The End of an Era

"Xavi se despide del Barça por la puerta grande"

I always figured this moment would come sooner than I would hope.  The day my favorite athlete, my favorite footballer, would stop playing for my favorite club.  He's not retiring, but he is pretty close.  He's moving to another country, to another league, but thankfully for all the right reasons.  It's something to be optimistic about, anyway.

I've posted about my feelings before.  And to be honest, it's not something that I feel adequate to talk about right now.  I'm going through a lot right now on a personal level and I've stopped writing like I used to.  My thoughts don't flow as smoothly, my mind is a mess, and nothing makes as much sense.  But I feel like I somehow owe him something in his departure.  I feel like I need to say something about this man, because of so much he's given me.  And it feels so weird to say.  Awkward, even.  I've never met him.  I doubt he even knows I exist.  I'd be shocked if he did, really.  And to be honest, I don't even really care that much.  But none of that matters in the end.  What matters is that this man, this footballer, has given me so much.  He's brought me back to a place I never thought I'd be in, he introduced me to a whole new world, a whole new culture, to the extent that I honestly do feel like I know him.

The sad part is that the last couple years I've been so busy trying to take care of my life, trying to make something of it that I let things fall by the wayside.  I ignored the things I loved thinking that one day I'd come back to them, only to be chewed up and spit out by the very life I thought I wanted to live.

At the end of the day, the story is this: seven-and-a-half years ago I was planning my first trip back to Spain in almost four years.  I was getting back into football, if one could ever say that I was ever into it, and found a name that popped up on a roster for the Spanish National Team during a Eurocup qualifying match.  I recognized it from nearly nine years prior.  "That couldn't be the same guy...could it?"  It was.  What happened next sent me spiraling into a world that I'd only marginally known existed.  And what ended up happening was that I would end up taking a trip to Barcelona with some friends, sitting in the nosebleeds at Camp Nou, watching 90 minutes of beautiful football that would turn out to be a precursor to the legendary season that gave FC Barcelona their first treble.  And who would score the first goal in that match I saw on a May afternoon in Barcelona but the man who essentially forced himself into my life.

From that point on, I found myself immersing myself in Catalan culture.  In the language, history, and culture of a nation I barely knew and understood and would find myself defending.  I found myself within months being able to converse in it, and by the time I would return to Barcelona two years later I was told by native speakers, Barcelona locals, that they had no way of knowing I'd never lived a month in Catalunya.

So here I am, finding myself trying to figure out what's going to happen next.  It sounds trite, and bizarrely dependent on sports to find some kind of meaning in life.  But here's the truth.  And everyone who follows football knows this to be true.  Football is more than just a sport.  It's more than what American football and baseball and basketball and hockey purport to be.  Football is so much more than that.  I'm not even going to bother defining it.  It means something different for everyone, and that's what makes it the Beautiful Game.  But I honestly don't know what's going to happen now that Xavi no longer plays for FC Barcelona.  Oh, I'll still follow Barcelona.  That club has become such a huge part of my life I will never be able to let that go.  And I'll still plan my next trip to Barcelona, and I'll still speak Catalan, and I'll still support Catalan independence.  But it won't be the same.

I know he's off to a better place.  Not Qatar per se, but knowing why he's going there...to play the game at a level that Barça isn't letting him play at anymore.  To play a more managerial role so that he can segue into coaching, so that within the next five years we'll see him coaching at the Miniestadi and subsequently at Camp Nou.  So that, who knows, given the streak Barcelona's been on with 1st-year 1st team coaches winning trebles, he'll go on to win one himself.

So to this I say, in the language of his people:

Gràcies, Xavi.  Gràcies per tot.  Gràcies per tot el que ens has donat i pel que ens tornaràs a donar.  Ets tota la llegenda que mereix aquest club i tota la persona que necessitàvem.  Gràcies per ser la persona que has sigut.  Molta sort al teu futur.  Mai t'oblidarem.