Parco on Passeig de Gràcia does the best sushi in Catalonia, or at least the most famous. If the Vatican has white smoke, FC Barcelona had a delivery man in a white helmet get off his motorcycle and press the buzzer at Joan Laporta’s penthouse at the top of Diagonal. It was just before 11pm on April 24 and he was holding an embossed brown paper bag containing the takeaway food that at that moment became a symbol of celebration and agreement, with the scene excitedly broadcast live. The restaurant got free publicity and Barcelona had a new coach, the same as the old one.
For a few hours the crowd outside had watched people arrive, a show playing out in public as they pleased. It had started in San Joan Despí and the outcome was uncertain, but they had gone to the president’s house. Outside, journalists saw Xavi turn up, reverse into a too-small parking space, drive out again and look for another one. They had seen Deco, the sporting director; Rafa Yuste, the vice president; and Alejandro Echevarría, who has no post but has a lot of weight. They had seen Bojan Krkic through the intercom. There had also been occasional false alarms. But now they knew.
It was done: Xavi continues anyway, let’s order a takeaway.
It was reversed a month later. The coach who extended his contract in September, resigned in January and was convinced to continue in April, was fired in May. The same people, the same president, who celebrated him then – all big hugs and smiles, some tears too – have slipped into the knife. After avoiding him for ten days and informing him behind his back, Laporta finally faced Xavi on Friday afternoon and told him it was over. The meal with which they staged their get-together – some even called it the sushi pact – now seems a symbol of something completely different.
Related: Barcelona plan to hire Hansi Flick as coach after telling Xavi his time is up
It could also be not only the best takeaway in Barcelona, but also the most expensive. The next morning, Xavi insisted that if he had walked away, as he said in January, he “would not have taken a single euro: the money from my contract would have been there for the next manager”. But that was then, this is now. That was his dismissal, because his head needed it; This is them firing him just a month after asking him to stay and 10 days after leaking that they were getting rid of it after all. He may now feel entitled to demand the €20m (£17m) owed; Barcelona cannot afford twenty million euros.
Replacing Xavi with Hansi Flick isn’t really the problem – many would welcome that decision, even more so after the last nine months. It’s more the way it happened, and to whom. Xavi Hernández played 767 times for Barcelona, the captain of the club that won everything, an ideologue, defender of their football faith. And although it is quickly forgotten, the coach who won the league last season. But like Ronald Koeman and Lionel Messi before him, he now has to go and that hurts him. That’s not to say Xavi is entirely flawless, much less that his team was brilliant.
None of this ever felt quite right, holes in almost everything almost everyone has said, a lack of conviction in almost every word and decision.
When Xavi announced he was resigning, he described the manager’s job as “cruel and unpleasant”. He talked about the emotional impact of it, about mental health. He saw no point in continuing; this was not life. He felt undervalued, that his work was not recognized. Listening to him, the lasting emotion was sadness: because the job was all he’d ever wanted, he’d come to feel like it was just wrong.
While Xavi that within the usefully vague concept of the entorno – The Barcelona environment, with its swirl of politics, press and pressure – he knew this wasn’t just something external. He knew that the criticism, the toxicity he felt so strongly, also came from within. He could not be aware that the pressure was mounting, that voices within him were urging him and that his possible dismissal was becoming more and more real. After one game, the president had a tray of vol-au-vents flying. His team really wasn’t playing well; Voices close to the president suggested they might do that with someone else.
In that context, his dismissal could be seen partly as preemptive pride. And there was no attempt to talk him out of it, not yet. The bottom line, however, was that he had done this, not her.
Xavi told Laporta he would sit out the season and then go. “It is a formula that I have accepted because it is Xavi who proposes it and he is a Barcelona legend,” said Laporta. Those were not the words of a man who was convinced and prepared to take action if necessary: Rafa Márquez was in place to come out of the B team and take over. Although Xavi kept saying that the team was better now precisely because he said he would go, he never really explained why and it didn’t sound convincing. Or rather, it is precisely what it sounded like: like a man convincing himself he did the right thing, or tried to do it.
But Barcelona did improve. The criticism subsided and the coaching experience was more pleasant, as if a ceasefire had been declared. The threat of dismissal disappeared. People asked him to think about it again, with increasing insistence. Xavi kept saying that nothing changed until it did: he kept saying he would leave at the end of the season – yes, even if he won the Champions League – but the tone changed and he quietly announced that moving on might not be so bad. As for Barcelona, they had not found a replacement, although Flick remained in their thoughts and they soon said publicly that they would try to convince Xavi to stay.
Privately, some close to the president weren’t sure. On the morning of April 24, there were suggestions that this was the end. Instead, the meeting with Deco in San Joan Despí was postponed and continued at Laporta. There Barcelona convinced Xavi to stay, that’s how it goes. The story is not as one-sided and simple as it was sold: he convinced them too and was now eager to move on. All it took, Laporta said, was for them to “look each other in the eye”; it had taken “two, three minutes,” Xavi said. When it was done, someone said this called for a celebratory dinner, so someone did.
At the press conference the next day to announce the U-turn that everyone already knew about, Xavi said: “Correcting your mistakes is what wise men do.” The word he and Laporta repeated was: illusion: hope, enthusiasm. They talked about trust, confidence, ambition, a winning project, which the president said was already the case. They said how much they loved Barcelona, how united they were in it, that that was all that really mattered.
“This is good news: we are pleased to accept his decision to change his mind,” the president said. There was a moment when the president choked up and paused as he tried to say that Barcelona “could be proud of the coach we have”. Applause rang through the room and the two men hugged each other, with big smiles on their faces and a hint of tears in their eyes. “I was always clear that I wanted Xavi to continue,” he said. “Stability is very important for success.”
The next time they sat down together, Laporta fired him. The president, an emotional man surrounded by many voices, expressed his unhappiness with the fact that Xavi gave a more pessimistic assessment of Barcelona’s economic and sporting situation, publicly admitting that next season it would be difficult to deal with Madrid to compete. In doing so, Laporta felt that this contradicted the agreement made that evening at his flat to project a united, positive message, and contradicted the enthusiasm they had expressed the next day , all the talk about a project that could win. Despite all the difficulties, Laporta believed that Barcelona had made a huge effort to supply Xavi with players, spending more than €250 million during his time as manager.
Yet there was also something simpler going on: the conviction had never been complete, the doubts were never far away and the end of the season offered them the right moment to take action. More importantly, they now saw that the upgrade they had sought but been unable to obtain since January could actually be completed.
Xavi had lasted a month; He had been waiting for the past ten days, knowing his time was up because he had heard it on the radio but failed to get anyone to actually tell him. He was left abandoned and alone, except for the fans at Montjuic who chanted: “Xavi yes, Laporta no!” – and he said he didn’t like that much either. It was over. Despite the whole show, despite everything they had looked into each other’s eyes, it had meant nothing; there had been no winners that Wednesday evening in April. Except Parco on Passeig de Gracia.