his job, to indiscriminately hurl thinly-veiled, acrimonious comments at the player who has openly been hailed as the savior of this once mighty club.
And the ‘Messi the power-behind-the-throne conspiracy theory’?
So what if it holds some elements of truth and he is indeed having a hand in holding the reins of power? A luminary with the GOAT-like stature and status of Messi that the world of international football revolves around certainly deserves some measure of authority and power for all that he has achieved for Barcelona, the one club to whom he has devoted his entire playing career so far.