Barcelona have come from a period, the Pep Guardiola era, where the team was set up in a very structural way. Everybody knew what they had to do, apart from one who could do whatever he wanted and that’s because he was Lionel Messi.
Everybody had obligations and more importantly they had a manager who told them what to do every single day in training.
So all the sessions were geared to that kind of football and that’s why they created a style that is for 2050, the football of the future.
Tito Vilanova came in, he knew what he had to do but he got ill so couldn’t impose his authority, the team relaxes… and Bayern Munich take over. A new coach comes in Tata Martino and he has ideas to make it a little bit different.
But, Martino has only watched Barcelona all these years on television so he’s having to learn as he goes along. On top of that, his alternatives are actually the main problem for Barcelona. If you want to play a much more direct game to benefit Neymar, Cesc Fabregas, Pedro, Alexis Sanchez, where is the high pressure?
If you don’t pressurise high up the field it means you have to defend like any other team, you have to defend in your own box, and we all know Barcelona are not perhaps as good as other teams at defending in their own box.
They have centre-backs who are short or who are there because they can play the ball, that’s the style they are used to. If you get another centre-back to play alongside Gerard Pique or you get a defensive midfielder like Yaya Toure and a striker like Mario Mandzukic, then you can play a more direct style.
But now we see that Barcelona are trying to keep some of the essence of passing, while adding some alternatives and gaps are being created. Martino was offered two defenders in the summer – David Luiz and Daniel Agger – but he said no. He was like a rabbit in the headlights at having to choose because he had just got to the club and wanted to give the players time.
He thought, ‘Carles Puyol, we can get him back’ and he played younger players like Marc Bartra, but why Barcelona haven’t bought another centre-back over the years remains a mystery.
Martino is a clever guy and being the coach of Barcelona is not just about tactics, it’s about managing the group and he’s doing well in that respect. He’s rotating the squad, he’s sat Messi on the bench, and replaced him in games so he’s doing things others didn’t.
He’s doing a lot of good but he needs to understand Barcelona and that either takes a long time or never happens. In the meantime, with the changes he’s made, with the players they’ve got, it’s made the team worse.
Guillem Balague is the UK correspondent for AS and a Spanish football expert for Sky Sports as well as an author of biographies on Pep Guardiola and Lionel Messi.
