“In the end, there is relief,” Jordi Cruyff says. “There’s a ‘pfff, thank goodness’. And if the signings then fit in and play well, you get a feeling of a job well done.”
There was a minute to go before midnight on deadline day, clock running, when the paperwork finally arrived and Barcelona at last knew they could register Pierre‑Emerick Aubameyang, somehow securing a fourth January signing. Six weeks later, he scored twice and gave an assist for Ferran Torres, another winter arrival, in a 4-0 destruction of Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu. It was Aubameyang’s ninth goal since joining, Barcelona’s 12th game without defeat, a new start. A job well done, indeed.
It is not an easy job, one where decisions have to be made that can “break your heart”, and still less in the midst of a crisis such as the one Barcelona must fix; it is also a job Cruyff has occupied only since 1 September when he became sporting adviser, later named director of international football, now effectively de facto technical secretary, working alongside Xavi Hernández and the director of football, Mateu Alemany, on transfers. But the preparation goes back further – he has been player, coach, sporting director – and so does the inspiration.
He talks eloquently about learning from Sir Alex Ferguson, a man “ahead of his time”, “ruthless” but “humane”, even if he didn’t always realise those were lessons then. And his father Johan, who died six years ago on Thursday and would have been 75 this year, was the most influential figure football has seen. A legacy is left through Cruyff’s foundation, celebrating its quarter-century, and in just about everything else. Nowhere is it felt more than here; no one feels it more than him.
Johan built the modern Barcelona, now Jordi is helping rebuild it. The task is huge. Lionel Messi has gone, the club unable to pay him or others; the debt revealed as €1.35bn in August, with further loans taken since; players have had to take pay cuts, and when the league recently announced salary limits Barcelona’s was set at minus €144m – the only club in negative numbers. There is, in short, no money. So, let’s cut to the chase: how could they sign Ferran Torres for €55m? And add Dani Alaves, Adama Traoré and Aubameyang?
“The word is amortisations,” Cruyff says. “You divide the cost by x years and work from there.” How it all works is complex; long-, mid-, short- and ultra-short-term plans running in parallel, a balance sought between building up the team and bringing down the debt. Imagination is required, opportunities seized: Barcelona’s winter signings were a transfer, a loan and a free agent, liberated at the last minute as the only way out. The fourth, Alves, was a 38‑year‑old with no club, desperate to come home – and make the World Cup.
“Spain’s financial fair play rules and the economic problems means many things that would normally be possible are not now,” Cruyff says. Those rules mean Barcelona can invest only one euro for every four they can save; they are also, Cruyff says, “much tougher than in the rest of Europe, which is curious. In England they’re more flexible. In Spain you get blocked. You need to be creative”.
He adds: “The mechanism is complex, and new to me, but Mateu understands it well. It’s so important to have a good team, direct communication: honest and clear, all together. Sometimes you come up with a [football] solution and it can’t be done. A difficult season sees you suffer but also helps you see clearly, to create priorities: there might be positions you want to strengthen but what do you need for these four months?” What do you need is only part of it; what can you realistically get? Hopes are not always fulfilled, targets get dropped, plans abandoned, others replacing them.
“Knowing the economic situation, FFP limits, players have to want to come. They know they could earn more elsewhere and all four signings made an effort so we can make the numbers work, which we should recognise. Barcelona is still special, a club players are prepared to lose money to work at.”
Alves came on the minimum salary permitted by La Liga. Aubameyang posed a simple deadline-day equation: if that’s all you can pay, that’s all I will earn. Which isn’t to say it was easy, a deal that was dead in the afternoon later rethought, restructured and revived. Rather than a transfer or loan Aubameyang had to rescind his contract at Arsenal.
“Depending on third parties on the last day is hard,” Cruyff says. “A termination agreement is also a lot more complicated than a loan agreement when you can say: ‘Well, we’ll sort things out in June, July.’ You’re waiting, there is a nervousness, the window’s closing, you can’t look for alternatives. Everyone’s after a goalscorer. But destiny decided and we’re delighted. There’s a collective sigh of relief when it ends well.
“Ferran is short-, mid- and long-term, and an opportunity. Had he not had the injury it would have been very hard to sign him. He would have played and he scores goals, so they [Manchester City] wouldn’t have sold. Sometimes you see a market opportunity. He’s injured, his team is winning [without him]; that creates a situation which doesn’t always come off, but this time it did.
“The winter market is difficult because clubs aren’t going to loan you a regular starter. So, you have players who are not playing so much but the Premier League is such a high tempo, more physically intense, that the player who has been there a few years has acquired certain habits, conditions. It’s not that we wouldn’t have looked at a good player from another league, but it was safer from England because you know they have the intensity built in. It wasn’t the key but it was a useful bonus.”
Within three games in Spain, Traoré had been involved in as many goals as in the previous 25 in England. Heading the other way, meanwhile, Philippe Coutinho has scored as many league goals in 10 Aston Villa games as in the past two seasons at Barcelona. “It can happen and it’s nobody’s fault,” Cruyff says; it pleases him too and not just because of their strategic aims – Barcelona need a market for Coutinho – but something simpler. “Karma,” he says. “If you wish someone ill, it comes back.”
There had been suggestions that Cruyff might temporarily take the team after the sacking of Ronald Koeman. Instead, Sergi Barjuán was made interim until Xavi arrived. Things have improved dramatically under the coach, with whom Cruyff has worked closely.
“I’ve been player, coach, sporting director – footballer is the loveliest thing of all – and don’t know what role I’ll do in 10 years’ time but what I do know is I never mix: when I’m here, I’m here. Sit in someone else’s chair? No. That’s rule number one. And rule number two, three, four, and five. What does help is that you can visualise a target, an XI, as a coach. You might think: ‘He’s a good player, but not what we need now.’ It helps to discuss things with coaches in their own language. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get it right, but it helps you better understand the player, the coach and his needs.”
The winter window has to be judged a success, Barcelona are unbeaten since deadline day, even if he stresses that it’s not just about the new four. Sergio Busquets, Gerard Piqué and Jordi Alba offer proof of that, Cruyff suggesting that people blaming the veterans is “the easy thing”, adding: “The coach deserves credit: the new players have raised the level, brought new energy, but everyone is better. There has to be a balance.”
Balance is the word. The financial constraints remain, an inescapable reality. They must fix the crisis at the same time as finding ways through financial fair play to facilitate the reconstruction of the team, aware that the risk of deepening the debt remains. There is a moment when Cruyff talks about inherited amortisations, signings from before proving a burden now, which poses a question: might not signings now be a problem later? What if a short-term fix becomes a long-term obligation?
“Now, it is being controlled so it doesn’t rebound on us,” he says. “Salaries have to be controlled too, a wage structure. That’s the way it has to be, or you get a boomerang effect.”
So far it is working, but they are under no illusions. There is a long way to go, but there is an idea, a pathway. Joan Laporta has always held Johan Cruyff up as a spiritual guide, asking himself what he would say, and Jordi admits he is the same, growing up seeing his father’s capacity to predict what was coming. So, what would Johan say now? “What exactly he would say about the situation, I’ll keep to myself,” Cruyff says, laughing. “But he was positive at all times and in everything. I was always amazed by it: even in the hardest moments of his life, he was an optimist.”
