I was genuinely bummed out when Xavi announced, after the 5-3 home defeat to Villarreal in January, that no matter what happened from there, he’d be stepping down as Barcelona manager at the end of the season. Partly because I think he’s good at what he does, partly because he was one of my favourite players and remains one of my favourite people in football, and partly because I found the following comment thoroughly depressing, if probably true: “The feeling of being Barca coach can be unpleasant … It’s cruel, there’s a lack of respect towards you … it’s terrible on your mental health and morale.”
No job — certainly not in sports — should be like that, and when he brought up mental health and family — wanting to see his kids grow up — all you could do was respect his decision. Barcelona went on a tear (at least in terms of results) after his announcement, going undefeated for 13 games with 10 wins, prompting speculation over whether the club would persuade him to stay. But seeing Barcelona’s stunning meltdown against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League quarterfinals — with a 3-2 first-leg lead undone by a 4-1 defeat at home after going a goal up — leaves little doubt: Xavi made the right choice. It’s pretty obvious that emotionally, this job takes far too much of a toll on him. At this stage, as we saw Tuesday, that toll can impact his team, too.
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Xavi got himself sent off in the 11th minute of the second half shortly after Vitinha’s goal put the visitors 2-1 up, making it 3-3 on aggregate with all still to play for. It was the third time this season he was shown a red card: The other two were in the scoreless season opener against Getafe and in a 3-0 win over Atletico Madrid last month. Contrast this with his playing career where, in 900 games for Barcelona and the Spanish national team, he was sent off just twice.
Former Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger once told me that one of the most difficult adjustments to make once you go from player to manager is control. As a player, you have “total knowledge” of all your inputs — what your eyes, brains, heart, legs and manager tell you — and then have “total control” over how you will react to them. As a coach, you have to work with inputs — often incomplete ones — from the 11 players on the pitch, plus the guys on the bench and then decide accordingly, knowing you can’t actually control what the players then do. That loss of control can be frightening until you get used to it, and it remains nerve-wracking until the very end.
And that’s the rub. It would be neat for Xavi to stay and oversee the growth of Gavi, Pedri, Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsí and whoever else La Masia unearths. It would also be useful to have a grown up at the club who could steer Barcelona through the gathering storm caused by the financial mismanagement of the Josep Bartomeu era and the reckless Lever-pulling of the Age of Joan Laporta. But not like this.
If games of this magnitude — precisely because he’s so invested in the club — become so nerve-wracking and draining that he ends up losing the lucidity required to make good decisions (like not getting himself sent off), then maybe Xavi is right. Maybe he did make the right choice back in January. There’s no shame in it, either; heck, his old boss, a guy named Pep Guardiola, spent two of his four seasons at the club talking about how the job was too punishing for him and he needed to leave, only for him to do a U-turn at the last moment. He eventually took a sabbatical and went on to do pretty well for himself in Manchester.
Maybe that’s what Xavi needs: a job somewhere else that’s just a job. But only after taking some time out to clear his head, be with his family and figure out what the next stage of his life is going to bring.
