The unusual and unexpected goodbye to Gerard Pique (Unusual at this stage of the season and due to the immediacy between the announcement and his last match at the Camp Nou, this Saturday) it has become a viral phenomenon. It responds to the footballer’s own personality, an expert in managing his image and now applied to projecting a perception of seriousness and commitment towards a future that, in view of what was expressed in the farewell video, is a “see you soon” to waiting for his self-confessed ambition to become president of the entity to come true.
Piqué is going his way and after a few convulsive months in every way. After having been a key player in the previous season, his role in the Barça first team has been laminated in such a way that, despite his desire to remain active, he has been seen relegated to the status of fifth or sixth centre-back. There is no doubt that Piqué has been accompanied to the door, although it was he who decided when and how he crossed the threshold behind which he leaves behind his professional life as a football player. There were plenty of reasons to consider that the time had come to take this step. His performance no longer had any correspondence with having the highest salaries in the workforce, which weighed like a slab in the tight finances of the club. And episodes such as those revealed in his conversations with the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) exposed a situation of more than doubtful compatibility between his status as a businessman with business with the RFEF and an active athlete. But they have been the repeated messages launched from the same club, finished off by the words of Joan Laporta on the refusal of the captains to lower the record, those who have put the team captain in the trigger, in a campaign of harassment and takedown that led to some notorious boos. Everything has ended with a goodbye that she has wanted to direct without the intervention of the club and projecting her gaze to the presidential box. Nothing new in a club that in most cases has not known how to dismiss the idols of the fans with dignity. From Cruyff to Messi, passing through Guardiola.
The board now breathes a sigh of relief and it seems that it is preparing to dedicate the space left free by Piqué in the salary limit to address new signingsinsisting on the course set in this second era of Laporta: continue raising the stakes, canceling out-of-orbit contracts inherited from the disastrous past of the board of Joseph Maria Bartomeu but signing in turn new signings with which he incurs an expense that has little relation to the economic reality of the club. A risky strategy that can make the virtuous wheel start to roll in which investment in talent on the pitch leads to sporting successes and these, to economic ones, or become a leap into the void if the former do not arrive. And so far they have not done so, with a real disaster in European competitions.
The price to pay is disposal of club assets, those euphemistic levers, which compromise the entity’s assets and, beyond that, its decision-making autonomy. If in other times the danger for Barça was to be subject to political interference, in this new scenario it runs the risk, even without reaching the unwanted horizon of its conversion into SAD, of being left at the mercy of the economic commitments made.