The Enrique Postmortem

For the most part I scrupulously held off on my analysis on the coaching tenure of Luis Enrique, waiting to see how that last year finished off, and until I had the full picture.



Now maybe I do. In as much as I ever will.

I have decided that he was a modestly capable man of few ideas that he held tightly to himself. He was the strong, silent type, a bit gruff, a bit stinting, whose reticence covered over a sparseness of invention. And we all spent three years filling in those blanks.

Give a sensible, unadventurous man a fortune and, in a world so friendly to the rich, he is likely to come out with at least another small fortune a few years down the line. And so Luis Enrique, with his fortune of a team, captured a treble, a domestic double, and a Copa, a fortune indeed for any coach in three years, and yet one qualified by his being the richest man in football. I don't believe it to be overbold to say he inherited one of the finest soccer teams ever assembled. He walked into a team with the greatest player yet to lay his foot on a ball, full in his prime, but also four others who were likely among the then top ten in the game in that year: Iniesta, Suarez, Neymar, and Busquets. Xavi, fading, his last year being the first year of the trident, could still be placed in the top 20 in the game, possibly along with Pique. Alves, Rakitic, Bravo, Mascherano, and Alba would have all found themselves at various places in the top 100. Enrique's diminishing returns speak more about his career than his total haul of trophies, and a more inspired coach, without requiring too much luck, could have taken such a team to even more dizzying heights.





After all, let us look at this three year history of Barca. In year one they bumbled a bit on their way, until, after Suarez served out his suspension, the trident caught fire and commenced to burn thrillingly through Europe. Enrique stood merely in the position of unleashing the fiercest hounds we may ever see running the front line of a soccer team. Convinced by the power of this he doubled down on them in season two.


https://youtu.be/wIhCqk6j1gE?t=1m34s

 The team looked likely to sweep through all of Spain and Europe again, and were perhaps even better in the heart of that season than they were in their first triumphant one all together. But unmanaged and uncontrolled fires cannot burn forever, and the unbelievably brilliant team, a still nearly perfect eleven, but now more fragile and with little to back it, burned out exhausted, and they nearly lost everything. Naturally enough this was the first point at which Luis Enrique's shortcomings came into full view. Fully reliant on a combination of old tactics and makeshift ones to serve the sizzling talents of his forwards, he, at the first impediment, exhaustion, was slow to react and understand, and he was reluctant to change or experiment. As the underlying problems slowly convinced him, being a man of no great finesse, he overreacted and prepared through the summer for a third season heavy on rotation. Unfortunately here he tried to kill two birds with one stone: trying to buy for the future and for the present with the same new players, and only one of the many 22 year olds acquired was able to add value to the team.



Buy outside as big as possible for the present. Develop from within for the future. And plug the small gaps that are left after this, only when you have no other choice, with something in between. Enrique skipped the first and second that summer and went right to the third.



In the third season the outlandish talent still carried the team into contention and occasional triumphs, even miracles. But a structural core of passing and control and stability of tactics, to work the magic off of, started to come apart under sometimes futile insistence that players not capable of such a level be given chance after chance to step up. Only able to take his lessons bluntly, Enrique, after the player burnouts of year two, overprotected and parsed out his players and his team's energy, remaining shy of presses and alternate approaches and players, all while waiting for the kind of magic sometimes unsuited and unequal to the shifts, talents, and diverse tactics of the highest level teams in Europe.



A signature moment in this was in the heart of a disastrous PSG game, when Luis Enrique turned to his assistant Unzue and more or less seemed to say "What do we do?" That Unzue merely shrugged his shoulders was emblematic of the failures of their merely acceptable tenure. "When in doubt, wait." Seemed to be their watchword. And it made Enrique increasingly poorly suited to a team of such outsized talent. In the end Enrique seemed to be at the mercy of that talent, but unable to truly craft and wield it.