the modern history of fc barcelona: part 1 [the dream team and the bad breakup]

the Dream Team

Author's note: I'm experimenting with cross-posting some of my posts on the modern history of FC Barcelona here. If you want to read the whole thing now, it's here on tumblr.

90s Barca players including Luis Figo and Pep Guardiola in old school outfits

(…don’t ask.)

Once upon a time I commented on missmollyetc’s LJ about how Barca is ridiculous with the drama, but the 90s were worse. She asked for details. I wrote a novel, which turned out to be part 1 of a series on the turbulent recent history of FC Barcelona. This post is an edited version of that post, which covers the years from the late 80s to the early 00s.

In this installment: Johan Cruyff makes Barca great, the origin story of Pep Guardiola, Cruyff is shoved out the door, Luis Figo breaks the hearts of an entire region and everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

Dramatis Personae

Johan Cruyff: legendary player turned maverick manager. Basically a god at the Camp Nou. Hugely talented and charismatic, but also arrogant, capable of turning on a dime and utterly unforgiving.

Josep Lluis Nunez: president since 1978, conservative and a notorious penny-pincher.

Joan Gaspart: vice-president and fanatical fan. Famously fulfilled his promise to take a dip in the Thames after Barca won their first Champions League title in 1992.

Pep Guardiola: the La Masia-bred heart of the Barca midfield. Unashamedly political and out-spoken, with enough charisma to power a city, enormously popular.

Luis Figo: a very serious professional and Barca’s biggest star of the late 90s. Beloved by the fans.

the godfather v the old guard

It was once said that being president of Barca made you more important than the president of Catalunya. What did that make Josep Lluis Nunez, who’d been president for 10 years as of 1988, re-elected twice with no opposition? We could ask the ultimate victims of the Hesperia Mutiny.

(Yes, a football team had a mutiny. Welcome to FC Barcelona, would you like some football with your drama?)

In 1988 - exactly 25 years ago this week - the entire Barca squad called a press conference at which they demanded the resignation of the board, as a result of Nunez’s refusal to pay competitive wages, amongst other, dodgier business practices. Nunez reacted by sacking the entire squad (bar one man), and the manager for good measure.

Nunez’s next move was the appointment of Johan Cruyff. Cruyff, who had cemented his status as a hero among fans with his stint as a player there in the 70s, was a huge success. He changed the entire culture of the club and constructed the foundation on which Barca’s current successes are built. His team won 4 straight La Liga titles as well as Barca’s first European Cup. They were so good that they were known as the Dream Team.

dream team line-up photo from the early 90s

(See anyone you recognise?)

However, Cruyff also had a massive ego and needed to get his way, which was a recipe for disaster in his relationship with Nunez.

In his heyday Cruyff was far too popular to sack. Nunez knew, though, that all he had to do was bide his time. The Dream Team came to a dismal end in 1994, after they lost the Champions League final that year, which they had been heavily favoured to win, 4-0.

Cruyff responded by dismantling the team and starting over, bringing in more young talent from the academy and foreign stars like Luis Figo, a serious young Portuguese player. The experiment didn’t quite work out, and results continued to slip. Cruyff was the kind of man who didn’t suffer fools at all, and he treated the salivating press pack that covered Spanish football with undisguised contempt when he felt they deserved it. They now felt free to give him some back.

Cruyff and Nunez’s disagreements became increasingly public, and in 1996 finally culminated in his acrimonious departure, which is reported to have included a rant in vice-president and super fan Joan Gaspart’s office in which Cruyff smashed a chair.

Cruyff never really managed again.

(Nunez’s next appointment as manager was the late, great Sir Bobby Robson, who brought with him a clever translator/assistant by the name of Jose Mourinho.)

The Once and Future King

If I had to pick the one person who was key to the rise of modern FC Barcelona, it would be Cruyff. No doubt about that. If I was picking two, I’d say Cruyff, and Pep Guardiola.

Pep Guardiola and Johan Cruyff

Guardiola was born in a small town, the son of Catalan parents of modest means. He entered La Masia at age 13 and was plucked out of the youth teams by Johan Cruyff at the tender age of 19 to become the on-field leader of his Dream Team. Cultured, charismatic, a natural leader and a fiercely committed Catalan nationalist, he very quickly attained cult hero status.

Pep Guardiola celebrating with the estelada, the flag of catalan separatism

The politics of Barcelona and Spanish football in general meant that he also made powerful enemies, both inside and outside the club. Many associated with the conservative club hierarchy did not like how outspoken he was. Increasingly, they worried about the soft power he wielded, fearing he would turn it against them if he perceived them to be acting against the interests of the club.

An example of the difficulty Guardiola posed Nunez: at the end of 96/97, Nunez was being typically ham-fisted about extending Guardiola’s contract, which was due to expire, and Pep was prepared to pack up and leave at the end of the season. At the big ceremony held at City Hall to celebrate Barca winning the Spanish Cup, star player Luis Figo led the fans in a chant of Nosotros te queremos, Pep, quédate, quédate, quédate (“we love you, Pep, stay”). Then Guardiola took the microphone and spoke movingly of his love for the club.

Pep Guardiola and Luis Figo celebrating with the Copa del Rey on the City Hall balcony

With the threat of an upcoming re-election campaign looming over him, Nunez could hardly afford to lose such a popular player. He backed down and Guardiola signed an extension.

In a way, those in charge at Barca were right to worry. Guardiola was unusually powerful for a player, and he never kept quiet when something struck him as wrong, even if it meant criticising those running the club. So it was almost inevitable that the whispering campaign against him began almost immediately as he came to prominence. In its most vicious form, it would take in football’s entrenched suspicion of any participant who didn’t perform masculinity in the traditionally accepted manner.

Rumours about his sexuality had followed Guardiola around for years, seemingly on the basis of little more than him having wider interests than the average footballer. But when he picked up a niggling injury during the 97/98 season, the rumours took on new life. As Guardiola travelled Europe, looking for someone who could cure his puzzling muscle problem, ‘sources close to the club’ enabled all sorts of wild speculation.

Pep’s career was over. Pep had a 'lifestyle problem’. Pep had AIDS.

(Yep. People actually said that. Barca politics can get fucking dark.)

Guardiola did actually find a specialist who helped him with his injury, and he came back to captain Barca again, in defiance of all the shit that had been thrown at him. But worse was still to come.

the worst break-up in the history of football

The nadir of modern Barca came at the turn of the century. Vice-captain and club hero Luis Figo’s contract was up for renewal at the end of 99/00. Negotiations had stalled over the board’s usual penny-pinching ways. Meanwhile, Real Madrid presidential candidate Florentino Perez was campaigning on the daring but surely impossible promise of bringing Figo to Madrid.

In early July, Figo was still insisting that he would remain at Barca in an interview with local media:

“I want to reassure fans that Luis Figo, with all the certainty in the world, will be at the Nou Camp on July 24 to start the season,” he said. “And I want to remind people that whatever is said about other clubs, Luis Figo has a contract with Barcelona.”

But the pre-contract that was said not to exist did, in fact, exist. Perez won, Madrid paid Figo’s buy-out clause, and Figo, for whatever reason, chose to go.

I don’t think we’ll ever know what really happened in those months. Figo’s then-agent has since provided his side of the story, namely that Figo signed a pre-contract agreement with a massive penalty clause in the firm belief that Perez would lose, and had his hand forced by Perez’s unexpected victory. It was all meant to be a bargaining ploy, he said, to get Barca to offer him what he was worth. I’m not sure what I believe.

All Barca fans knew was that their hero, a man they had thought to be one of them, the man who had a few years earlier stood on the City Hall balcony and led them in a somewhat ill-advised chant of 'white crybabies, salute the champions’, had deserted them for the enemy. It was too much.

Figo’s first match back at the Camp Nou was horrible. As one giant banner said, we hate you so much because we loved you so much. Figo told El Pais newspaper a few years later that the love affair with Barca had, for his part, never ended. But from the perspective of the fans, something had broken.

jumping the shark

It wasn’t the only thing that was broken. Figo’s departure led to a period of madness: at board level, as new president Gaspart spent money like a madman to try and make up for the loss of Figo, bringing in ever more hideously over-priced, sub-standard players on huge wages; and throughout the fanbase, as the fortunes of the team took a nose dive.

The new manager, Llorenc Serra Ferrer, had no power, leaving control of team affairs largely in the hands of four Spanish veterans, led by the hugely influential but increasingly burnt out club captain Guardiola.

(The so-called ‘gang of four’, consisting of Guardiola, Luis Enrique, Sergi Barjuan and Abelardo, all turned out to be at least reasonably talented football managers.)

Although few knew at the time, Guardiola was nearing the end of his endurance. As El Pais commented in the late 90s, Barca could not simply continue to use him as a symbol in the morning and a scapegoat in the afternoon. The departure of his good friend Figo (the godfather of his first child) and a string of other fellow homegrown players and veterans saddened him, and he grew increasingly isolated in his struggle to assert the voice and image of Barca that he believed in. The environment grew ever more toxic.

In 2001, Guardiola chose to leave Barca at the end of his contract. Many believed he was jumping before he could be pushed.

an emotional Guardiola at the press conference announcing his departure

[To replace Guardiola] Barcelona need to find another footballer who is Catalan to the core, telegenic, with a gift for words and people, able to recite poetry and who has the sense of humour needed to be spokesman for a bunch of crickets. – El Pais, 2001

At the beginning of the new millennium, things looked pretty bleak for Barca. And - spoiler alert - they’d get worse before they got better. Few could have predicted how successful the coming decade would be. The only certainty was more drama.

~ Part 2: The Little Genius and His Brazilian Bros ~