Barcelona recovery still pending as CL exit creates more problems for Xavi

MADRID: Xavi Hernandez said the Europa League is not where Barcelona belong, but another chastening defeat by Bayern Munich on Wednesday showed again how far they are from the Champions League elite.

After six games played in Group E, Barca had scored two goals in a pair of 1-0 victories over Dynamo Kiev. Against Bayern and Benfica, the two accomplished sides in the group, they failed to score a single goal and conceded nine, from a stalemate at home to Benfica, and three 3-0 defeats.

When Xavi took over on the back of consecutive wins over Dynamo, there appeared to be a way back, a possible path to qualification. But that always assumed Xavi´s arrival would initiate a bounce in form that, in truth, is yet to materialise.

Barca suffered Xavi´s first defeat in La Liga on Saturday at home to Real Betis, a fellow contender for the top four, and now their status as a Champions League club has also gone up in smoke.

"I wanted us to compete in this Champions League and try to win it but the reality is we are not at that level. It´s hard, but that´s how it is," Xavi said on Wednesday night.

The immediate impact will be primarily financial, with Barcelona missing out on around 15 million euros they would have earned for reaching the Champions League last 16 and that the club had forecasted into their accounts.

To make the same money in the Europa League, they would have to win the tournament.

For any club, in the aftermath of the pandemic, unexpected losses like these are damaging but for Barcelona, still nursing more than a billion euros of debt and trying to launch a 1.5-billion-euro renovation of stadium and training facilities, it is a hammer blow.

There will be the impact on potential signings, those Barca are now even less able to afford than before and those who might see them now, even more so than before, as a club in freefall.

Any targets in the January transfer window might justifiably wonder if exile from the Champions League is a blip, or a sign of things to come. Will Ferran Torres leave Manchester City for this?

Even the struggling Lionel Messi at Paris Saint-Germain might look back at his former club with some sense of relief to be away from it all. It cannot be entirely coincidental the last time Barcelona played in the Europa League was 2003-04, the season before Messi made his Barca debut.

There will almost certainly be a hit to the morale and belief of the players, for whom Barcelona´s status and grandure has been one of the last remaining sources of reassurance —