At Barcelona, Life After Lionel Messi Is Haunted by the Past

BARCELONA — Even by the most charitable estimate, Camp Nou is hardly more than a 3rd whole by the time the groups stroll on to the subject. The Champions League anthem blares, drowning out the slender applause that experienced greeted the players. Enthusiasts pockmark row upon row of sunshine-bleached seats, stretching into the sky, lost in the extensive stadium.

On the much side, Barcelona’s motto, its statement of self — més que un club — is spelled out in the seats. As the players fan out, taking their positions, the lettering is nonetheless readable.

To the left, in the arena’s next tier, the place there was after a club sponsor’s emblem, a yellow patch has unfold. Nobody has bothered to switch the seats that after broadcast the firm identify. Rather, the club has just painted the types around them the same shade, redacting the branding, leaving a blotch that is supposed to erase the previous but acts only as a reminder.

There are, in Barcelona’s protection, mitigating situations for the attendance. It is only a 7 days or so because Catalonia’s authorities decreed that the stadium could run at comprehensive capacity in a city emerging cautiously from the coronavirus pandemic, possibly lots of supporters are not completely ready to return.

Rates are significant, as well — as superior as they used to be they are not, it looks, efficiency-linked — and for now there are not practically as quite a few travellers, building their long-awaited pilgrimages to Camp Nou, well prepared to shell out them. Locals might have struggled with the timing, too: An early-night kickoff time on a Wednesday has intended a hurry to get to the stadium immediately after work.

Latecomers, at some point, drive the crowd’s dimensions to 45,000 or so, but this does minimal to improve the environment or the impact. This is a vital activity for Barcelona: Failure to defeat Dynamo Kyiv would signify, for the initial time given that 2003, that it most possible would not make it to the knockout phases of the Champions League.

That failure would harm additional than just the club’s pleasure. The crew was, according to its main executive, Ferran Reverter, “technically bankrupt” in March. It desires the cash flow from a deep operate — as deep as it can go, in any case — in the Champions League. And for that, it requires its enthusiasts.

But nevertheless they did not occur, just as they experienced not arrive to the league recreation versus Valencia a number of days before. Even income for this weekend’s Clásico, the take a look at of archrival Serious Madrid, have been sluggish. Camp Nou made use of to be the hottest ticket in city. Barcelona was the team absolutely everyone required to check out. It is a a lot a lot less desirable prospect now that all it can offer is the possibility to bear witness to the drop, to the stark truth of lifetime right after Lionel Messi.

Outside the house Camp Nou, on the tranquil streets of Les Corts — the neighborhood dominated by and synonymous with the club and its stadium — that truth has not fairly sunk in. The stalls hawking Barcelona merchandise and the stores stuffed complete of unofficial blaugrana souvenirs are continue to adorned with his name, his encounter.

There are Messi jerseys: this season’s and last season’s and further again still. There are Messi bobbleheads. There are Messi pencil cases and crucial rings and magnets. There are haunting, uncanny dolls that search like some sort of votive Messi. Taken jointly, it amounts to a clearance sale of Barcelona’s latest memory. It is very simple economics, of training course — they have the stock, so it all should go — but it is a continuous, aching reminder, as well, of what Barcelona had, and what it dropped.

Just at times, nevertheless, there are glimpses of some thing diverse, a need to glance forward, rather than back again. Supplied all that Barcelona has endured in excess of the final yr — from the callous farewell to Luis Suárez to the reduction of Messi, a journey that encompassed the dismissal of a president, a fractious election, money calamity, a ongoing fealty to the European Super League as conceived by Florentino Pérez, Real Madrid’s chairman, and all fashion of embarrassments along the way — the thought that this might be a position of assure would seem unlikely.

And still, someway, it is. Messi aside, the most frequent name on the jerseys outside the stadium is that of Frenkie de Jong, the 24-yr-aged Dutch midfielder. His facial area beams out from a vast billboard, curving close to the facade of Camp Nou, alongside that of the other good hope for the team’s coronary heart: Pedri, an 18-year-previous of exceptional poise, signed for $6 million from Las Palmas.

When the groups were being announced before the Champions League video game on Wednesday, the last identify to be read obtained the loudest cheer by much. Pedri may be lacking mainly because of an injury, but Gavi, a 17-yr-outdated with only a handful of appearances beneath his belt, commences. Gavi is so youthful, so new, that the counterfeiters have not nevertheless started to churn out replicas of his jersey.

There is a cheer, too, midway by way of the 1st fifty percent, when Ansu Fati appears on the sideline to heat up. Fati is 18, on the way back from a season shed to damage, but he has already been forged as the club’s savior.

In the slick video the club developed very last 7 days to promote its prepare for a $1.7 billion refurbishment of Camp Nou and its surroundings — a challenge identified as Espai Barça, and one thing Barcelona officers insist will not jeopardize the club’s fragile monetary problem — the remaining scene is a laptop rendition of a Clásico held in the new stadium. (For some motive the match is in the Champions League, relatively than La Liga.)

As the tunes swells, a commentator bellows that Fati has scored the profitable goal. Following Messi still left, the club upgraded Fati’s squad quantity. This yr, he wears the No. 10. None of this iconography is delicate.

Not extensive just after the Kyiv game, the club’s president, Joan Laporta, moved a stage closer to producing that animation a truth, confirming that Fati experienced signed a new agreement. That was the uncomplicated bit, of system — less complicated than revamping the stadium — but it was still a action in the proper course. The new agreement ties Fati to Barcelona right up until 2027.

Pedri experienced agreed to a person of his individual only a few months back he will be here until eventually 2026, at least. Equally of them have agreed to launch clauses — the sum at which Barcelona would efficiently be forced to offer them — that stand at $1.16 billion apiece. Laporta is decided not to repeat the mistakes of the preceding regime, the kinds that misplaced Neymar and, in the conclusion, Messi.

These younger players, Barcelona is aware of, are its future. With Pedri, Gavi, de Jong and Fati — as nicely as the likes of heart again Eric García, the Uruguayan defender Ronald Araújo and Sergiño Dest, the Dutch-born United States fullback — an define of a crew is setting up to emerge, a sketch of what tomorrow could glance like.

But still, Barcelona is not really completely ready to enable go, to settle for that a person period is in excess of and yet another will have to start out. In the same online video, the 1 endorsing the stadium that befits Barcelona’s standing as the “best club in the earth,” the personal computer-created workforce that requires the industry is led out by Sergio Busquets, its present-day captain. Espai Barça is scheduled to be concluded in 2025. By then, Busquets will be 37.

For now, this is a club caught amongst two worlds, trapped in the no-man’s land between the comfort and ease of the earlier and the promise of the long term. Barcelona conquer Dynamo Kyiv, barely, thanks to a goal from a different member of the aged guard, Gerard Piqué, but it labored all evening to do it. There was muted applause at the conclude: not the celebration of a victory, but aid at an additional pitfall averted.

Barcelona may possibly still — just — qualify for the Champions League knockout rounds in the spring, but no person seems to be enjoying it incredibly a lot, this treading of water, this wishing the times away, this sad purgatory of now.

What will come future, everybody is familiar with, will most very likely not stay up to what came before. Tomorrow will not be really as fantastic as yesterday. They will be selling Messi jerseys outdoors this stadium for years to arrive. But there is hope, even so trim, that it will be ample, at least, to attract the crowds as soon as much more.