Barcelona Heading for Turmoil as Players Turn on Luis Enrique's Confused Methods

Barcelona FC are no strangers to crisis. This time, however, their problems are not limited to what occurs on and around the pitch.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Everywhere you look, Barcelona are in trouble. Big trouble.

Coach Luis Enrique’s statement to the media after Saturday’s defeat against Celta Vigo that he was not worried but "angry” will not have gone down well in the dressing room. Enrique should be worried, very worried. At the moment, Barcelona are in a mess.

On the playing front, the blame and buck stops firmly at the door of the new coach. What exactly is he trying to do with this team?

The warning signs were there in the performances against APOEL and Ajax in the Champions League, both of which resulted in unimpressive victories. The talk then was always of the major tests being against Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid, and Barcelona have failed them both.

Celta Vigo—with the greatest of respect to the Galician side, who played to their absolute maximum and got what they deserved—should not have been a major stumbling block. In the end it proved to be a game, and a 1-0 defeat, that turned a drama into a crisis. Nineteen shots on goal suggest Barcelona should have won the game, but the performance was undeniably poor.

Javier Mascherano, one of the leading figures in the dressing room, probably spoke for more than just himself when he told the media after the game: “We played a bad game. We were not comfortable all night. We created chances but did not generate our usual game. It is worrying. We didn’t create chances by collective work, but by robbing possession.”

So there you have it: The brilliant, inspirational, effusive, footballing masterminds that were Barcelona are now plying their trade as petty pickpockets.

Luis Enrique seems caught in two minds as to what he actually wants from his team, talking frequently about wanting possession but then suddenly getting them to play in quick transitions.

His concept of what he wants is, at best, confused, and as a result what you get is a side that sometimes keeps the ball, sometimes counter-attacks, yet does neither with any collective intelligence or commitment.

This is no longer the side where everyone knew their roles. It is all too predictable, a rigid arrangement where defenders defend, the midfield creates and the forwards finish. Barcelona should have a more complex team than that—one with different layers, with more movement, more surprises.

The talk now from a fractured dressing room is that Luis Enrique hardly talks to the players, does not prepare games in enough detail, cannot explain what he wants nor what he is doing with his team rotations. This is something that has been confirmed to me by no fewer than three different sources in the dressing room. It is an impossible situation.

Before the season Luis Enrique told Lionel Messi that the whole nature of Barcelona’s game would be built around him, but that clearly has not happened, certainly not as often as it should have.

Far more than Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi needs a team to play to his strengths and close to the box, where he is so lethal. Again, a confusion in attack and a lack of understanding about what exactly his coach wants him to use have forced him to start his attacks too deep, to take on too many players to get into dangerous areas.

He still has the highest number of assists (along with Atletico Madrid's Koke) in the league, so talk of his demise is premature. But there is certainly too much reliance on him as an individual and not enough emphasis by the coaching staff on the team effort that can create the game and type of situations that can make this particular individual so much better.

This is clearly neither the Messi who was nor—more sadly—the Messi who could still be.

Rumblings of discontent are also gaining pace with the exclusion of Gerard Pique from the squad for the Celta match. The official line is that everyone is happy with his performances and attitude in training, and that his being left out was simply because he had played four games in a row and there is a Champions League match this week at Ajax.

There appears to be a lack of leadership on the training ground, compounded by the fact that there’s also precious little evidence of it in the boardroom, either.

The credibility shown by the "men at the top" reached a new low recently when the club lost a legal battle against former president Joan Laporta and 16 other directors over alleged false accounting.

Words being bandied around the club are of disenchantment, disillusion and weakness, swiftly suffixed by calls for early elections.

With a much publicised one-year, two-window transfer ban imposed on them by FIFA for allegedly breaching the rules on signing foreign youngsters for their vaunted youth academy, the club will be hoping that an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport might provide a ray of light—should they manage to get the ban reduced to just one window.

Before then, they have to negotiate the small matter of a match against Frank de Boer’s Ajax side in the fourth group match of the Champions League. If they lose in Amsterdam, progression to the knockout stages—although still very much in their hands—will no longer be the stone-cold certainty everyone thought it was, and PSG will probably become the new favourites to win the group.

If that happens, things really will get interesting for Luis Enrique and his team. It seems this is going to get worse before it gets better.