Tommy Martin: Barca and United now trading off memories of glory days
OFF-BROADWAY: Manchester United goalkeeper David de Gea makes a save during the UEFA Europa League play-off first leg match at Spotify Camp Nou, Barcelona. Pic: Isabel Infantes/PA Wire
Watching Barcelona and Manchester United play each other in the Europa League last week put one in mind of the movie Stan & Ollie, in which Steve Coogan and John C Reilly took on the roles of the titular duo touring Britain in their career dotage.
By that stage Laurel and Hardy were trading off memories, reduced to playing provincial music halls to half full houses. But there was still a bit of the old sparkle there and by the end of the tour punters were hanging from the rafters, word of mouth burnishing the showbiz legend for a new generation.
Much like Barcelona and Manchester United, Stan and Ollie fell from grace in their Hollywood heyday thanks to a combination of financial mismanagement and misguided entanglements with unscrupulous associates. Oliver Hardy was also an incorrigible gambler, with the same weakness for useless horses as football’s two fallen giants had for underperforming attackers.
Still, as the once-mighty pair went at it in the Camp Nou last week, older fans nudged their younger neighbours and remarked on how they used to love these two. Ghosts of great games of the past seemed to come alive in the helter-skelter second half, ignoring the insalubrious surrounds of Europe’s secondary competition and reprising the spark and timing of their box office prime.
Before the game, Erik Ten Hag laid it down, as he tends to do.
“It’s the truth — both clubs are in the Europa League,” the United manager said. “Both clubs have the ambition to be in the Champions League and not even just to be in the Champions League. They want to have a real impact in the Champions League.
“But the reality is, we’re in the Europa League and that tells that both clubs needed a reset and I think we are both on a journey and we are both in the right direction.”
But even as the latest step in that reset played out, with the teams coached by Ten Hag and Barcelona’s Xavi recalling glory days gone by, there came reminders of the slough from which they are trying to emerge.
For Barcelona it was the news that Spanish prosecutors were investigating payments made by the club to a company owned by Catalan referee José María Enríquez Negreira, who was vice president of the Spanish referees committee at the time. In total, Negreira’s company received €7m over a period of twenty years, the arrangement only broken off in 2018 in the face of Barcelona’s mounting financial meltdown.
Another fine mess.
The club claimed that the payments were “very normal” and that Negreira was providing little more than guidance to players to ensure that Barcelona would receive “neutral” treatment from referees. A lot of money to pay to get a fair crack of the whip.
The story has blown up in Spain, dividing along the usual tribal lines. Catalan voices claim a carefully timed Madrid plot to destabilise the club as they sit eight points clear at the top of La Liga. Others have come forward to cite occasions when Negreira attempted to use influence. Some claim that, given his lack of actual power, Negreira was getting money for old rope. Mostly there is a tit for tat bunfight, a great dusting off of controversial decisions from the past as evidence of bias against whichever side is making the claim.
The Negreira affair is just another act in the boardroom clown show that has laid Barca low. The club’s decline on the pitch was accompanied by a slew of financial scandals, fraud investigations, shady deals and catastrophically misjudged transfer decisions. This is a club whose president from 2010 to 2014, Sandro Rosell, spent 20 months in prison over money laundering charges before being acquitted in 2019.
His successor, Josep Bartomeu, while almost running the club into the ground, was accused of hiring a social media company to smear some of the team’s biggest stars, Lionel Messi included.
Barcelona’s member-owned structure meant that when the spivs and gangsters came to feast on its soul, they were in the shape of power-hungry Catalan businessmen. Manchester United were afforded no such dignity when the Glazer family slung the famous old club into their swag bag and left it with a mountain of debt.
While fans who protested against the American owners pointed to the dividends that the family sucked out of a club they hadn’t even paid for, what underlay their unease was more than the arcane workings of complex financial instruments. They were feeling used, their beloved club no more than a thing to be squeezed and milked by the forces of untrammelled greed.
Instead of football glory being an end in itself, United had a new master now. Serving that master led them into their own share of unsuitable entanglements, from the feeble reign of Ed Woodward to the stupid and expensive transfer policy that culminated in the return of Cristiano Ronaldo.
But recent events have underlined the success of the club’s true purpose over the last 17 years. The Glazer family stand to realise billions of dollars of profit whichever of the two bids declared last week wins the current auction for ownership of Manchester United. The most likely victor is the puppet of an autocratic state long practiced at using football to push its own foreign policy agenda.
This is all happening just as United have finally stumbled upon a manager with the clarity of thought to restore the club’s original purpose. Alas, evidence of Qatar’s involvement in Paris Saint Germain and the FIFA World Cup suggests vanity and cynicism will once again be the driving forces at Old Trafford if things pan out that way.
Barcelona and Manchester United sharing the European arena will always conjure up golden memories, but both seem strangely faded and worn now from those days when each could fairly claim to be more than a club. The toll of all those bad deals written in their faces, they take to the stage again on Thursday evening, on the trail of the Lonesome Pine.
