Barcelona ponder grim future after Champions League exit

THE future rather than the past was on the minds of worried Barcelona fans yesterday after the Spanish football giant’s Champions League exit less than 24 hours before.

Barca crashed out of the quarter-finals 3-2 on aggregate to Juventus after their 2-1 loss in the Nou Camp on Tuesday.

"Now it is time to call the elections," said the Barcelona-based sports daily El Mundo Deportivo, demanding a new club president in place of the incumbent Enrique Reyna.

Its rival Sport concurred with a similar clarion call. "Elections Now! Reyna is obliged to call an election."

Barcelona's departure from Europe's premier club competition means that for the fourth season in succession there will be no trophies added to the sizeable room in the Nou Camp where momentos of past achievements are displayed.

The pill of disappointment has been made even more difficult to swallow as their bitter rivals Real Madrid have swept all before them.

By contrast, Barcelona languish down in 12th and could finish in the lower half of the Spanish first division for the first time since 1942.

The Catalans are only five points off sixth place, which would see them into the UEFA Cup next season, but Sport envisaged Barca maintaining their unbroken streak in European competition since 1959 in a slightly more ignominious manner for a club of its grandeur.

"Goodbye to Europe. Hello to the Intertoto," was the cartoon comment above a caricature of two lamenting 'Cules' the Catalan name for Barca supporters.

El Mundo Deportivo warmed to its theme that there needs to be wholesale changes in a hard-hitting editorial.

"The supporters of Barcelona deserve a club very distinct from the one that they have had for the last three years, the darkest and worst period in the history of the blue-and-clarets.

"Until now the Champions League kept alive a vague dream .... but with the pain, the disappointment and the cruel goodbye of yesterday we can at least start to construct a future," commented the newspaper's editor Santi Nolla.

The future though will have to be a solvent one.

In February, Barcelona was estimated by the financial magazine Mercado De Dinero to be a staggering 230 million euros in debt, a figure the club did not challenge.

Many of the problems stem from last season when 95.14 million euros was spent on players some of whom, like Brazilian midfielder Fabio Rochemback and French defender Philippe Christanval, have proven to be costly flops.

Without income next season from the lucrative Champions League there is little likelihood that inroads will be made into the debt without radical measures. A summer sale of players is already anticipated.

Several of Barca's Dutch contingent, including Patrick Kluivert and Marc Overmars, have already expressed an interest in playing in the English Premiership next season.

Another solution might be to sign up a shirt sponsor for the first time in the club's history.

"I would never have a shirt sponsor. Tradition demands that the colours are not besmirched by a commercial name," said the former president Josep Nunez in 1999. Nunez reigned at the club between 1978 and 2000.

However, with mounting debts, the mood has been changing and some Barca directors are known to have started thinking what had previously been unthinkable.