All doom and gloom

Barça

Fol­low­ing the hu­mil­i­at­ing de­feat to Bay­ern, head coach Quique Setién and sport­ing di­rec­tor Eric Abidal were shown the door, for­mer player Ronald Koe­man being an­nounced as Setién’s re­place­ment shortly af­ter­wards. This was fol­lowed by the ar­rival of an­other ex-player, Hen­rik Lars­son, to join Koe­man’s coach­ing staff. Barça fans may be briefly ap­peased by these ap­point­ments, if noth­ing else for the Dutch­man’s glo­ri­ous as­so­ci­a­tions with the club, given that he scored the win­ner in their first CL tri­umph at Wem­b­ley in 1992. His record as a club coach with the likes of Va­len­cia, Southamp­ton and Ever­ton makes less promis­ing read­ing, how­ever. And while the one re­deem­ing fea­ture of Barça’s past sea­son was surely the break­throughs of young­sters Pujol and Ansu Fati, the real story this sum­mer has been the saga over Messi’s ap­par­ent de­par­ture. It now ap­pears that the Ar­gen­tine su­per­star is will­ing to stay at the club, given that his only al­ter­na­tives were for some­one to pay his as­tro­nom­i­cal buy­out clause or take Barça to court, some­thing he vowed he would never do to the club of his life. Whether Koe­man and co will be able to con­jure the nec­es­sary form and com­mit­ment out of the best player the world has ever seen next sea­son is an­other mat­ter.

Es­panyol

Sadly, and as some fans had feared, Es­panyol have proven to be a les­son for how things can go badly wrong if your club is bought out by an in­ter­na­tional busi­ness­man. Chi­nese owner Chen Yan­sheng went pretty much AWOL after his an­nounced plans to bring the club Cham­pi­ons League foot­ball within three sea­sons of tak­ing over, the periq­ui­tos in­stead drop­ping meekly into the sec­ond tier of Span­ish foot­ball. De­spite break­ing the club’s trans­fer record by first spend­ing €10.5 mil­lion on for­ward Matías Var­gas, then more than €20 mil­lion on Raúl de Tomás, and fur­ther ad­di­tions in the guise of Adrián Em­barba for €10 mil­lion, Le­an­dro Cabr­era for €9 mil­lion, and Fer­nando Calero for €8 mil­lion, the team could not find the nec­es­sary form to stay in La Liga. To make mat­ters worse, the fi­nan­cial out­lay in trans­fer fees and wages could prove a prob­lem in Spain’s sec­ond tier next sea­son, when in­com­ings will be dras­ti­cally re­duced with­out the tele­vi­sion rights money from the top flight. Es­panyol’s new head coach to help them bounce back to the First Di­vi­sion is at least a man with ex­pe­ri­ence in the lower leagues – Vi­cente Moreno Peris. He began his coach­ing ca­reer on the bench at Jerez be­fore get­ting Gimnàstic de Tar­rag­ona pro­moted to the Sec­ond Di­vi­sion. These last three sea­sons Moreno Peris was coach of Mal­lorca, who he helped rise from the Sec­ond B Di­vi­sion to the top flight in suc­ces­sive sea­sons, be­fore being rel­e­gated along­side Es­panyol last sea­son.

Girona

True to the word of head coach Pep Lluís Martí, Girona did get them­selves in the po­si­tion they wanted by the end of the sea­son, mak­ing the play-offs to win a spot back in La Liga. They had every­thing in their favour after see­ing off Alme­ria with home and away wins, and min­nows Elche hav­ing seem­ingly knocked out the more dan­ger­ous threat of 3rd-placed Saragossa in their play-off. But Girona failed to heed the warn­ing signs, as Elche did to them ex­actly what they had done to Saragossa, draw­ing 0-0 at home in the first leg be­fore snatch­ing a late win­ner in the away leg. Things had been look­ing good for Girona, need­ing just one goal at home against an unin­spired and frankly very poor-look­ing Elche out­fit, but then dis­as­ter struck in the 61st minute when the league’s top scorer and Girona’s tal­is­man striker Cristhian Stu­ani made an un­nec­es­sary late lunge at an Elche de­fender and was sent off. De­spite his long protes­ta­tions, the Uruguayan had no de­fence for this ac­tions and it cost Girona dear. Elche sub­se­quently grew in stature with 11 men ver­sus 10 and se­cured pro­mo­tion after a basic error by Girona goal­keeper Asier Riesgo (never a more ap­pro­pri­ate name) al­lowed the vis­i­tors to sneak a late win­ner with a back­post header. A tragic and far­ci­cal end to what had been a promis­ing sea­son.