Sport Barcelona has regressed to its historically dysfunctional mean, which slipped our minds thanks to Lionel Messi

It’s important to remember that the 15-year stretch of Barcelona dominance, from the 2004-05 season through 2018-19, when the Catalans claimed four Champions League titles, 10 La Ligas and six Copa del Reys, was an outlier.

Barcelona defined a generation of the sport and reimagined what soccer could look like. But set against the backdrop of the club’s history, that era’s success and brilliance stood in sharp contrast to the century that preceded it.

Other than the four-year stretch of Johan Cruyff’s early-1990s Dream Team, Barca’s history was one of conflict and combustion and disappointment. Even as a player at the club, Cruyff won La Liga just once in five years. Until Cruyff returned as manager in 1988, Barca had been Spanish champions just 10 times and never once the champions of Europe.

Lionel Messi has come under fire from Barcelona manager Ronald Koeman after failing to score for an almost unheard of run of 3 games

The Argentine forward drew his third consecutive blank in front of goal at the weekend as Barcelona lost 1-0 to Getafe.The Argentine forward drew his third consecutive blank in front of goal on Saturday as Barca suffered its first defeat of the La Liga campaign at the hands of Getafe.

Barcelona are unravelling dramatically as the vandalism of ex-president Sandro Rosell has put the marriage of Lionel Messi and sublime football on the brink of a divorce. Throughout Messi ’s emergence as a true genius of football, Barcelona had repeatedly chosen to cosset and reassure him.

Lionel Messi has confirmed he will remain at Barcelona for another season having previously Lionel Messi will NOT be leaving Barcelona , we can confirm. We sat down with the man himself to The Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email. Messi ’s legal representatives argued that date

After the high-flying 1990s, Barca transcended the sport in the first decade of the 21st century under Frank Rijkaard and then Pep Guardiola, before a grab-bag of other coaches rode out the final waves of the tide. Last season was the first since 2003-04 that Barcelona won nothing at all.

On Tuesday, club president Josep Bartomeu and the rest of his board resigned, perhaps marking the end of that triumphant run. Saturday’s 3-1 home loss to Real Madrid appears to have been the final straw. It was a second consecutive La Liga loss and. a third game without a win that cast Barca into 12th place, albeit with two games in hand over most other teams.

But it wasn’t about the losses. It was about all of it.

© Provided by Yahoo! Sports Club president Josep Bartomeu resigned along with the rest of the Barcelona board on Tuesday, having overseen years' worth of on-field decay. (Photo by Joan Valls/Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Barcelona has regressed back to the mean, reacquainting itself with the dysfunction that ruled before this remarkable decade-and-a-half spell. This stretch was ended infamously and irredeemably by the 8-2 loss to Bayern Munich in last season’s Champions League quarterfinal and superstar Lionel Messi’s subsequent, and ultimately futile, push to leave his childhood club.

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Lionel Messi failed to show up for a coronavirus test at Barcelona 's training ground on Sunday, club sources have confirmed to CNN, casting further doubt on his future at the La Liga powerhouse.

Lionel Messi had that aimless look again Saturday after El Clasico, searching for plenty of answers that aren't there. But much of that money has come from its own mutual funds. back to its days as Standard Oil Co. a century ago.About ExxonMobil: ExxonMobil is one of the largest oil companies in

Bartomeu had been in charge for almost seven years. He became a club director during Joan Laporta’s presidency, when Barca restored its status. He rose under Sandro Rossell’s presidency and took over for the latter in 2014, when Rossell was forced to resign in the Neymar transfer scandal.

Bartomeu was an accidental president, of sorts, but he was reelected in 2015. His term was up next summer and he could not stand again. But pressure kept growing. He had promised elections in the spring. It wasn’t enough. A no-confidence vote had gathered enough signatures to proceed in early November. Bartomeu tried to put off such a vote on account of the coronavirus spike in the region, but local government refuted that excuse.

His fate was probably sealed when Messi blasted him for his lack of vision and competence while announcing that he would play out the final year of his contract because the club wouldn’t honor a release clause the Argentine believed he had exercised properly.

Barcelona waits on authorities before vote against Bartomeu

MADRID (AP) — Barcelona is waiting for authorization from local officials before holding a referendum that could lead to the ouster of club president Josep Bartomeu and his board of directors. Club members have called for a motion of censure against Bartomeu and the board, but the club said Monday it can’t hold the vote until officials authorize it amid the coronavirus pandemic. More than 110,000 club members are entitled to vote, but the Spanish government last week declared a state of emergency because of a surge in the number of coronavirus cases.

Barcelona icon Lionel Messi has candidly spoken about having to administer his own childhood hormone injections. Messi was diagnosed with a growth hormone disorder, otherwise known as idiopathic short stature, which resulted in him having to inject his own legs every night.

Thanks to Messi , the team has enjoyed the most successful era of its history, having won 30 Even if Lionel Messi 's advisers insisted that the transfers from FC Barcelona to Messi 's foundation were But the issue facing the club has by no means been resolved. The audit of FC Barcelona is ongoing.

Messi was fed up with the decay of the last half-decade. Of the hundreds of millions of euros spent on players who didn’t complement him, or really anybody else on the team. Of the blunder in allowing Neymar to leave in 2017. Of the team’s increasing reliance on him and the other veterans, no matter how much they aged. Of the revolving door of managers — six since Guardiola left in 2012 and three in this calendar year alone. Of the slow decline, the team a little weaker every subsequent season, a little older, a little more vulnerable.

All the while, Bartomeu seemed more focused on the business side, pushing for, and speaking incessantly of, becoming the sport’s first club to generate a billion euros in annual revenue. He was preoccupied with stadium renovations, neighborhood redevelopment, digital innovations. All the stuff that wasn’t the first team itself. Or the attendant results.

If the club was already in the throes of overlapping crises, the leadership vacuum at the top likely won’t improve matters in the short term. An election will be called in the coming months. And a new president is likely to install a new manager, which would spell doom for Ronald Koeman, if the poor results alone don’t do him in. It seems unlikely that Messi will go to bat for him, after Koeman told Messi he would no longer enjoy special privileges, shipped out some of his closest teammates and criticized his form publicly.

Juventus needs to find a way to win without Ronaldo

MILAN (AP) — Cristiano Ronaldo's status remains unclear going into this weekend's Serie A games, which means Juventus may have to finally find a way to win without him. Ronaldo has yet to be cleared to return after testing positive for the coronavirus more than two weeks ago, and his absence has been keenly felt by a young Juventus side which is going through a transition under new coach Andrea Pirlo. The nine-time defending Serie A champion has drawn its last two league matches without Ronaldo — against last-place Crotone and Hellas Verona — and was outclassed by Barcelona in a 2-0 loss in the Champions League on Wednesday.

LIONEL MESSI proved once again why he is widely regarded as the greatest footballer of all time in Barcelona 's win over Chelsea last night, and Rio Ferdinand has noticed one thing he does Lionel Messi scored a crucial goal for Barcelona against Chelsea – here are the best snaps of him in action.

Lionel Messi signed his first contract with Barcelona on a napkin before moving to La MasiaCredit: AP:Associated Press. THAT'S right, one of the greatest players of all time was snapped up thanks to a serviette. Barca scouts were so keen to tie him down, they used the only piece of 'paper' they could find.

But there will be renewed hope that Messi will stick around next summer, when his contract finally expires. He will turn 34 years old then and there is an argument to be made that his presence has prevented an overdue rebuild. Yet returning to the summit tends to be easier when you have the world’s greatest player in your team, even one with a stratospheric salary and who stopped running years ago.

At one point last summer, Bartomeu promised that if Messi stayed, the president would resign. But Messi stayed and the president’s vow was somehow forgotten about. When he finally did resign, Bartomeu announced on his way out the door that he had signed Barca up for some kind of European Super League — a project that has been rumored for decades but never materialized — as if to drop that little bombshell purely for effect. Or perhaps he wants credit for it when if it ever does happen.

It was perhaps a fitting allegory for the Bartomeu era. While he was thinking about the future, about revenues and infrastructure and media products, the product on the field decayed. The core business suffered as the president diversified.

And now Barcelona is back to where it was, a sated giant that has lulled itself to sleep.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.

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