In November 2020, as Barcelona tried to survive a financial crisis accelerated by the pandemic, the club’s players agreed to forego approximately €122 million in basic pay and another €50 million in bonuses. In 2019, a footballer at Barcelona had the highest basic pay of any sporting institution on the planet at an average of $12.2 million a year. They could, it’s safe to say, take the hit. But it wasn’t a loss, it was a deferment. Barcelona would repay the players over the next three seasons.

“Short term, the deal got the club halfway out of a big hole,” Simon Kuper writes in his new book, Barça: The Inside Story of the World’s Greatest Club. “Longer term, the promises shrank the future budget to refresh the squad. An austerity Barca wasn’t going to attract stars.”

The club’s debt at this point, Kuper notes, was €1.17 billion, most of which had been accumulated since the pandemic. Joan Laporta, running for president of the club, referred to Barcelona as “the club of three billion: one billion in income, one billion in expenses and one billion in debt”. This was only partly true: Income was dropping below a billion.

At least, they weren’t alone. Their great rivals Real Madrid were also experiencing the pain of pandemic-induced debt. This was what made their president Florentino Perez push so strongly for a Super League. “We have lost €400 million,” he said in April as he defended the Super League. “It was already a delicate situation, but the coronavirus has come to deal us the death blow. In this situation, we die.”

But there was a difference, as Kuper points out. Real Madrid were still being run as a feasible business. Madrid’s move to sign Kylian Mbappé this week demonstrated that Barcelona – more than a club as they liked to believe – are out on their own once more, but this time they fight a lonely battle for relevance in a changing football world.

In 2021, Barcelona, more than any other club, are burdened by the debt caused by mismanagement and the pandemic. They pursued a Messi strategy, which was designed to keep the greatest player the game has seen happy.

“I think it’s a little bit like a Gaelic football club in Ireland, in that you represent your town or your region and you feel very local, and all the people inside the club are locals who expect to be there their whole lives.”

Simon Kuper

Kuper talks in detail about his book in the podcast that accompanies this article. It is s a book about Barcelona but also about football in 2021, when power and the superstar players are ending up at a few clubs with the others wondering how they can compete.

The Messi strategy that saw them, understandably, cater to his every whim must now turn into a post-Messi strategy that is as yet barely discernible.

Last summer, Messi thought he was able to leave but it turned out he got bad legal advice and stayed. If Barcelona was a different operation, they would have done things differently then.

“The rational thing for Barca to have done was in August 2020 – after they lose 8-2 to Bayern Munich, they clearly have an ageing team, the financial problems have become very visible – would have been to say to Messi, ‘Look, you want to leave. You’ve actually not obeyed the contracts in that you filed your request to leave too late. But whatever, we’re going to let you go, we’ll sell you for €150 million to Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain, and we’ll also lose your salary of nearly €150 million a year at that point’. Probably three times higher than the second-highest-paid player in all of football.

“And then you immediately free up €300 million, most of which would have had to go into funding the debt. So they wouldn’t be able to put it into the team. But it would have been the quickest possible way to diminish their financial crisis and create a little bit of space at least to bring in free-agent players. So that’s what a rational club would have done, a sort of business-like club. But Barcelona is not a business.

“One thing I absorbed very strongly hanging out there all that time and speaking to dozens of people from the president on down, is nobody at the club thinks of themselves as a business. It’s a real local club. I’m not a great expert on Ireland, but I think it’s a little bit like a Gaelic football club in Ireland, in that you represent your town or your region and you feel very local, and all the people inside the club are locals who expect to be there their whole lives. And you’re not there to make money.

“I mean, there is money around and some of it sloshes to unexpected places. But that’s not what the point of the club is. And the people who run the club are very invested in their personal pride, which is linked to winning, and then this enormous sentimentality that understandably developed around Messi. Messi became the kind of totem of the club, he’d arrived at 13. And the dream was that he would finish his career there and would never leave.

“So it was impossible for president Bartomeu last year, for any president to say, you know what, we’re going to get rid of Messi for financial reasons. Laporta presented that this month as a force majeure. There was no money, he had to let Messi go. But they invested enormous amounts of emotional capital and money in keeping Messi.”

Barcelona have won the Champions League five times, more than Ajax but less than Liverpool or Bayern Munich. They won four of those Champions Leagues during the Messi era.

Barcelona’s modern story is – as Kuper tells it – a story of two men, Johan Cruyff and Messi. Both became accustomed to getting their way, even if both used very different methods.

Cruyff, the most important person in the history of football according to Pep Guardiola, not only shaped the club, but his ideas on football are the ideas that shaped the modern game, from Klopp to Pochettino to Pep, from Liverpool to Paris to Manchester. Then Barcelona have been left behind as their ideas were embraced.

“Cruyff had to win in every – not just in every football match, but in every personal encounter,” Kuper says. “He wasn’t a diplomat, he wasn’t a guy who could say, well, let’s split the difference. Let’s agree to disagree. He had to win, he had to defeat and crush the other person.”

He arrived in Barcelona in 1973 from Ajax who had just won the European Cup for the third year in a row. Kuper writes that: “Cruyff was taking a step backwards: The world’s best player was exchanging the world’s best team for a club of losers in a decrepit provincial city, in a backward league, in an impoverished dictatorship.”

But Cruyff relished it. He fell out with people, he couldn’t help it. Kuper himself had a falling out as he recounts in the podcast – and he felt driven by his vision of what football could be. “Generally if you see great teams, you know they’re all good footballers, but at most there’s one who sees something.”

Cruyff didn’t believe anyone could see as he could see. He would dismiss the team talks from managers, including Rinus Michels, the coach he worked so closely with.

It was a torment as he saw it, so he might as well torment others under the conflictmodel, while he was at it. “That was the worst thing about my career, that you see everything, and so you always have to keep talking,” he said.

He shaped the club with this vision and those who came after him in Barcelona, particularly Guardiola, were driven by it. But by then, there was another genius in charge.

Barcelona felt they had cracked it. Kuper quotes Laporta saying: “Real Madrid buy European Footballers of the Year, we make them”. This was at a point when Xavi, Iniesta and Messi had emerged from the fabled La Masia academy. Those days passed and then it was left to the greatest of them all.

Towards the end of the book, Kuper quotes Quique Setien, one of those recent Barca coaches appointed almost to underline that the power resides someplace else. Setien, Kuper says, “diagnosed in Messi a permanent anxiety fuelled by the pressure to win matches”.

His personality and perhaps this root cause differentiate him from Cruyff. Messi wants people to get it right but if they get it wrong, they will know about it.

Setien asked Messi what he thought at halftime in one of his first matches. “What do you think I think?” Messi snappily replied. “This isn’t the youth team. Play your best players.” Messi was annoyed that Setien had selected a different left back than Messi’s friend Jordi Alba.

“I think the anxiety they had was similar,” Kuper says of Cruyff and Messi, “because actually being the best player is a huge responsibility. If you’re just a normal player, you go onto the field thinking, ‘I’ve got to do my job, I mustn’t screw up, I must play my role correctly’. But if you’re Messi or Cruyff, you go onto the field thinking ‘I’ve got to win it for us’. Not when you’re beating Majorca 4-0 and everything is fine, then you don’t have a special responsibility. But in any difficult match, or when the team is not functioning, it’s on you.

“So Messi has felt that like Cruyff did, all his career – ‘I’ve got to win this, I’ve got to win this title, I’ve got to win the Champions League. And if we don’t, it’s my fault, because I’m the only one who really can win it’. You know, I’m the one with the most capacity to win it by himself. And so that’s why Messi vomits before kickoff sometimes. He does live with this enormous stress.”

But it was all worth it until it wasn’t. Guardiola left and Barcelona won another Champions League with Messi, Suarez and Neymar giving an indication of where football was going. Since Neymar left, the club’s mistakes in the transfer market have been legion and far more damaging than keeping Messi happy. Bartomeu sacked their experienced sporting director Andoni Zubizarretta and then sacked three more over the next five years.

When Neymar left for PSG in 2017, they made a mess of replacing him. They weren’t convinced by Mbappé and blundered into a deal of Ousmane Dembélé and then Philippe Coutinho. They would subsequently turn down Erling Haaland, too, because they felt he wasn’t a “player in the Barça model”.

And this may be their problem as they join the pack. They were right to believe in their way and their methods – it led them to choose Guardiola over the more successful Mourinho when he wanted the job in 2008. But the world moved on and caught up. In the end, a strategy can become a neurosis, especially if a genius was concealing its vulnerabilities.

In the new world, Barcelona have a lot to worry about.