Barcelona boss Hansi Flick makes big calls ahead of new season

A report claims Barcelona is in a race against time to lower its wage bill and register manager Hansi Flick before the new season begins.

Flick was unveiled as Barca’s new manager earlier this week. He replaced former boss Xavi after a clash with president Joan Laporta over the squad’s strength, which saw him relieved of his duties.

According to MARCA, however, Barcelona still needs to register Flick’s contract with La Liga as the club is still well over its current salary limit. Fans with Barcelona tickets assumed that the financial constraints would’ve been solved by last season, but by the looks of it, they are here to stay for yet another season.

It is noted that Xavi’s registration only ran until this summer, and club officials know they need to lower their current salary expenses before registering any new faces.

Four more players still need to be registered for next year. Gavi and Alejandro Balde are expected to be registered before the end of the summer, but doubts persist about Vitor Roque and Inigo Martinez, who could leave the club.

To register Gavi, Balde, Flick, and anybody else – Eric Garcia is also returning from an impressive loan with Girona – Barcelona will have to raise significant funds in the transfer market.

Decisions will have to be made on loanees Joao Cancelo and Joao Felix, while Barcelona may be forced to listen to offers for several players in Flick’s squad to make the next season work.

Defenders Ronald Araujo and Jules Kounde continue to be linked with big-money moves away from Camp Nou, as do forwards Ferran Torres and Raphinha, while speculation surrounding the future of midfielder Frenkie de Jong is never far away.

The departure of Marcos Alonso on a free transfer should free up some money, but Barcelona will have to raise more money in the coming months to fulfil all its ambitions.

While the current state of the Hansi Flick contract still needs to be fully in print, the manager is already making decisions to shape the club’s path for the upcoming season.

He’s also quite adamant that the club will need to sell a few more than the ones mentioned above if they need to return to their usual playing form.

The 59-year-old came out of nowhere to take over a Bayern Munich side from which very few people expected greatness. 

Hansi Flick is the Attitude Change that Barcelona Need

All he did was win a Sextuple and a second Bundesliga title in less than two years in charge, at first with a highly German, full Gegenpressing style of play that slowly but surely evolved into a well-rounded, varied machine of offensive precision and defensive aggression that took Germany and Europe by storm and made Bayern weekly must-watch TV for a year and a half.

Then he surprisingly moved to the national team, started out on fire, dealt with some weird situations within the Federation, didn’t even get out of the World Cup group stages, and was fired after two years and 12 wins in 25 games. 

After nearly four extremely intense years featuring the highest of highs and the lowest of lows at the very top of the game, Flick is still somehow an unknown quantity at this level and can use the Barcelona job to finally answer the question of he’s truly a winning club tactician and astute man-manager that was shoehorned into a strange international position, or if he’s just a mediocre, lucky coach who inherited a brilliant Bayern squad simply in need of a different voice at that time.

There is still a lot that we don’t know, but what Flick has clearly and consistently shown both at Bayern and at Germany is, without a shadow of a doubt, that he’s an aggressive, attacking coach who wants the ball back as quickly as possible so his teams can create as many scoring chances as they can. 

The pressing stuff might sound like music to the ears of Barcelona fans going back to the glorious Pep Guardiola days, but they’re not used to the direct attacking stuff.

That is when culture shock comes in. Under Flick, at one time or another, or maybe many times, there will be a game with A LOT of long balls and crosses into the box, and a Barça team possibly winning with 40% possession and that counter-attacks their opponents to death. Barça fans might have to get used to long, diagonal balls from centre-backs to wingers, not as much midfield play in a few games and some not-so-pretty passing patterns at times. Still, the intensity, the effort and the willingness to win will always, always, always be there.

That is a non-negotiable for Flick: effort and intensity. These two pillars have been integral to Barcelona’s play, and the fans with Barcelona tickets think the same. 

You play as hard as you can until you can’t anymore. You will be well-drilled, your back four will have perfect distances, you will be told exactly when and how to press, and your front players will hunt in packs to help you get the ball back. 

But you have to run like crazy as if you were never quite asked to run in a Barcelona shirt before.

The club’s members, inside and outside, will be introduced to new methods and will get to do and see things on the pitch that will shock them at first. There might be plenty of voices against it, and some of them could even be the fans of Barcelona tickets. 

And those voices might be loud because they won’t stand seeing something different, even if it works.

But the simple reality is that football has evolved to a place where the style of play Barça introduced 15 years ago is now the norm, and the very best teams in the world are those who can execute their variation of the principles of that famous Pep Team: the buildup play from the back, the passing triangles, the third-man runs and the off-ball pressing, and execute it at the highest level, with the highest intensity possible, for the longest period. 

And that’s how Flick did it at Bayern, and that’s how he tried and failed at Germany in the biggest games for many known and unknown reasons.

It’s a truly fascinating gamble, and it brings something Barça fans haven’t seen in a while: the prospect of a genuine change in playing style and trying to achieve ways of winning that we don’t normally associate with the club. But even if that culture shock isn’t successful at first, it could be the catalyst for an evolution of the infamous ‘Barça DNA’ that causes the club to finally understand that they can still do things their unique way, as long as they understand that we’re in a new era where those things must be done slightly differently to achieve the same level of success they did last decade.

Hansi Flick isn’t the end of the rebuild process. He’s another step. But he may very well be the most important one.

The fans with Barcelona tickets hopes that he will be the person who can make the change.