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Fast one touch passes whizzing beneath confused feet as stars rush past in a beautifully correlated and controlled attack. It’s 2009 and Barcelona is in the heat of what would later be known as their prime. The team features big names like Lionel Messi, Thiery Henry, Iniesta, Eto’o, and many more. Together they were unstoppable. Fast forward to today and one of the members of that squad is now Barcelona’s head coach and the team is slipping back into poor form and back down the table. Xavi seems to have a plan reminiscent of his once great team but Barcelona are struggling to adapt it. The Cathedral may have fallen but Xavi’s plan has the potential to be a major rebuild, or just a failed nostalgia trip.
The tactics behind what some argue as the best team in football history were at a first glance deceivingly simple. Quick organized passes pushing the ball up the field both maintained possession and generated attacking opportunities that were hard to stop. Beyond just quick passes the movement of players was very unique for its and shows traces of what Guardiola would develop into positional play. Tiki taka is often diminished to fast passes but the foundation that this style of play is based on is an interactive and controlled one. Positions players have to keep and move around in is carefully coordinated to best fit the foundational ideas of the strategy.
All of these characteristics, positions, and strategies all relied on one thing; the players. It is absolutely undeniable that the stars in this team were crucial to the team's success and the ability for the strategy to land. Quick passes and thought out positioning can be executed by many but none will be anywhere near as successful because the ability to win one on wins, read a pitch, and be able to make split second decisions can seldom be taught. Players like Thiery Henry have an incredible ability to move around the opposition as an individual, in modern cases we see many players forced to take on the burden of an entire team or we see in the case of teams composed of only superstars have disharmony. So having a team of successful individual players worked well for the 2009 team but modern teams fall into disarray with star studded squads, so how was Barcelona able to achieve this the answer is in the foundation of the strategy.
The very foundation of these quick passes and controlled positioning is unity. A unified squad is built into everything the team did from practices to matches the center of everything was the team and a dedication to it. The central aspect of tiki taka is connection, which then gives the ability for the team to use one touch passing to move past opponents. It's in teams like PSG who sign individually talented players but lack a central strategy where we see individuals harm and not help the group effort. Unity is essential to any strategy and the greatest teams are exactly that teams.
Fastforwarding past years of development collapse and redevelopment we reach modern Barcelona. Xavi’s first full season as manager was largely a success from winning the Supercopa to winning the league for the first time in a long time. The 2022-23 season was an early example of what the new coaches strategy would be. Xavi used older players like Busquets to anchor a strategy very closely based in positional play, originally many believed Xavi would try to reinstate tiki taka but instead he moved towards the more modern trending rendition. This strategic decision also came with the signing of striker Lewandowski who had been at Bayern Munich who used a very positional play esc style and at the very least built up to pass up to the striker. These moves along with starting to bring in younger Barcelona academy players worked very well for the team and granted them a refresh they desperately needed.
The older players kept on by Xavi made his first season great but they were never meant to stick around. Towards the end of the 2022-23 we saw more and more young homegrown players starting on the pitch, at the same time we also saw clean sheets go down and some of the confidence in Xavi started to shake. The ideology behind the transition makes sense, the older players were only ever meant to be swappable anchors to train in the younger ones while still maintaining a stable team. The issue is it all had to happen in one season and in that season there wasn’t enough time or games to train them into a style of play that historically takes a very long time. This season we’ve seen some struggles with these younger players who have now all been forced into this situation and now continue to struggle.
Prime Barcelona along with Xavi’s current team both have one thing in common: they both use their academy players a lot. This dependency on their academy is one of Barcelona’s greatest strengths, it gives them all a baseline of unity from being raised in similar styles. In 2009 the team was more likely to branch out and when they did the strategy was well maintained, in the modern day however the influx of academy players seems to have diluted the abilities of the non-academy players. Lewandowski has pretty severely fallen off in terms of goals and a large aspect of this is because, based on passing stats, he receives the ball less. The overall tactical mix match has highlighted some squad issues.
It’s clear that Xavi’s strategy, one sharing similarities both in the foundation and in the central players, takes a lot from the golden age he was such a big part of. That being said, a new era brings new issues and one of the biggest issues in the modern day was one of the greatest strengths in 2009; unity. Barcelona this season has been woefully disorganized, from the struggle to adapt the positional play after the transition to the disorganization between academy and non-academy players. It all tracks back to a general lack of unity.
In the end Xavi’s plan isn’t to rebuild the Cathedral, it's a plan to reinvent it. Plans take time and the bumps Barcelona are running into now aren’t defining or anything more than just bumps to be expected. There really aren’t many other coaches that are even available to take Xavi’s spot and while yes the team is struggling it is far from a downfall. If fans continue to expect a rebirth of the Cathedral in just a few seasons they may never see anything like it again.
