It used to be difficult to imagine Barcelona not playing in the Champions League. After all, it was one of the biggest and most renowned teams in Europe and the world, which disputed and won important titles and championships. But nowadays, haunted by a bad phase that has been going on for some time, it is not something that needs much imagination, as this fact was consummated last Wednesday, 10/26/2022, when confronting and losing 4 – 0 to Bayern Munich. The Catalan club depended on external and internal factors to continue in the competition and advance to the round of 16. First: he needed exclusively the victory over Bayern; Second: he needed Inter Milan, a team that was also fighting for the vacancy, to lose to Viktoria Plzen; And well, not even one of the cases occurred to give at least a little hope to the fans, since the team entered the field already disqualified, needing the victory.
It was the second year in a row that the club was eliminated in the group stage and to avoid the same situation as last year, big investments were made and signings from Barcelona for this season, such as Brazilian Raphinha, Koundé, Pablo Torre, Kessié, Christensen, Bellerín and, of course, the trump card and icing on the cake: Robert Lewandowski, former athlete of Bayern Munich and until last Wednesday, opponent in group C of the competition.
This troubled phase that the club is going through is something that has happened at least since when Lionel Messi was still playing in the team, Luis Suárez recently said that at that time he saw the star cry like never before, lamenting the situation, the low performance and the situation in which Barcelona is found and that ended up messing with everyone in the cast.
It is clear that the team has problems on and off the field and needs some time for things to align and the investments made to actually start to act as expected. For rival fans, the bad phase and the finding of the club for the second year following in the Europa League (the second biggest competition in Europe after the Champions League and therefore it is a joke for big teams to compete), is a dish full of mockery and memes for part of fans of Real Madrid and other rival clubs. As for Barcelona fans, unfortunately, what remains to be done is to accept the joke, hope and believe that in a short future everything will be back to normal.