Thread by @DianaKristinne

I have multiple Barcelona related thoughts that aren't necessarily connected to each other so I'll try to make a thread to see if I can make sense of them.

First of all: I think the current CL obsession engulfing the club and fanbase is kind of unhealthy and reminds me of pre-Decima Madrid. *Everything* is seen through the perspective of the CL.

Every game becomes a search for clues as to how the team will do in the CL. The Cup is seen as a nuisance because last year we somehow reached the unshakable conclusion that the cup run was why we lost to Roma and not the fact that we thought we had won the tie

and thus didn't turn up for the game with anything resembling a decent mental setup. I said this last year and I'll probably die on this hill fighting with the entire fanbase, but the reason we lost to Roma or drew with Valencia now or whatever other bad result you connect to the

cup is for me much deeper and painful if you want: the team doesn't play well. There are games, here and there where you get all excited and enjoy the team and everything and then the next game comes along and knocks it out of you again.

Will the team that played well at Wembley and the Meazza turn up for the rest of the CL games? I have no idea. Maybe. Hopefully. But whether they do or not will not be because of minutes played in January.

And even then, except for Alba, all the "irreplaceable" players played the least minutes of the last 4 years this season.

https://twitter.com/Barca19stats/status/1091413734373933056

So my main problem isn't counting the amount of minutes or saying that they shouldn't compete for every competition. I think that a club with our budget and standing in the game has no argument to just not compete for something. If you don't believe me ask Pep.

I don't think we should be obsessed with the CL as we are. Yeah, Leo's words didn't help and it's obviously an objective and Madrid winning it 3 times in a row while we got knocked out in the QF has made everyone even more insane than usual.

But the focus should be playing well and trying to compete and get the best we can in every game. Maybe the fact that we don't have amazing and beautiful football to watch every 3 days makes people focus on the objectives more.

If we're not having fun or enjoying it today we turn the focus on the long term, thinking that if we go through all of this there better be some pot of gold at the end of the road.

Other than that... The Twitter Culerverse continues to do its thing: when the team gets a bad result everyone gets a chance to blame the person they don't like.

We all have our biases and shouldn't deny them in the quest for some sort of objectivity claim. Fandom itself is biased so it's ok.

For Barcelona this is even more pronounced than in other cases maybe, because it's also connected to the politics of the board and the memory of the best team to ever play the game.

Every player becomes a pawn in this, as a part of the ideological battle or the political one. Rakitic is perhaps the clearest example in this. This isn't his best year, obviously, but he hasn't been worse than Busi from a personal performance POV IMO.

The difference of the analysis around them is history and Busi being "one of ours" and Ivan not being that, no matter what he does. If Busi plays bad it's because of the people around him, his coach and whatever else. If Ivan plays bad it's because he's not a "Barca midfielder".

I don't have some sort of deep tactical insight into all of this. All I know is that Barcelona has won the CL when it has played well and been the best team in Europe. We might be helped by the fact that everyone seems to be semi-bad from a superclub perspective.

But we still have to get to the point of playing well and doing it at least semi-consistently. I don't know what the solution is. I'm not sure there is an easy solution, like "move X here, don't ever play Y, always play Z".

Personally I'm just sad that I'm not enjoying watching the team play. I just want that feeling back. It could make up for not winning everything or the occasional bad result. It should be about the journey, not the destination. That's how I see it at least.

Gonna end this here because I've rambled on long enough and managed to depress myself even further on a Monday morning.

Have a great week everyone! 🤣