Today the Barcelona Football Club plays many things at the team, club and institution level.. Prestige, money and credibility are at stake. It’s played confidence and stability. You play present and you play future.
In reality, today Barça is playing a little bit of everything so that this season leaves something more than the fantastic news that represents the first matches in the elite of Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubars.
It is evident that Bara is going to play all of this without being the team that we all expected it to be, without many players who should be very important and without the immensity that the Camp Nou used to represent for rivals.
But this is already assumed. It cannot weigh one bit today because Napoli is not the team that won the Scudetto last year either. It is the team that has changed coaches three times since then. And that he did not register one of his stars in this phase of the Champions League because in the summer he is going to play once morest Inter.
There is a fable that Alberto Edjogo often quotes that I think describes perfectly. What this tie is and what the Champions League is often also. When a gazelle encounters a lion in the middle of the savanna, it doesn’t have to worry regarding outrunning the lion, it simply has to outrun one of the other gazelles.
That is to say, taken to our case, today Barcelona does not have to aspire to be a complete and perfect team that can win the Champions League, because we know that it cannot be. Today they simply have to focus on being better than a rival who, as we saw in Diego Armando Maradona, has even more problems than Barça.
The Champions League is this: a survival exercise in which often it is not whoever lives best who wins, but rather whoever avoids death best. That’s why today is the day Marc Andr ter Stegen, Ronald Araujo, Joao Cancelo, Ilkay Gndoan and Robert LewandowskiAbove all, these five footballers show what stuff they are made of. For different reasons in each case, but it is these footballers that Barcelona must hold on to in order to run faster than Napoli.
?If then Jules Kound or Joao Flix surprise you with a performance that they have barely been able to do this year, even better. If on top of that Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubars take to the Champions League what they are doing in the League You can even think of higher levels, but today is the day when Ter Stegen, Araujo, Cancelo, Gundogan and Lewandowski allowed Xavi’s Barça to run faster than Calzona’s Napoli.