On Xavi Hernández’s last night as a Barcelona player, he walked out of the Olimpiastadion in Berlin carrying the European Cup in his right hand. It was the 25th trophy he had won with the club and it was over, but only for a little while. He had arrived aged 12 from Terrassa, where the square he played in now has a sign up banning football, and although he was leaving 23 years on he was already planning his return, eventually made on Friday.
At Xavi’s farewell, Andrés Iniesta gave a speech in which he thanked him for “everything you have given this club … and everything you have left to give”. After all, Iniesta said: “Those of us who know you know you’ll be back.” Xavi too was clear: “My objective is to return to this ‘house’, as coach or sporting director. I hope this isn’t a goodbye but a ‘see you later’.” Six years later, as it turned out.
Few managerial appointments have been as preordained, to the extent that although Xavi is only 41 and has no European experience, many feel his return should have happened sooner. Right down to this week: Barcelona had hoped he would be on Thursday’s flight to Catalonia, only to encounter tougher resistance from his club, Qatar’s Al Sadd, than they anticipated, agreement not reached until the following day and until the full release clause was paid. On Saturday morning the club were finally able to announce him as their new manager on a two-and-a-half-year deal.
It is not the only point at which his arrival felt delayed. In January last year, Barcelona’s then CEO, Óscar Grau, and sporting director, Eric Abidal, very publicly flew to Qatar to persuade Xavi to occupy the job he had been preparing himself for. To their surprise, he turned down the chance to be Barcelona manager then, and again in August. Xavi later said he felt he wasn’t ready yet, which was true but was also the polite version. There was little faith in the administration led by Josep Maria Bartomeu, who would be forced to resign as president that October.
On Tuesday night, almost two years on, the new vice-president, Rafael Yuste, and the CEO, Mateu Alemany, made the same trip. This time, it wasn’t so much about convincing Xavi as being seen to do the right thing by his club, Al Sadd, whom he coached for the 97th and, he hopes, final time the following evening, having won seven trophies. Convincing Al Sadd proved unexpectedly complicated but Xavi believes he is ready and Joan Laporta, Barcelona’s new president, says he does now too, the absence of alternatives helping overcome doubts. If Xavi is the only real candidate, he is also one around whom there is consensus.
Xavi is not just the man who played 767 games for Barcelona, nor is he just a coach. He is not even just a symbol, nor is this about nostalgia, although that hangs heavy. He is an ideologue, a defender of the faith. He had to be: “I was extinct; footballers like me were in danger of dying out. It was all: two metres tall, powerful, in the middle, knockdowns, second balls, rebounds …” If it was about survival, the shift was real. The architect of the greatest era Spanish football has had, he won two trebles and the biggest trophy in the world every year for five years – Euros, Champions League, World Cup, Champions League, Euros – and it was not just about what they won but how they won it.
If there is a line that runs from Johan Cruyff to Pep Guardiola, it continues to him. When he left Barcelona the last time, he said he hoped to be remembered as someone who was “football to the bone”, a man who would watch every game in every league and always find something to capture his attention. Talk to him and never mind Barcelona, conversation can go from Portsmouth to Oviedo and back again, a footballing manifesto emerging. “Some teams can’t or don’t pass the ball. What are you playing for? What’s the point? That’s not football. Combine, pass, play. That’s football – for me, at least.”
Jorge Valdano once said: “If football was a science, Xavi would have discovered the formula. With a ball at his feet, no one else has ever communicated so intelligently with every player on the pitch.” He is still searching for that formula, the same ideals driving his coaching as his playing, the same search for spaces, the same pursuit of some idea of perfection. The philosophy is non-negotiable, but it’s not just a theory and he is not just a former player, a face to whom opportunity is gifted. It is six years preparing – “He has more experience than I had when I took over,” Pep Guardiola insists – putting it all into practice. It is drilled, driven, analysed repeatedly.
He is “obsessed with possession”, to use his own words. “He always shows us the possession stats and it’s never enough,” Santi Cazorla, the former Arsenal midfielder now at Al Sadd, told Cadena Ser radio. “His ideas are very clear, always have been. He wants the ball for us, and the opponents not to even touch it.” Xavi tells players: “The ball is not a bomb; it is a treasure.” Last week Laporta conceded: “Maybe we have to recover the essence of our football, which is non-negotiable.”
No one represents that like Xavi and for all the doubts – inevitable given the state the club are in, a preparation carried out in Qatar – no one else could arrive with such universal goodwill. That matters, even if Laporta hasn’t always been sure and there is something a little improvised in this decision, or at least in the timing of it. “I have always said that he would end up being coach of Barcelona; what I didn’t know was when,” the president said this week. Yet in February he had suggested he didn’t think Xavi was ready, later saying he was “unproven”, and that reticence remained.
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“I understand that people say I am not prepared but I am,” Xavi had insisted when he was back in Catalonia in the summer. A clause in his contract with Al Sadd always contemplated a return, facilitating his ability to answer the call when it came. “I am on the market,” he said, yet he also insisted he was “not in a hurry”, that he did not want “a constant debate about whether I could be going to Barcelona”, and had not spoken to Laporta.
This week Laporta was quick to insist that their relationship had not gone “cold” but some distance was probably inevitable, for reasons of politics as much as football. By the time Laporta announced his intention to run for the presidency, Xavi had aligned himself with the candidacy of Víctor Font, for whom he would be a kind of general manager, overseeing an overhaul. That put both men in a difficult position, kept at arm’s length.
Once Laporta threw his hat into the ring, Xavi’s public profile reduced, his role in the campaign largely silent, less active than anyone had anticipated and Font probably needed. He was the central figure in Font’s project but he did not want actively to oppose Laporta, his president in the golden years and a man with whom his relationship had been close. Laporta would make mischievous remarks appropriating him but Xavi was off limits for now and always someone else’s man.
Ronald Koeman was someone else’s man, too, inherited from the Bartomeu administration, but Laporta was stuck with him. He had said the return of Pep Guardiola was his “wet dream” but his candidates were German: Flick, Nagelsmann, Klopp, Tuchel. They were also out of reach. Koeman continued then, and again after the defeat against Benfica when Laporta had wanted to sack him. Again, only the cost and lack of alternatives kept the Dutchman in the job. When Barcelona were beaten by Rayo Vallecano, they decided they had to sack him anyway before the damage got even worse.
“Maybe I should have done it sooner,” Laporta admitted. They didn’t have a replacement ready, Sergi Barjuan becoming the interim manager, but there was a ready replacement: the man who had been there all along. And so at last everything fitted into place. “All” they had to do was re-establish contact, wait until the Qatari season stopped, reach an agreement with Al Sadd and make him theirs again, bringing him home. “Xavi pl ays in the future,” Dani Alves once said. The future was foreseen and it starts now.
