After 63 days in a metaphorical ICU, starting in August with Futbol Club Barcelona's humiliating defeat against Bayern Munich (2-8) at the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon in the quarterfinals of the Champions League, and continuing until this Tuesday, the club president Josep Maria Bartomeu and his board of directors have submitted their resignation. The repeated leaps of faith since August 14th, the day that Bartomeu should have resigned immediately, embarrassed by a season in which the club bordered on ridicule, have been useless. But far from doing that, he planned a new season as if nothing at happened and tried to gain time, first with a new coach, then a promise to bring the elections forward to next March and finally trying to dodge a motion of no confidence by taking refuge in the situation generated by the coronavirus pandemic. The career of a seemingly driverless vehicle ended this Tuesday in the worst possible way: alone, discredited in football terms, in confrontation with such iconic players as Leo Messi and Gerard Piqué and distanced from a squad that under his mandate has been getting smaller and smaller despite hundreds of millions of euros in signings being squandered, without any of them being able to justify the expense.
The Bartomeu cycle has closed before the vertiginous prospect of being scandalously defeated in the no-confidence motion, which was to have been held on 1st and 2nd November. The excuses that the board can offer from now on are of little use and will not end up convincing anyone after the action by nearly 20,000 members who, in almost impossible conditions - with the stadium closed and the pandemic beginning to erupt again - wrote their signature below the motion as required, leaving no room for doubt as to the position of the mass of Barcelona supporters. What is urgent now is for the interim manager to agree with the Catalan government on the necessary protocols for holding the elections and for them to be held as soon as possible so that the period of provisional management is not prolonged.
Barça needs to start a new cycle after the paralysis of recent times, when the spotlight has been more on events in the offices than on those on the pitch. More on spying on players to discredit them than on bringing together a group of footballers that felt like a winning team; or by denigrating the symbolic stars of the Barcelona club in an attempt to reduce the admiration that the fans feel for them. More on protecting itself via a docile press in exchange for promotion than accepting criticism when it was justified. And more on abandoning the approach used by a great club to turn into a timid and mediocre entity. There will be time to assess the candidates who may run for president, but there is no doubt that a mere cosmetic change by those who have governed the Barça organization for the last decade will not be enough to lift the club out of the pit in which the last board has left it. The club needs a revolution, a real injection of fresh air, to recover the spirit of a winning team and a board that knows what it has in its hands, one that combines experience with the new challenges of an economic situation in which resources will have to be to generated at a very difficult time.
PS: On a day that did not have the exceptional news of the resignation of the president of Futbol Club Barcelona, these lines would have been dedicated to the party held in Madrid attended by four Spanish cabinet ministers, the top leadership of the Popular Party and Ciudadanos and the mayor of Spain's capital. In all, nearly a hundred people enjoyed the evening a few days after the state of alarm had been decreed and a curfew was introduced. There are no words to describe what it means as an example transmitted to members of the public who are losing their jobs or watching their businesses going bankrupt because of the coronavirus. For the person at the head of this long list of personalities to be the Spanish health minister Salvador Illa is the epitome of the disappointing response of a political class which preaches forceful measures for everyone at all times and then races to do the opposite for itself.