Pressure builds on Xavi ahead of clasico with Barcelona on brink of Champions League exit

Last October, Barcelona’s players and manager boarded a late-night flight from Madrid to return home, expecting a bad reception. By the time they landed, coach and players were no longer colleagues.

Ronald Koeman had been sacked while he sat at the front of the aircraft. He had just overseen a second defeat on the trot, one of them a clasico against Real Madrid. Barca were also heading towards elimination at the group stage of the Champions League.

Fast forward 12 months and the Barcelona who head to the Bernabeu stadium this weekend to contest the leadership of La Liga with their arch-rivals will board their flight much changed in personnel.

The squad is far stronger, on paper, than the one Koeman picked from in his last days in charge. Robert Lewandowski and not Luuk de Jong will be the experienced centre-forward looking forward to his first clasico; Jules Kounde, a €50 million summer purchase, rather than Oscar Mingueza, will be in contention for the tricky right-back position, charged with marking Vinicius Junior.

And the manager? When Koeman was sacked, several thousand metres into Spanish airspace, Barcelona had already lined up his replacement in former club captain Xavi, a relative novice to management at 41 years old. He said yes to his first job as a senior coach in Europe on the promise that, in 2022, big money would somehow be found to strengthen the squad.

More than €200m was spent in his first two windows, much of it on Lewandowski, Kounde and the wingers Raphinha and Ferran Torres. High salaries were offered to players with champion calibre, such as European Cup-winners Marcos Alonso and Andrea Christensen and to Franck Kessie, fresh from winning Serie A.

Barcelona, heavily in debt, had raised the funds