Why Xavi Is Right, and Barcelona Can Win Back-to-Back Trebles
When you leave a football club it must be incredibly tempting to hope that they are worse off without you.
In most cases there must be constant feelings of “well I’d have done that better” or “I wouldn’t have allowed that to happen” as you watch the players entrusted to fill the gap that your departure created, but that was never really going to be the case with Xavi and Barcelona.
The midfield icon played 767 games for the Catalan giants, winning a total of 25 major honours as well as the hearts of world football fans. He was the team’s reference point, their constant, their metronomic maestro who set the stage for others to create the headlines.
Any team would be better off with him in it than without him, but following his somewhat subdued impact in last season’s treble success—when his 44 appearances in all competitions was the least he managed in a campaign since an injury-hit 2005/06—Xavi has backed his former teammates to move on from his departure as though it had never even happened.
Speaking to AS (via Goal.com), he said,:
"They've got the team to do it [the treble]. They've got a magnificent coach in Luis Enrique, who is a real perfectionist, very methodical and a good leader.
And right now, Barca boast the best players in the world.
It will be difficult to achieve but I wish, from the bottom of my heart that they go on to win the Champions League and every other success they can achieve.
"
Everything. Again. And why not?
Xavi is right. Barcelona really do have the best players in the world, especially in attack, where Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar will be gearing up to either match or surpass the 122-goal haul they got between them last season.
At the back, too, they’ve overcome a strange pre-season to keep back-to-back clean sheets in the start to their La Liga title defence, hardly damning evidence to support the idea that the treble is on, but a decent beginning nonetheless.
We might know more about Barca’s treble effort a week from today, after they’ve undertaken two tricky away assignments at Atletico Madrid in La Liga and Roma in the Champions League, but even then it is worth remembering that there was a point last season when Enrique was under pressure as results failed to go his side’s way.
The point here is that it is far too early in the season to rule anything out or in, and it is entirely correct that Barca should believe that they can win every single competition they enter in this campaign because, as Xavi says, they’ve got the players for it.
History might weigh against them, obviously.
No team has ever retained the Champions League in its current form, while the reason trebles are so rare is that they are very difficult to achieve. Pep Guardiola’s Barca side famously achieved one in the 2008/09 season, then there was Enrique’s 2014/15 vintage, and that’s it.
But with key players retained—no-one ever believed that Neymar was going to go to Manchester United, did they?—and the close-knit nature of the squad coming in handy during their transfer ban, Barca can certainly go close once again.
The Champions League is going to be the most difficult to win, especially with Guardiola under pressure to deliver that competition for Bayern Munich, Jose Mourinho on a one-man mission to win it for Chelsea and with Real Madrid having appointed a serial winner of European trophies in Rafael Benitez.
It would be a surprise if the winner didn’t come from one of those three and Barca, but Enrique’s team are in the conversation and rightly so.
How could they not be, with the mesmeric Messi, the sniper-like Suarez and the near-perfect Neymar to call on?
They might not achieve it, but it’s going to be fun watching them try.
And isn’t fun what football should be all about?
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