Preseason friendly matches are a misleading projection of the future. Sometimes you stumble upon discoveries like Bojan (in 2007, in that match against Egyptian Al-Ahly), but often you have to surrender to the evidence that many preseason football loves are, in reality, fleeting summer flings. In recent years, a new model of allegiance has been consolidated that, from slogan to slogan, celebrates the perceived explosiveness of Adeyemi or the proud efficiency of Hamza Abdelkarim and, on the other hand, frowns when Ferran is mentioned. We consume expectations with dizzying voracity, as if it were a reaction to the years of stability in which many team positions seemed assigned for life. With no time to assimilate reality, we try to imagine a Barça where the wingers – Gordon, Adeyemi, Raphinha, and Lamine Yamal – will press with both defensive and offensive intensity.
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Conditioned by an inhuman schedule, we discover youth players who skip stages with a boldness that Barça will have to learn to manage if it doesn’t want to have an overbooking problem. In the culé psychology, affections are not rational but whimsical. We fall in love with a distant promise and, on the other hand, keep our distance from veterans like the eternally resurrected Andreas Christensen, who has been on the squad for four years and whom, if we meet in an elevator, we only know sounds familiar.
Mourinho’s return is one of the morbid attractions of the preseason
First impressions of the preseason? Hansi Flick is thinner and Joan Laporta has overcome an arrhythmia process that, literally and metaphorically, defines his character. We are left, as informational bone to chew on, with the possible signing of Julián Álvarez. It is part of the tradition of hypertrophied soap operas that feed our infinite capacity to chase wild geese which, with a legitimate sense of spectacle, entertain us. For dessert, we have the specter of antagonism embodied by José Mourinho (August 11, Netflix premieres the docuseries with the irrefutable title: Mourinho), which will propose a wiser and kinder image that, in theory, should be based on real facts, although for most culés the slogan will always be to question his credibility.
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By the way: after the friendly match against Fiorentina, José Mourinho appeared before the press and said he had seen three Real Madrids: a fresh Madrid, a tired Madrid, and a very tired Madrid. Hearing this, at first I felt the impact of the reunion, as if Mourinho’s voice took me back to those times when the Portuguese was just beginning to display his undeniable communicative power. They were a few seconds of fresh Mourinho, but soon a tired or very tired déjà vu prevailed. Morbidly, I retrieved the little book The Gospel According to Mourinho (Morellini Editore, 2010), which collects maxims and aphorisms that today seem prophetic: “The way back is long but not impossible” or “If before a match I put on my team Gladiator, my players would laugh or call a doctor to check if I had gone sick.”
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