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Last week in the UEFA Champions League, a Real Madrid side seemingly (but not suddenly) unable to break down a packed defense fell just short of a spectacular comeback against a fluid, in-form Borussia Dortmund. The final score (aggregate after a home-and-away doubleheader) was 4-3; Real scored two of their three in the final ten minutes of the second leg, and if they had scored again they would have won on the away-goals tiebreaker. It was terribly exciting.
But they didn't score again. And anyway, that's not the result that's still on the minds of fans and pundits alike. While the general focus has been on a passing of the "World's Best" mantle from Spain to Germany, it's definitively not the Madrid-Dortmund result still dominating the editorials. No, everyone is talking about the other UCL semifinal. FC Barcelona were absolutely destroyed by Bayern Munich, 7-0 on aggregate. The first leg in Munich ended 4-0 to Bayern. A Bayern win wasn't a big surprise, but the manner in which it was accomplished was a real shock. Regardless of Barca's recent stumbles, prior to their meeting with Bayern they were still considered by many to be the best club side in the world; even the first leg they were still making almost-credible noises about a comeback. By late Wednesday evening, that opinion seemed (as it does now) well and truly dead. Bayern had humiliated Barcelona a second time (in Barcelona), winning 3-0 and strolling through to the Champions League final. I am going to tell you how and why this happened so you don't have to listen to what anyone else says. Germany isn't simply "better than Spain" now, nor is passing football dead. Barcelona has been headed for a fall for quite a while, Bayern have been eyeing/working toward this triumph for a number of years now, and there's a strangely unmentioned x-factor that I'll get to at the end.
On paper, this match looked like an aesthete's dream: Barcelona's possession-and-passing masters against...their closest imitator, a Bayern Munich side indelibly influenced by Dutch manager Louis van Gaal's recent stint in charge. A disciple of the same Total Football movement that (through Johan Cruyff and van Gaal himself) has shaped Barcelona's ideology for decades, the veteran coach set Bayern on the path to a style revolution. In 2013, two years after van Gaal's departure, the numbers speak for themselves: Barca and Bayern are first and second among Europe's club sides in both possession and pass completion. No other side is even close. Both are at the forefront of soccer tactics; they focus on possession, short passing, and pressuring the opponent ceaselessly to win back the ball when it is lost. These two clubs have embarrassed teams regularly this season, scoring goals for fun; Bayern's goal differential is higher than any other Bundesliga side's total goals tally. While Barca remains the best at what they do (keeping the ball so the other team cannot score), they are no longer alone at the top.
Bayern have also improved their squad immeasurably in the past few years, adding star power without compromising their new ideals. Basque defensive midfielder Javi Martinez was coveted by Barcelona but eventually joined Bayern for the eye-watering sum of €40 million. Brazilian center-back Dante Bonfim Costa was bought from Borussia Moenchengladbach for the (comparatively) paltry sum of €4.7 million and is now being named among the world's best at his position. By far the most successful-ever German club, FC Bayern have long been financially secure, fan-owned, and well-run; this is just their latest reloading.
Coinciding with Bayern's rise has been the less-heralded erosion of the once-invincible Barcelona machine (see my previous post on Barca). There are obvious excuses for Barca's loss: midfield master Xavi is aging and increasingly injury-prone, injuries in defense meant youngster Marc Bartra was ruthlessly exposed, and Lionel Messi was not fully healthy. But there is a worrying trend that goes back further and transcends these more immediate concerns.
Paul Morrissey's excellent piece for 101GreatGoals in December shed light on the flaws in Barca's famed cantera system. Their fabled La Masia academy is responsible for almost the entire first-team squad, and the blaugrana made history at the time of Morrissey's article by fielding 11 "home-grown" players at once. Indeed, it is the eerily cohesive, La Masia-schooled nucleus of the current team that is responsible for Barcelona's unprecedented recent success. But Pep Guardiola (architect of the 2009 triumphs) has leaned too heavily on home-grown talent. As Morrissey rightly points out, over-dependence on such an insular system has left the club vulnerable in two ways (the latter clearly amplified by the former).
It sounds simple, but an academy that looks for only certain types of players...is missing out on all the other kinds. La Masia may ceaselessly produce ball-playing midfielders and defenders, but it has serious limitations. For one, it cannot seem to turn out a reliable goalscorer. Lionel Messi is the one exception, but that's pretty much the story of his life; he is the exception that proves the rule.This has left Barcelona starved of goals when Messi is absent (or half-fit, as he was in the first leg). They are left seeking strikers elsewhere, and since the breakup of the great (and more cosmopolitan) 2009 team this approach has borne little fruit. Of the recent signings from outside, only David Villa has (at times) excelled by virtue of his experience with the blaugrana-loaded Spanish national team. Zlatan Ibrahimovic was never accepted, and Alexis Sanchez still has not lived up to expectations.
Likewise, since Carles Puyol there has been a notable shortage of physical players. While Barca's skill means they can still out-pass bigger/stronger teams, they are vulnerable to elite opponents that (like Bayern) marry skill with power and size.
No elite team excels without outside reinforcement, and Barcelona are no exception. They need fewer additions than most teams, but the players that do join are outsiders by definition. They are forced to buy into the Barcelona philosophy or sit the bench (and eventually leave). This oft-hostile environment has led to a string of players failing to settle at the club. Ibrahimovic famously feuded with Messi and then-coach Pep Guardiola (whose departure has surely weakened the club), Dmytro Chygrynsky was shipped off at an embarrassing loss of €10 million. Alex Song, bought for €19 million from Arsenal, has been marginalized and tasked with special defending lessons. The list goes on. These transfers have cost the club money and credibility; players are now more hesitant to move despite the temptation of success. Barca's long-running pursuit of Brazilian striking phenomenon Neymar will likely bring both of these problems to the fore; he is a famously free-wheeling player, and Morrissey rightly points out that his brand of flair may not be as welcome as it was in the days of Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, and Romario, "Because its evolution from an open-door commune for free thinkers into an esoteric ivory tower risks cutting Barcelona off as a closed-off cult." While Barcelona's current method of play is intimidating and effective, it has become predictable.
All the same, these are two teams running away with their domestic league titles. This still should have been a closer game: a passers' duel, a tense cut-and-thrust battle between two teams brimming with skill and creativity. It wasn't. Quickly (see the excellent ESPN FC for a more in-depth summary), here's what it was:
Bayern, now ably managed (in his second spell at the club) by the German journeyman Jupp Heynckes, welcomed Barcelona to Munich with an impeccably drilled Plan B, one that (again, on paper) seemed anathema to their current passing style. Instead they dropped much closer to their goal than usual without the ball, congesting the space in front of the penalty box and forcing Barcelona to play on the flanks. Starved of central space, Barca's effervescent legion of pint-sized playmakers (including a half-fit Lionel Messi) had to resort to lumping aerial balls into the box. That is not their usual game, and such an approach was never going to bear fruit against a Bayern backline marshaled by Germany captain Philip Lahm and the immense Dante.
Despite physically dominating Barcelona, Bayern's usual strengths still manifested themselves. Although they eschewed their full-field pressing game, die Bayern expertly pressed Barcelona when they ventured over the midfield line. Barcelona normally push their defense extremely high (close to the opposing goal), penning opponents into their own half and encouraging faster ball movement by decreasing the space between their players. However, their inability to penetrate into central areas meant their best players (Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi) were forced further from goal then normal. While the previously-described creative stagnation is to blame, Bayern deserve an equal share of the credit. In essence, they compressed the space even further. They doubled down, ceding the possession battle and counting on their physicality and organization to cause mistakes. It did; they won the ball in dangerous positions, counterattacked at terrifying speed with quick combination play, and capitalized on set-piece (corners, free-kicks, etc.) opportunities where their height advantage was at the fore. They devised a game-plan and implemented it to perfection, helped in no small part by Barca's lack of creativity and unpredictability.
Later on, Bayern reverted to their normal possession game to defend the lead, keeping the ball and weaving triangles around Barcelona's strangely lethargic defensive pressure. This is where something surprising became apparent: Barcelona's pressing game is a pale shadow of what it once was. Although it may not be the reason Bayern's tactics worked initially, it certainly allowed them to defend their lead in a strangely comfortable manner. Barcelona simply never looked like coming back. The always-illuminating Michael Cox of ZonalMarking covers this in his tactical discussion of the second leg.
Without knowledge of Barcelona's previous exploits, you might conclude that their squad of ball-players simply isn't as comfortable on defense. And you'd be right. But under the aforementioned Pep Guardiola, this wasn't apparent. The typical Barcelona player is not suited to a rearguard action. He knew his team simply wasn't built to play defense in the conventional way, so he set about devising another.
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One thing that cantera graduates understand is space (and how to use it); their offensive strategy demands an intuitive understanding of where other players are, and Guardiola used this skill in an innovative way. He set his team out to defend in the same way a team of kids would: to chase the ball and win it back ASAP. The obvious difference lay in his team's organization: they pressed as a unit, "passing on" marking assignments as fluidly as they passed the ball while in possession. Their high level of fitness is well-known, but such cohesive pressing has the additional effect of saving energy. Opponents would win the ball only to find themselves instantly swarmed by blue-and-red midgets. Starved of passing options, they would lose the ball, Barcelona's attack would rip through the exposed and out-of-position defense, etc. This happened over and over until teams simply decided (or were forced by exhaustion) to sit back and let Barca have the ball...which was just as suicidal, given that their play in possession is even better than without.
Under Guardiola's hand-picked, in-house successor Tito Vilanova, Barcelona have not been bad. They are winning La Liga at a canter, and they are (after all) in the semifinals of the Champions League. But this defeat undermines the one (ridiculous) knock on Guardiola: that he simply turned loose a golden generation of players, taking advantage of the world's best football development system to enhance his reputation. If Pep was leaning on the Barca "machine," Vilanova should have been able to do the same, even with his lengthy health-related absences this season. Guardiola did much more than his detractors think; he took an unbalanced squad and completely obscured their shortcomings by teaching them a new way to play defense. And while he may have become a bit creepily obsessed with cohesion (he banned the playing staff from using any language other than Spanish and Catalan), his influence is sorely missed on the field.
The next obvious question (in case you don't already know) is, "Why did Pep Guardiola leave such a successful club, especially one whose success he had directly shaped?"
Exhausted by several seasons of nonstop success and with a ready successor waiting in the wings, Guardiola took a year's sabbatical. He recently announced his decision to return to management, to coach a club (like Barcelona) steeped in tradition and (unlike Barcelona) financially secure.
Next year, Guardiola will coach Bayern Munich.
Barcelona's comprehensive defeat is not totally down to Guardiola's absence. There were the aforementioned injuries and age concerns. But he has gone strangely unmentioned in the postmortem, as have the flaws in Barca's over-reliance on the cantera. They forget that when Pep took over the storied club, his in-house promotion (from coaching the B team) had no precedent in recent history. Among top coaches, he was (somewhat perversely) an outsider of sorts. That is what Barca would do well to remember; without outside influence and commitment to innovation, they are destined never to reach the top of Europe again.
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