8 THINGS BARCELONA AND REAL MADRID MUST DO TO REGAIN THEIR STRANGLEHOLD ON EUROPE
1 INTEGRATE BIG-NAME SIGNINGS
You can always judge how Barcelona and Real Madrid perceive the relative success of their previous season by taking a look at that summer’s dealings in the transfer market. Austerity means there was an acceptable amount of silverware won. If they’re splashing the cash like shopaholics at the Boxing Day sales, things probably haven’t gone very well.
That La Liga’s big beasts were comfortably Europe’s top spenders in the summer of 2019, each splurging eye-watering sums on players, is telling. Barcelona shelled out €255 million in transfer fees, while Real Madrid’s expenditure tipped €300m.
Spending twice as much as Manchester City this summer is a tacit admission of guilt from Madrid president Florentino Perez. Eden Hazard was the headline arrival, but Luka Jovic, Ferland Mendy, Eder Militao and 18-year-old wonderkid Rodrygo each commanded fees north of €40m, even though they were all signed with the future in mind, with the Rodrygo deal agreed as far back as June 2018.
But the new signings have, for the most part, been conspicuous by their absence from the starting XI in the early stages of the season. Coach Zinedine Zidane has been especially loyal to the players who secured three Champions League trophies during his first spell in the Bernabeu dugout.
Not even Hazard, Real’s joint-record signing and the one guaranteed starter from their summer spree, has been immune from criticism. Returning from his holidays 7kg overweight, the Belgian’s pre-season form was poor and he soon picked up an injury. On his first start, the embarrassing 3-0 Champions League defeat to Paris Saint-Germain, he shuffled around the Parc des Princes to little effect. “Innocuous,” El Mundo Deportivo wrote the following day. L’Equipe gave him 2/10.
The new recruits were supposed to inject genuine competition for places in a trophy-laden but ageing squad. “Despite the investment,” wrote Marca only a month into the campaign, “a lot of the signings are just substitutes for the old guard. Zidane’s revolution is in danger of becoming half-hearted because he didn’t get what he wanted.”
Meanwhile, Barcelona’s 2018-19 season may have seen them bag a fourth league title in five years, but a chastening Champions League semi-final defeat to Liverpool meant that
