Xavi’s new order

Xavi Hernández made it very clear in his presentation as a new Barcelona coach that the pillars of his project are based on “order and demand”. To achieve this challenge, the Egarense has a series of norms and rules that he has learned throughout his time as a player, “when we have had order and discipline, things have gone well, but when we have not had order or discipline, everything has gone wrong and has ended badly” .

In AS we can reveal a decalogue of rules that from now on will be governed within the Blaugrana dressing room:

1- Players have to be an hour and a half before training.
Until now, a certain relaxation was allowed in terms of the time they had to be in the changing room, taking into account that the sessions began at 11 am. As of this Tuesday, it was over to arrive half an hour or twenty minutes earlier. Everyone must be 90 minutes in advance. The goal is to have time to prepare for training sessions and for the players to have a quiet breakfast. Also to be able to make some individual talks to comment on aspects of the work. That means that from now on, the arrival deadline will be 9.30 a.m. The arrival control will be carried out by the delegate Carles Naval.

2- Staff must show up two hours before training.
Xavi is the first to set an example, so his assistants and the rest of the locker room members have to ‘sign in’ 120 minutes before training, with the aim that when the players start to arrive, they have everything ready to start their session .

3- Players eat at the Ciutat Esportiva.
Voluntariness is over. As of this Tuesday, all the players of the first team have to have lunch and eat in the dining room of the Blaugrana facilities under the parameters set by the club’s nutritionists. A correct diet can prevent injuries and improve physical preparation.

4- Fines are instituted.
Since Luis Enrique left, the sanctions for minor, serious or very serious fouls have disappeared, on the grounds that footballers are professional enough to know what they have and what they don’t have to do. The truth is that this type of management can work in an ideal scenario, but in real life it is much more complicated. Xavi lived in the time of Rijkaard as the costumes were diluted by the relaxation in the rules and as Guardiola established a rigid code of conduct, which ended up bearing fruit very soon.

5- Exponential penalties.
The fines will be fixed with a geometric rhythm and not an arithmetic one. That means that if a player is late for training he would pay the lightest penalty, 100 euros, to the second penalty, it would be 200, but if he repeats a third, it would rise to 400, and so on ‘ad infinitum’. Some players, in the time of Luis Enrique, reached 6,000 euros in fines in a single season.

6- 48 hours before a game you can’t be home late.
When the team is two days away from playing a game, it is prohibited to arrive later than midnight. It is considered that the player must be aware that he has to arrive at the game in the best possible conditions and one of the non-negotiable requirements is to lead an orderly life and even more so on the eve of the games.

7- Meritocracy.
You play like you train and meritocracy is the only way to success. Only those who train the best and who have the most commitment at work will have options to be starters. The rest will suck the bench or in the worst case, they will not be summoned.

8- Control of extra-sports activities.
Footballers may have other facets that are not strictly football, but if these end up affecting their performance, as they need to travel or spend many hours, they will have to be supervised by the coaching staff. You cannot make private trips of several hours by plane during the season without the explicit permission of the coach.

9- Risk activities prohibited.
No more seeing a player surfing or riding an electric bike. This type of practice is sanctioned as a very serious offense and would pass to the legal department as it is considered a flagrant breach of the contract.

10- Good image.
The players are a fundamental part of the club and they have to be the first to set an example. Empathic with fans must be shown and reprehensible attitudes are prohibited. During the trips they must comply with the rules of conduct and encourage Barcelona at all times.

The first day in Xavi’s ‘office’

The coach, who arrived at the Ciutat Esportiva at 8.35 am, experienced an intense day of meetings, receptions, speeches and, at the end, training in the field.

Xavi Hernández got up early on his first day of work at the helm of FC Barcelona. At 8.35 am, two and a half hours before training, the brand new coach appeared at the Ciutat Esportiva. In any case, he was not the earliest of the squad because Eric García and Iñaki Peña were already inside, and Pedri arrived right in front of him. Little by little the rest of the players appeared almost two hours before training, surprising the people who were waiting at the access door to the Ciutat Esportiva. And it is that as we anticipate exclusively in AS, one of the new rules that will be governed by the first team requires that the players attend an hour and a half before the set time of training, while the staff must be two hours before .

President Joan Laporta also arrived relatively early, who was accompanied by his usual entourage, made up of the sports vice president, Rafa Yuste, and the football director, Mateu Alemany, better known as “the detachment”, since Laporta defined them that way by his adventure last week in Qatar to bring Xavi.

Inside, the president’s advisor, Enric Masip, as well as Jordi Cruyff, director of the international area, and the technical secretary, Ramon Planes, were already waiting. Before starting with the speeches, Xavi personally greeted the players one by one. They were not all, far from it, since the internationals were with their national teams. He was especially effusive with Ousmane Dembélé, whom the Frenchman thanked his words of support in his presentation, as with Nico González, a player who will surely be one of the pillars on which his project will be based.

Once the presentations were finished, Joan Laporta took the controls to deliver an optimistic and hopeful message regarding the project that is starting now. Then it was Xavi who endorsed the president’s words, delving into the idea of ​​”maximum demand” to return to being at the top.

And then, Xavi’s most anticipated moment arrived, that of jumping onto the pitch to complete his first training session with FC Barcelona. There, a handful of first-team players await him, including goalkeeper Neto, already recovered from his feverish process, along with Riqui Puig, Umtiti, Luuk de Jong and Mingueza. To add more troops, he called a total of seven players from the subsidiary: Comas, Mármol, Álvaro, Abde, Jutglà, Aranda and Akhomach. The latter is a winger of the subsidiary, only 17 years old, who, having seen the problems that the team has in that position, could have more presence in the first team and enter into work dynamics during these weeks.