The sporting embarrassment Barça starred in last Saturday night at Granada's Estadio Nuevo Los Cármenes marks perhaps the lowest point for a club that too long ago forgot how to play football among the continental elite. The overwhelming statistics of defeats and draws outside of Camp Nou, the almost permanent tedium of many periods of the matches, despite having one of the best current teams, the tactical confusion in the team where everyone does whatever they want and the lack of technical leadership have laid bare at the first signs of trouble the decision to renew Ernesto Valverde's position on the bench and the huge mistake that was made. The board wanted, surely, to keep an ace up its sleeve in case things didn't go well, but the truth is that they have linked their future to the coach's.
Everyone knows that the Valverde era is over. You only need to go to the stadium every fortnight to hear the constant whispering over all his decisions. A faint-hearted and ego-packed board was incapable of taking the only possible decision if it wanted to send a clear and forceful message to the locker room and the fans. Barça today is a mediocre team who play is lacking, has forgotten what good football is and whose games are enormously boring. While a few years ago you would enjoy every trip to Camp Nou, it's now a long time since that feeling was lost.
The world of sport is capricious and it is possible that the results, which are today very negative, will change. But even so, the football we knew is unlikely to come back. The club needs to rethink everything from top to bottom after the failures at Rome (2017) and Anfield (2018), with its last Champions league dating back to 2015. All that bright past has been squandered, despite investing millions in the lineup. A club in which nobody does what is expected of them and has lost its serious, winning identity.
At this rate, the season will be very long.