Due to my great ignorance of the world of football, I approach TV3 to understand: What will happen to Barça? And I don’t understand anything. So why am I approaching TV3? Man, because TV3 is, or should be, the television beacon that illuminates, examines and analyzes the great events and massacres that shook Catalonia. Barça, ‘more than a club’, falls squarely into this excellent category.
This weekend I see the story they created about Xavi and his resignation as delayed. The cameras and spotlight are on Xavi at full speed in the productive program called ‘Gol a goal’ (Esport 3). I understand the specific news is Xavi, yes. They timed this coach’s moves for us in Sunday’s ‘TN migdia’. Who did he meet at 11 o’clock on Saturday night, who did he meet with, who did he talk to… The next day at 9.30 in the morning he met with the players (“emotional meeting, some of the heavyweights even started crying”), met with the ‘staff’ and the president Laporta (” He was also very excited and said that the League had not disappeared”). Ahh! How careful the coach is in timing his moves. Perhaps instead of a stopwatch, it would be more useful to use caving tools that analyze the origin and nature of terrifying caverns and holes.
To ease my boredom, I read here in El Periódico de Cataluña my colleague Francisco Cabezas of the Prensa Ibérica group, and also Marcos López. They tell me about a man named Alejandro Echevarría, who managed the club and attended board meetings without having any position in the club, among many other greats. I also read Emilio Pérez de Rozas, from whom I borrowed the very accurate terminology ‘cabinet’, and learned that the process of collecting signatures for the no-confidence motion was ongoing. They don’t tell me any of this on TV3. His story is on the surface. Suddenly they say this, ah! surprise, the coach resigned.
Maybe if they had told us about the commissioning processes, the shenanigans, the levers, the role of the ‘booth’ in signatures, the tracking of evaporating ‘money’…, if they had dived a little instead of swimming at the surface, perhaps even I would have understood that the coach did not resign just because of a specific sporting failure. It would be a good public service to explain to the members and all of Catalonia what is left of their club and what they no longer have because it has already been sold.