A lament for Catalonia

Whatever your own club allegiance, if you loved football, you had to love Barcelona

Serial winners, invincibles and other types of footballing untouchables are great fun for the faithful, much less so for the neutrals and the also-rans.

You only have to think of that delightful feeling of collective schadenfreude when the mighty are humbled, to appreciate just how much merriment can be derived when champs are made to look like chumps.

So it tells you a lot about the universal appeal of Barcelona FC that, outside of Bavaria, the dominant tone of the reaction to their crushing Champions League exit was one of pure, unmitigated sadness. In an echo of the position Brazil have traditionally occupied in the international game, Barcelona had risen to an exalted level in recent years, commanding the affection and admiration of millions as the latest, state of the art custodians of the beautiful game. In short, whatever your own club allegiance, if you loved football, you had to love Barca.

So to see them humbled over two legs by Bayern Munich was in many ways a painful experience, leavened only by the fact that Bayern are themselves an intensely thrilling side who fully deserve their place in the Champions League final against Borussia Dortmund at the end of the month. Yet, despite signs throughout this European campaign that Barcelona were becoming increasingly vulnerable, it’s undeniable that there were also mitigating factors at play over the two legs of the semi-final which helped make Munich’s task a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.

Injury to Messi was, of course, the most obvious. Indeed, it’s hardly much of an exaggeration to suggest that, literally hamstrung, his influence on the pitch in the first leg was not a whole lot greater than his influence from the bench in the second. That said, the now popular criticism which holds that Barca are damagingly Messi-dependent strikes me as absurd, as though the club should apologise for having the best footballer on earth on their books and, by extension, bend their efforts to somehow minimising rather than maximising his contribution.

To say that Barca without Messi are a much less potent force is simply to state the obvious about his exceptional talent, but to jump from that to the conclusion that they are therefore some class of one-man band is a leap of monumental folly when you take a moment to consider that the also have in their ranks, to name just two other world-beaters, Iniesta and Xavi.

Also undermining the one-man team theory, is the fact that Barca were already seriously weakened by the absence of warriors like Carlos Puyol, Javier Mascherano and Sergio Busquests – the steel underpinning the team’s signature style. Factor in too, the seismic events of a more personal nature at the club in recent years, from Pep Guardiola’s departure to Eric Abidail’s liver transplant and manager Vilanova’s absence to receive treatment for cancer, and it should be obvious that there has been far more going on with the potential to destabilise things at the Nou Camp than the temporary unavailability of the world’s greatest player.

Yet the big question remains: does it all add up to the end of an era? Gerard Pique had a point when he said this week: “We reached the semi-final of the cup, the semi-final of the Champions League and, looking at La Liga, I would quite like to have an ‘end of era’ like this every year.”

The truth is that the definitive answer as to whether their 7-0 aggregate drubbing by Munich represents an exceptionally bad couple of nights at the office or something closer to, at very least, the beginning of the end, will only become clear when we see how the Catalans respond next season.

And I would suggest it’s similarly premature to talk about a changing of the guard in European club football, however tempting such an analysis might be in light of the fact that we will have an all-German Champions League final at Wembley at the end of the month.

Let’s see who wins it first and if, as many people expect, it’s Bayern Munich who go on to confirm their status as the new power in European football, then let’s further see if they can win it again in 2014 – something not achieved since Milan did it in the old European Cup at the end of the 80s, even Barca in their pomp having failed to land back to back successes.

The magazine ‘World Soccer’ recently conducted a global league survey which, based on criteria including attendances, finances, star players and goals per game, named the Bundesliga as the world’s best, five points ahead of the Premier League and a full 14 points ahead of La Liga in third. Add in the philosophical and structural change which has seen Germany’s international side transformed since the country hosted the World Cup in 2006 and, yes, all the signs would seem to point to a lasting power shift towards the continent’s centre. That would be no bad thing for the game. But if it is to be so, then forgive us if we first allow ourselves a little period of mourning and a lament for Catalonia.