Is Barcelona’s dominance of European football over?

It’s been a dire week for the Catalan giants. It started with a defeat by fierce rivals Real Madrid, effectively ending Barca’s late charge for La Liga glory. To compound the misery, their midweek aggregate defeat by Chelsea ended thee defence of their Champions League crown. The manner of their Tuesday loss was what made it even more crushing. You only need to look at the stats: 82% possession, 23 shots on goal and 10 corners. But the most important statistic was the one that counted. Goals, goals, goals. It’s what counts in football and, unfortunately for all of Barca’s dominance, they could not see off the 6th best team in England.  Chelsea had luck on their side that night for sure, but is Barcelona’s tippy-tappy football just becoming too predictable and easy to defend against?

For a start, Barcelona, in my eyes, outplayed the Blues. Despite that, the lack of penetration from Barca’s world class playmakers in Xavi, Iniesta and Messi was nowhere to be seen. It was only until after the red card involving John Terry’s moment of madness with Alexis Sanchez that Barca began to find in-roads within the Chelsea defence. After the first leg, opinion was divided on whether Chelsea could contain the Catalans for another 90+ minutes. This was due to the fact that the Camp Nou has a much wider pitch which would therefore give Barcelona a considerable amount more space to pulverise and destroy Chelsea’s stern defence. The ascendancy and momentum was there but it was almost getting to the point where Barca ran out of ideas. After the final whistle, they looked dejected and it seemed as if they had nothing else left to give. This gave me the impression that their dominance was coming to an end.

Their performance against Madrid was very similar. Real went with vintage Mourinho tactics: sit back and hit Barca on the counter attack. And it worked a treat as Barcelona’s shoddy defence could not cope with the pace and strength of Madrid’s sensational forwards in Cristiano Ronaldo, Mesut Ozil, Angel Di Maria and Karim Benzema. I’ve seen many a team set-up with Mourinho-esque tactics and fail miserably. Sir Alex and Manchester United have blundered on 2 occasions to contain Barca and be a potent threat at the same time. Madrid’s performance, however, was special in many different ways. It was the first time Real had beaten Barca in eight league attempts so this maybe connotes that the great FC Barcelona are not the force they used to be. Moreover, Cristiano Ronaldo was more efficient than Lionel Messi when they were both on the same pitch together! That’s not something you hear every day.

The uncertainty surrounding manager Pep Guardiola has probably shown that Barcelona just cannot maintain high level of focus and performance anymore. On Thursday evening in an interview with talkSPORT, Spanish journalist Guillem Balague quoted: “Yesterday morning there was a meeting that involved everyone important at Barcelona where Guardiola told the Barca chairman that he could not continue anymore. He’s just had enough: physically and mentally.” If these reports are true, then FC Barcelona would be losing their influential figure; their talisman in the dugout. Guardiola’s tactics have been behind Barcelona’s dominance of European football for the past 4/5 years. This news is undoubtedly going to have an effect on the Barcelona players. Whether some of them move on in the summer remains to be seen. However, in answer to the question: is their dominance over? Well, I don’t think it is. People are forgetting that this team is regarded as one of the greatest club sides in the history of football. Their style is unique and all they need is a bit more luck. Maybe 1 or 2 new signings in the summer could see Barcelona at the top of their game once again.

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