Along the way, a hijacking occurred or Barcelona became what they wanted to be. It’s easy to mock the Catalans for putting Qatar on their shirt and still claiming Més Que Un Club, but if their golden era and whatever you want to call Luis Enrique’s tenure has been a struggle between whatever ideals any massive, wealthy institution can have and the increasingly corrupt bureaucracy governing it, then this is the point where perhaps we concede that the whatever ideals end of things can’t put up much of a fight. You can stand for something and be Rayo Vallecano-sized or you can conquer the world and be governed by a group of Acura owners existing somewhere along a narrow spectrum that starts at shrewd businessmen and ends at blithe felons. If you could split the difference, it seems like someone would have done it by now. 

The $47 million transfer of Paulinho—a Spurs castoff who’s spent the past two years in China—is the nadir of the club’s stewardship by Josep Maria Bartomeu and his cronies, who have been in power since 2014, but it’s not all they’ve done wrong, and they’re not the only wrongdoers. The Paulinho deal itself is unconscionable and probably has something to do with the ADELTE group, an infrastructure company at which Bartomeu is a partner and CEO. ADELTE is looking to expand into China and they’re bidding for a construction project headed by Guangzhou, owners of (duh) Guangzhou Evergrande, who are about to be $47 million richer after selling a 29-year-old holding midfielder who couldn’t hack it in the EPL for twice the money Barça spent on Ivan Rakitić a few summers ago. Cruyff knows why Bartomeu thinks he can get away with such a blatant bit of self-dealing, but it’s happened and can now only be sanctioned retroactively.

This is the latest fishy Barcelona development in a half-decade that’s been dotted with them. You’ll remember that Bartomeu’s predecessor Sandro Rosell was the OG of the youth team child-trafficking that got Barça banned for two transfer windows before FIFA authorities found the same stuff going down at Real Madrid and Atleti. And we’re probably never going to get the full details of who paid what and when and to whom of the 2013 Neymar transfer, but Rosell almost definitely paid Neymar’s father under the table, stiffed Santos out of some cash, and tried to fleece Spanish tax collectors by underreporting the fee. Bartomeu tried to clean up the scandal by voluntarily paying Spain’s government $18.6 million after the fact while maintaining that the club had done nothing wrong and the discrepancies in terms of what was owed and what was paid simply had to do with some kind of difference of accounting opinion. Sure, because accountants are notorious for just winging it and going on feel and if we know one thing about billion-dollar companies it’s that they make sure they pay all their taxes plus a little extra.

Oh, and not for nothing: Rosell got arrested last May for allegedly taking kickbacks paid for the television rights to broadcast Brazilian national team matches. Not strictly a Barça-related crime, but an indication of the quality of people we’re talking about here. 

It’s a coincidence and it’s not that Barcelona, in the grip of a scummy club president, are currently at an ebb from a sporting perspective. Bartomeu has nothing to do with the fact that Xavi is gone, Andrés Iniesta is in decline after an extended prime, and youth talents like Sergi Roberto and Denis Suarez aren’t quite up to snuff. It’s not a referendum on La Masia that they can’t spit out generational creative geniuses once every ten years. Enrique was exactly what the team needed at the moment he was hired, but he was always going to be a short-term fix. (You can’t be that tactically dense and stick around for long.) Arda Turan was a flop signing and Paco Alcacer and Andre Gomes had awful first seasons at the club, but not every move is going to work. Neymar got bought right out from under Barcelona; there was nothing they could do about it.

Which doesn’t mean that the club hasn’t been mismanaged and lost its way philosophically. It’s telling that the players tipped to replace PSG’s newest star are Phillippe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembélé, who both have price tags in the neighborhood of $177 million. Scuttlebutt is Barça want both of them, which is some Real Madrid-esque cash-splashing. Signing up some galacticos, etc. When your youth academy isn’t producing world-class talent and you want to keep competing for domestic titles and Champions Leagues, you might start to look like the thing you define yourself in opposition to.

It’s always incompetence that gets fans riled up more than corruption. Allegations of crookedness at the Nou Camp have grown louder and more frequent over the past year, as the team’s performance has tapered off. But that doesn’t make the accusations any less correct, and perhaps the threat of the end of Leo Messi’s prime being wasted due to profligacy and possible criminal activity is occasion for what is, after all, a member-run institution to examine itself and realize how far they’ve strayed from even the most abstract notions of what it is to be a sustainable and responsible club, let alone more than one. 

Then again, Coutinho and Dembélé are awesome players. Culés might just let Bartomeu live long enough to sign them, depose him six months or a year from now, and call it a day. They’ll become what they want to be, and hardly anyone ever chooses the more difficult path toward success.

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