Ken Early: Sad truth is Messi has become a problem for Barcelona

The seventh goal was the saddest. Lionel Messi comes back to his own half to get the ball, turns and scans the options. Philippe Coutinho at one o'clock. Lucas Hernandez further back at two, David Alaba stepping forward at twelve. Corentin Tolisso closer, at eleven o'clock. Thiago at eight. Where are all his teammates?

The closest is Frenkie de Jong, across the pitch at nine o'clock. But as Messi tries to pass to de Jong, somebody's big foot suddenly appears to knock the ball away towards Thiago. He had missed Robert Lewandowski sneaking up from six o'clock. Bayern charge forward, Messi decides there's no point in chasing back. Thiago passes to Thomas Müller, who finds Coutinho, who scores easily.

You could criticise Messi for not bothering to run back, and yes, in an ideal world, he would have done. Coutinho, who finished off the counter, started from behind Messi, and his budgie-hearted lack of running power was one of the reasons put about for his failure at Barca. Even Coutinho is now a powerhouse next to the great man.

To focus on the lack of tracking back, though, would be to miss the more important point, which is that there were at least five Bayern players closer to Messi than the nearest teammate. If this had happened 10 years ago when Guardiola was the coach, somebody would have ended up getting sold.

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At 33, Messi remains the best player in Spain by many measures – most goals, most assists, most shots per match, most chances created, etc. He's still the best dribbler in the game, at an age when most players have become too stiff even to try. Compare Messi's performance last week against Napoli – nine dribbles, two shots – with Cristiano Ronaldo's against Lyon – nine shots, zero dribbles.

But these statistics increasingly have the feel of an incantation, something you close your eyes and recite whenever you are confronted with signs of the uncomfortable truth: Messi has become a problem for Barcelona.

The problem is not that he doesn't run any more – he's consistently run less than other outfield players since he was about 26. And it's not that a top team simply cannot carry a player who doesn't press: Barcelona, obviously, have been doing it for years, Real Madrid won four Champions Leagues between 2014 and 2018 with Ronaldo exempted from defensive work.

But if you want to have a player like this, then you need the others to make up for it by working harder. Instead the Barcelona team is full of Messi’s 33-year-old friends who can’t run: Suarez, Vidal, Busquets, Pique. It seems there is nobody at the club with the standing to tell these guys: the dream is over.

Barcelona have not simply forgotten that footballers get old and eventually have to be replaced. They have spent almost €1 billion on players over the last six years. But for some reason, these new players have struggled to integrate.

In this way, the fortunes of FC Barcelona have curiously mirrored the wider fortunes of Barcelona the city. A study published earlier this month by Andres Rodriguez-Pose and Daniel Hardy, scholars at the London School of Economics, looks at why Barcelona, which was until recently considered Spain's economic dynamo, has now been surpassed by Madrid on most economic measures.

The authors’ provocative case is that the decades-long institutional project of boosting Catalan national identity has resulted in Barcelona, once Spain’s most open and outward-looking city, becoming difficult terrain for outsiders. “There is a positive correlation between social class and Catalan-only identity,” they say. “Catalans of a certain class, who speak Catalan at home, marry other Catalans of the same class who also speak Catalan (in addition to sharing similar educational levels), leading to the intensification of an institutional divide-or insider/outsider problem-which has acted as a brake for the promotion of talent, for inclusiveness, and for the development of economic activity.” This was expressed in interview statements like: “Barcelona is governed by just 100 Catalan families”, “There’s a concealed but very strong glass ceiling in the city”, and “Without the ‘right’ Catalan surnames, you are no one in Barcelona”.

It sounds a little like the team, where you have that elite group consisting of Messi and friends, honoured guardians of the unique brand of Barcelona football which has dazzled the world for more than a decade. Then you have the larger transient group, who aren’t so sure of their standing: they may once have thought of themselves as outstanding players, but they must be broken down and schooled in Barcelona’s ways, when they are not fortunate enough to have the Barcelona way encoded in their DNA.

No new player has managed to break into the elite group in years. Sometimes you can understand why. Often the board has signed famous players, big names with stellar reputations, with no idea of how they are going to fit into the team. Antoine Griezmann – where's he supposed to play in a 4-3-3? Philippe Coutinho – he combines brilliantly with fast forwards like Mané and Salah, so we sign him to play alongside Stroller Messi and his good friend, Vegas Suarez?

But you can't keep blaming systemic failure on the shortcomings of individuals. Ousmane Dembele and Frenkie de Jong were made for Barcelona's style: what's gone wrong? An interesting story appeared in L'Equipe at the beginning of March – it disappeared quickly down the memory hole, the world had other things on its mind at the beginning of March – asking: why did the muscles in Dembele's legs keep exploding and ruling him out for months at a time, when he had never been injured at his previous clubs?

The story dismissed the usual rumours: that Dembele had bad habits and a poor diet, that he stayed up all night gaming, and so on. The real reason, it claimed, was that Barcelona’s training did not prepare him for what he was expected to do in matches. In matches, as a winger, he had to sprint all the time, but in training he hardly ever sprinted, because Barcelona training was tailored to the needs of the elite group of old men. The story further claimed that Frenkie de Jong had hired a personal trainer after realising that Barcelona’s training sessions would leave him undercooked for matches.

Such stories should be taken with a pinch of salt: "sources close to Player X claim none of this is Player X's fault". But on Friday night, as you watched the oldest side Barcelona have ever picked for a Champions League match suffer the club's worst defeat since the 1950s, you could see with your own eyes that it was all true. Allowing Messi to set the tempo for the club, in training as well as matches, has been a disaster. Maybe he can still just about win playing at walking pace, but Barcelona are kidding themselves if they think the rest of them can too.

What happens next? Status anxiety at Barcelona must now be intense. The genius that made them special is fading. Threats to their status come not only from Madrid, from Munich, from the Premier League, but also from rich upstarts like PSG and RB Leipzig. As their power slips away, there's never been a better time for Barcelona to remember that football is about more than just winning. The stage is set for a resurgence of community values, "more than a club" rhetoric, a sea of red and yellow stripey flags, Xavi in the dugout and cantera players with good Catalan names out on the field. Such a 'back to basics' strategy would have the additional advantage of affordability.

An emotional final lap for Messi would be a good way to kick off this new era of nostalgic romanticism. He surely will not leave just yet, if only because it seems unthinkable that the greatest career in the history of club football could end like this, with two months of mediocre performances in empty stadium matches, losing the league title and losing 8-2 in his last ever game. But as the lap of honour begins, the time has come to say goodbye to a few old friends.