BARCELONA – 2020 will be remembered as the year that emptied the stadiums, interrupted all competitions and closed a continental season in an unlikely way, with a Champions League centered in Lisbon that confirmed the undisputed power of Bayern Munich.
In Spain, with its eyes on the two greats, 2020 should be viewed from a different perspective: Madrid regained the league throne after two years and Barça failed, unfortunately, at all stages. Even in the institutional to provoke the resignation of his director.
The year of the covid destroyed all the economic plans in Barcelona and Madrid, but, curiously, Real knew, managed, to withstand the storm with a better spirit, even daring Florentino Pérez to take the team to Valdebebas while advancing in the pharaonic transformation of of a Bernabéu, which in a few months will look bright, while the image of the Camp Nou is more depressing with each passing day, waiting for some cranes that have not yet started work … that have no start date, because Barça is at the edge of financial collapse.
From a sporting point of view, in December the Catalans and the Catalans are halfway between recovery and disaster, without forgetting the collapse that marked the end of last season in which they lost the League after a closing in which could only win seven of the last eleven matches of the tournament, to deliver the title on a set to a Madrid that with or without controversies VAR proved intractable.
2020 was the year of the three Barça coaches, who started with Ernesto Valverde, fired after the defeat in the Spanish Super Cup in January, followed by Quique Setién, already condemned for his disastrous League final and condemned after the historic 2 -8 suffered at Lisbon against Bayern and ends with Ronald Koeman, a legend at the Camp Nou who failed to escape criticism due to the irregularity of the game and the results that his team showed in the first four months of dangerous competition in the League and qualified in the knockout stages of the Champions League as the second place in the group after suffering a terrible loss at home to Juventus, which meant the end of the best historical series of a local team in the tournament.
Eliminated by Athletic in the quarter-finals of the King’s Cup in February, this was the worst year for Barça since 2008, without winning any titles. In the absence of the game that will close the year against Eibar, Barça played 47 games, of which they won only 28 (59.6 percent) and lost 11 (23.5 percent), an absolutely inadequate statistic for him. Barça Club.
Defender of style, committed to a philosophy of the game that is not negotiable, in which the ball is or should be the main protagonist, Barcelona sank into mediocrity without noticing it as the year progressed … until disaster from Lisbon, the historic defeat of Bayern Munich, blew everything up.
Quique Setién was immediately fired and a week later the Messi case broke out, the Argentine star requesting his immediate departure from the club. Bartomeu remained firm in his refusal, alluding to the fact that the clause that allowed him to leave had expired in June and he managed, against all odds, to keep the captain at the club … Although this became the last stone of on the road.
A vote of no confidence encouraged by various groups of partners brought resistance at the end, and the team trembling between good, bad and worst results, the president and his council left early. The storm at Camp Nou was historic in this 2020 and, with good reason, fingers are crossed in the hope of saying goodbye to him once and starting a better life in 2021 … No matter how much he understands that the road will not be easy.
WHITE … BUT NOT RADIANT
If it is said, affirmed and confirmed, that Barça and Madrid, Madrid and Barça, are communicating ships between which disaster and success go hand in hand, it is clear that the smile at the Bernabéu in 2020 was undisguised. As much as Zinedine Zidane, the coach of the three Champions League, had a difficult period, the league title he won in July, winning ten consecutive games after the closure, erased any sense of failure.
All the more so if we take into account the fact that Madrid has won only three league titles in the last ten seasons … And that two of them bear the signature of Zidane, who always ends up responding to critics with results.
The league won in July erased from memory the disappointment, the failure, which led to the elimination in the quarterfinals of the Cup, against Real Sociedad and at the Bernabéu (3-4) and motivated a feeling of happiness that ended, of Dintro date, in August, when Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City left him on the street in the knockout stages of the Champions League … in a tie that had started in February losing at home 1-2 and could not be beaten in England, where the citizens they won again by the same result.
It was not a 2020 round at all in Madrid, but the collapse of Barça limited, and not a little, the damage around the Bernabeu with a team waiting for the last game of the year against Elche played 48 matches with 32 victories (66.6 percent) and 10 losses (20.8 percent).
Madrid closed the year with a good grade, it could be said that it was approved at a high level, thanks to the league title won and entered in 2021 at the top of the standings, on an equal footing with Atlético and well over a Barça that defeated him in the classic played at the Camp Nou and condemned his step to the knockout stages of the Champions League as group champion.
It is rightly said that Zidane is a lucky coach … While Ronald Koeman, a legendary character from the Barcelona imagination, continues to look for that luck that eluded him on too many occasions.
2020 will be remembered as the year of the coronavirus, the year that emptied the stadiums … And it tore down a Barcelona that started with the loss of the Spanish Super Cup in Arabia, followed with the worst failure in its history in Lisbon and ended up without a president. The worst impossible. It is not strange that at the Bernabeu the smile was undisguised.