Imagine the scenario. Your football team are in first place in the league. With only seven games remaining, they’re 11 points ahead of the team in second place. They’re going to win the league. It’s a question of when rather than if.

What’s more, they’re a massive 15 points clear of their bitterest rivals, who are languishing in fourth place.

They’re also in the domestic cup final which will be played next weekend. In the final they’re playing a team who are in seventh place in the league table. So they’re the clear favourites. After all, they’ve won the cup for three years running. It’s more or less their cup.

Oh, and I nearly forgot. There’s another thing. Your team’s striker is arguably the greatest player of all time.

So, sounds great, right?

Except..you don’t look very happy.

Why?

The socis

The scenario above would sound fantastic for the majority of football fans around the world. But then FC Barcelona fans aren’t like other fans. I discovered that fairly early on in the 2014-2015 season. I’d moved to Barcelona from London at the beginning of September, and was lucky to make it to most of the games at Camp Nou for the following two and a half years.  

I was sat in a block full of socis (members) who had been going to Camp Nou for years. Among them were some fascinating characters. In the seat to my left was an Andalusian who had moved to Barcelona around 20 years earlier. His accent was so thick that I had no idea what he was saying half of the time. Then there was a woman just in front of me who would berate the referee ruthlessly for any decision, however minor, that went against Barça.

I learned plenty of interesting insults in both Spanish and Catalan in that block.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all the socis in my block was a stout, elderly gentleman who behaved like Barça was his club. I called him Mr Barça.

Mr Barça

Everybody around me knew Mr Barça. He would shake about twenty hands on his way to his seat. Making sure everybody knew that he had arrived. And he’d make even more noise when he was leaving.

I never once saw him stay until the end of the game. My friend Joan and I would sometimes bet on the minute that he would leave. It could be anywhere from the 55th minute to the 80th. But he rarely stayed longer than that.

When he decided he’d seen enough, he’d get up unhurriedly and calmly button up his jacket. Turning his back to the action on the pitch.

Like a Caesar in Ancient Rome, he’d survey the crowd of faces before him, catching as many eyes as he could. Then he’d loudly and clearly make an announcement that went something like this:

“These guys don’t deserve me hanging around to watch anymore of this game. I’m going home.”

The score at this juncture was normally 1-0 or 2-0 to Barça. Invariably they’d get two or three more goals in the final 10 or 15 minutes as their opponents tired, but for whatever reason Mr Barça chose to ignore this inevitability.   

The elevated expectations of FC Barcelona

Don’t get me wrong. Mr Barça is an extreme example of the demanding FC Barcelona fan. The majority of those who sat around me were normal, realistic supporters, albeit with the elevated expectations that come with supporting one of the world’s biggest football teams.

I’d suggest that expectations are a lot more unrealistic among Barça supporters from around the world that I encounter on Twitter than the locals who go to Camp Nou every other week.

A lot of the supporters in my block who I’d speak with were old enough to remember a time when Barça weren’t all-conquering. They could remember seasons when they’d finish 6th in the league. They could remember a time when the club had never won the European Cup and never looked likely to win it.

For younger supporters it’s different. If you started following Barça in 2009, for example, you’d have witnessed not only unparallelled success, but also some of the most glorious football any team has ever played.     

The expectation for a lot of fans is, quite simply, perfection.

Barça are the footballing equivalent of a chapel somewhere in Italy during the Renaissance. There are several walls to be painted inside, but the first two have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. And the patrons expect the other walls to match up to the same exalted standards as the first two.

You’d forgive the artists following those two to be a little bit apprehensive.

Barça’s Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola. Together they created the guidebook on how Barça should play. Fluid interchanges and passing. Denying the opponent the ball. And goals. Lot’s of goals.

From fun to functional

Luis Enrique’s Barça deviated from these tactics. This was the Barça that I watched during my time in the city. They didn’t dominate games as much as they did under Guardiola. The play wasn’t as dizzyingly spellbounding.

But it was still fun.

There were lots and lots of goals. As you would expect with a forward line of Messi, Suarez and Neymar.

And there were some incredible moments. Not least the enthralling, unforgettable final few minutes of La Remontada against PSG just over a year ago.      

This season has been different under new manager Ernesto Valverde. A word that has been used a lot to describe Barça in the last few months is functional. And therein lies the problem. FC Barcelona, surely, should not be described as functional.

Barça have been playing 4-4-2 this season. A formation synonymous with direct, English football in the 1990s. Hardly the refined school taught by Cruyff and mastered by Guardiola.

They’ve not been dominating games. In fact, in more games than Barça fans would like to admit, they’ve been saved by Messi’s genius. Or by Marc-André ter Stegen’s goalkeeping abilities.

The cracks in the chapel walls have been growing steadily wider. More often than not it has been possible to fill them. But a realization has been growing among fans of FC Barcelona this season that something just isn’t quite right. And that sooner or later a crack might appear that would prove harder to fill.

An empire falls in Rome

That fracture emerged on Tuesday evening in Rome. Barça travelled there with a 4-1 lead from the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final. They should have been comfortable. But they were anything but. The truth is that Roma were impressive in the first game in Barcelona and were unfortunate to lose 4-1. In the second leg they demonstrated from the first minute that they believed. They won the game 3-0.

So it was then, that after the fall in Rome, the inquest began in the Catalan and Spanish media into what has gone wrong at a club who are 11 points ahead at the top of the league and in the final of the cup.

If that sounds strange, it points to how, for FC Barcelona, success alone just isn’t enough. There’s a demand for a certain style to go hand-in-hand with that success. There was none of that style in Rome. It was a dreadful performance.

The fallout from the game also points to the importance of the Champions League, above and beyond the league and the cup. Particularly when that most bitter of rivals, Real Madrid, have secured a semi-final place and look likely to win the competition for a third successive year.

On Wednesday, the Spanish football podcast, El Larguero, suggested that the Barça dressing room had begun to question the methods of manager Ernesto Valverde. In El País an article pointed out that it wasn’t the first time in recent years that FC Barcelona had been well beaten in Europe away from Camp Nou. In El Mundo Deportivo, it was suggested that Barça fans had been too presumptuous in wondering whether it would be better to play Real Madrid in the semi-final or the final of the Champions League.  

The end of an era

In the coming weeks, it’s likely that Barça will wrap up a league and cup double. There will be celebrations, and rightly so. But there will be some introspection too.

Andrés Iniesta, one of the symbols of the club’s glittering last decade or so, is set to leave in the summer. Lionel Messi is getting older. Other key players appear to have peaked already. And while the club has spent hundreds of millions of euros in recent years, not many of those who they’ve bought to build for the future have really been a success. There’s an “end of an era” feel about it all.

But more than anything else, the team just doesn’t really look like a Barça team anymore. At least not the Barça that we’ve grown used to watching.

As a Manchester United supporter I’m aware of the danger of sustained success building sky-high expectations. However, it didn’t take me many games in my old block at Camp Nou to realise that the expectations in Catalonia are at another level altogether.

After all, there aren’t many football teams in the world that can be 11 points clear in the league, in the cup final, and yet still be disappointed.

But that’s FC Barcelona. The club where success alone just isn’t enough.