Barcelona have no Messi and billion-dollar debt. Can Xavi and his young stars come to the rescue?

BARCELONA — There’s nothing nou about Camp Nou, Barcelona’s iconic stadium. The red grandstand seats, meant to evoke the stripes on the Catalan flag, have faded to flamingo pink. The concrete floors are mottled and scarred.

It’s a fitting symbol of the vertiginous decline of a great football club. Barcelona’s widely reported billion-Euro shortfall is only part of the problem, though it casts a shadow over everything else. When Real Betis arrived for a Saturday game in early December, Barcelona was mired in seventh place, lower than they have ended a LaLiga season since 1942. This was barely a month after Xavi Hernandez, a club legend who’d only ever managed in the Qatar Stars League was hired to replace Ronald Koeman. Yet the Betis game was already being billed in the newspapers as a crucial test.

Xavi is Barcelona’s fourth manager — fifth, if you count an interim — in less than two years, distressing turnover for a club so impressed with its own continuity. And for the first time in nearly two decades, Lionel Messi isn’t around to salvage the wreckage. When even the 50% cut he’d agreed to couldn’t fit into Barcelona’s league-mandated wage bill, he ended up making $860,000 a week at Paris Saint-Germain. “We cannot ask the team to win big trophies now, because we are coming from very low,” said Albert Ferrer, a Barcelona loyalist who advanced through the youth system and then played more than 200 games with the first team from 1990 to 1998. “At this point, we have to go back to basics.”

Like the stadium, the roster needs a drastic overhaul. Fortunately, one is underway; a new generation is hidden in plain sight, among veterans who helped Barcelona win four of the past seven LaLiga titles but won’t be around the next time they win another.

At the forefront is Pedri, an 18-year-old midfielder with a DIY haircut that makes him look even younger. Last month, he was named world football’s Golden Boy, a designation awarded annually by an Italian newspaper to the best under-21 player in the world. (Previous winners include Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappe and Messi himself.) Another midfielder, Gavi, 17, is starting — and sometimes starring — for Spain. (Nico, 19, is just waiting for the call.) Striker Ansu Fati, a product of the club’s much-hyped youth program known as Barcelona’s La Masia, scored four goals in seven games last year as a 17-year-old before tearing a meniscus in his knee.

There are more, though a casual Barcelona fan might not recognize some of the names. Abde Ezzalzouli has been featured lately on the right-wing; he’s also not yet 20. Neither is striker Ilias Akhomach, nor defenders Eric Garcia and Alex Balde. Standout defender Ronald Araujo, summer arrival Ferran Jutgla and the Dutch-raised American Sergino Dest are just a tick or two older.

“These days, there are many talented young players all around football,” said veteran defender Dani Alves, 38. “But so many in one place? You just don’t find that anywhere.”

Alves has perspective. He has won more titles and trophies than anyone in the history of the sport — 42 of them, including multiple LaLigas, Club World Cups and Champions Leagues at Barcelona between 2008 and 2016. He was signed last month on a free transfer after spending the past two years at Sao Paulo in what had appeared to be a coda to his career. He can’t start playing until January’s transfer window, but he’s already an unofficial mentor for Barca’s teens, on the field and off it. He cautions that their maturation must occur organically, as Messi’s did. “A player who is 17 years old, you have to take care, take care, take care,” he said. “You can’t put too much pressure on him right away.”

That part, it turns out, is a problem. If they were any other club, Barcelona could ask for patience. For even the biggest of teams, rejuvenation can be a laborious process; consider that neither Manchester United, Arsenal, nor AC Milan have come close to winning a domestic title since 2013. But Barcelona’s ticket holders, who elect the club’s president, require constant validation.

“I could accept losing everything this year and enjoying watching the new team build-up,” said David Caraben, a popular Catalan rock musician with lifelong connections to the club; his father worked on the financial side and was close friends with Johan Cruyff. “The trouble is,” Caraben adds, “nobody will let that happen.”

The requirements at Barcelona are not entirely rational: The team must play artfully and win a trophy of some kind every season. Former player and manager Pep Guardiola always maintained that doing the first led to the second, but that’s far more likely when you have the budget to construct a roster that fits with your philosophy. At the moment, Barcelona’s budget basically doesn’t exist. Still, the mandate won’t change. “There is no transition year allowed at Barcelona,” Araujo said. Just contemplating the idea seems to strike him as an affront. “You know what this club is,” he scolded. “It can’t be possible here.”

Nobody understands that more than Xavi, who first came to La Masia when he was 11. That might explain his reluctance to take on the challenge of managing Barcelona when he was asked last summer: How do you balance building a team with the need to win now?