On August 14, 2020, Barça experienced one of the darkest nights in its history, surely only at the level of the European Cup final in Seville. That 2-8 was a missile on the waterline of a club in which everyone had grown tired of everyone, to the point that Leo Messi sent a burofax ten days after the disaster to announce that he was leaving Barça.
Those days, Barça was staying in a Sheraton hotel in Lisbon's financial district. They were times of pandemic, so players, coaches and management arrived and left, in separate buses (only Pepe Costa, Messi's inseparable, was on the footballers' bus) with the famous masks. Arriving at the hotel, late at night after the disaster, was chaotic. A group of fans greeted the players shouting scoundrels. The footballers went up to the rooms, where Messi finished ruminating about the burofax with Pepe Costa and Luis Suárez.
As it could not be otherwise, the board met urgently at dawn. Everyone was in shock. During the match, in addition, they had experienced with a certain astonishment the behavior of the Bayern executives.who instead of looking with respect at a rival who was falling, and perhaps carried away by the pain of elimination in the 2015 semi-final, celebrated each goal stronger than the previous one, with special attention to Oliver Kahn, who was especially rude An ungentlemanly behavior to which, surprisingly, they added a call the next morning to try to sign Pedri. However, the managers quickly forgot the Bavarian arrogance because there were more important things to worry about. QFor example, the coach. Quique Setién, who before the game was taking selfies with Eder Sarabia and the rest of his assistants in a shocking photo, never better said, 'said goodbye' to the club. A football man, he thanked everyone and declared himself dismissed (later he would demand his severance pay) and left Bartomeu, who had already thought about Koeman to try the electro-shock, a free hand. Bartomeu, who traveled with a vice president, Jordi Moix; three directors (David Bellver, Javier Bordas and Joan Bladé); and Óscar Grau, CEO of the club who was later investigated like Bartomeu by Barçagate, knew what was coming with Messi upon his return to Barcelona.
-“It was like the fall of an empire,” acknowledge sources who were on that trip to Lisbon, which ended in catastrophe. That tremendous army that had been capable of winning ten Leagues and four Champions Leagues in the Messi era, had shown signs of cracking badly in Paris, Turin, Rome and, above all, Liverpool. But what happened in Lisbon was a seismic movement that collapsed the building suddenly. For some actors in history, that night the return of Joan Laporta to the presidency of Barça began to take shape. As he himself admitted in an interview with AS during the 2021 election campaign, that “Want to see you again” banner, even the campaign slogan (“Estimem el Barça”) spoke of “self-esteem”, “recovering pride”. and the path of success.” Almost five years after 2-8 in Lisbon, the club is still rebuilding because what was demolished had been very large. On August 14, 2020, an empire had fallen.
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