Barça bottoms out, from the Dream Team to the Nightmare
Everything can get worse in Barcelona. The angry Eder Sarabia may end up as Koeman's second. Can you imagine the grotesque? Hurricane Bartomeu will leave no stone unturned in Camp Nou. The departure of Neymar or the circus in Braithwaite's transfer is now behind us. Two examples of a ruinous management that is completed with an inconceivable attitude in the dismissal of a coach by an institution with 121 years of history.
Everything that surrounds the dismissal of Quique Setién and his team is humiliating for Barça and for the terminated workers. An unlikely situation in normal working circles and one that does not usually happen in elite sport. Money makes up for any uncomfortable situation. And money is always there to keep the lordship of the clubs and the working future of the sportsmen and women intact.
It is true that the pandemic has also altered working life. Spain is suffering disastrous consequences and citizens find themselves unprotected with closed employment offices. Apart from this, Setién has been the victim of a bureaucratic situation typical of the deceiving. The famous deadlines for contracts have lost their validity due to the social hiatus between March and June and Barça lawyers have exploited this to save the club money.
Messi and the flames of his bureaucracy were quelled by attending a section of his contract where he set a deadline for leaving the club. Date in which the player was playing matches with his team after the restart of the league. But Bartomeu stuck to the clause and the Argentinean did not want to litigate, even though a judge had agreed with him.
With Setién, Barça has followed an even trickier script. He fired his coach in the media on August 17, but has not been officially announced until September 16. The only purpose of this is to defend that Setién only has to receive his salary until the last working day of the previous season, precisely the day of the 2-8. And the mud gets even higher when the ex-coach of Barça makes public that Bartomeu's intention is to relocate his three collaborators within the staff so as not to have to pay for their dismissal. A maneuver that tries to pressure the assistants to be the ones to leave the entity and avoid paying them. By the way, this movement would mean that they would not be able to collect unemployment benefit either.
Justice will be served in the coming months, but Barça's directors will go down in history as a result of poor management since the dismissal of Valverde when Koeman arrived. The contract to Setién was signed for three seasons, although it could be ended in 2021 with the arrival of the new presidency. A coach who landed in the middle of the season, who came from unemployment and who was not raffled off Europe. They put on the table a succulent contract that could reach nine million euros according to the gross monthly salary filtered by L'Equipe of 500,000 euros.
Barça's daring to tie up a coach with such a long commitment gets worse when the reasons for the dismissal and refusal to pay him another season are known. The club says that Setién did not meet expectations and that he did not train the team during the months of confinement. These are poor arguments, from a small club, and they show the serious economic problem that the Catalan entity is dragging along. Indefensible before a judge, even if they want to call it "low productivity" and less justified the months of confinement due to a serious health situation. The world of football moves by other codes. Barça has the right to kick around inside the offices. In the face of the gallery, it has to reach an agreement with Setién, pay and think about the future.
The future of Barça is very uncertain. It will have to face Setién in the courts, the race for the presidency of the club begins, Messi wants to leave and if Koeman decides to take the lead the changing room will be a time bomb. Do you want more? The motion of censure against Bartomeu has gone through. As if the institutional chaos was not enough, he is now waiting for a tedious path to ask the member if he wants to throw out a president who does not want to leave now but has already said he will leave in March. More than a club. Less than a club.
