They used to be better than this.

Days before the La Liga season kicked off, an announcement left the entire Spanish football community in disarray. It was to be expected, but even still, that didn’t mean it wasn’t shocking. Javier Tebas, fitting his usual standard procedures character, let it be known that there was a fixture during the upcoming season that would be played in Miami. Tebas has been adamant that football in Spain needs to become more like a multinational corporation and less like a football culture. His all-supreme attitude has brought him problems and enemies with time, but few things orchestrated by the La Liga chairman have been so terribly received as this one.

It not only breaks with the spirit of the game and the competition he presides over, but also opens the gate for a complete wrap-up of the league system in a country where football has already been dismantled by his ultra-dominating agenda. Yet, if you think this marketing move, which takes Spanish football right into the heart of the Latin community in North American in Miami would happen due to Real Madrid’s insistence, think again.

The club from Concha Espina may have changed how the great super clubs view the game over the past quarter of the century, but in this case, President Florentino Perez decided to position himself on the right side of things, and got unexpected support from almost every corner of Spanish football. It is Barcelona, the club that once proudly loaned the headline spot in the centre of their iconic blaugrana shirt to UNICEF, that is now heading up this new preposterous agenda. Not much remains of the Catalan club that once was, and after all the noise around the Negreira affair, the financial levers, the poor treatment of key squad players, they now resort to this. Barca used to be better than this.

Imagine The Lord of the Rings and think La Liga. Two great wizards are supposed to help their world live in prosperity and peace, keeping order and tranquillity while reigning supreme in their superior knowledge, provided by the gods themselves. Then one of the wizards turns astray as he decides to move away from all of that in his thirst for power, aligning with the sort of villain that has the power to unite everyone against them. When the movie came out, at the turn of the millennium, few would imagine that would take no more than twenty-five years to see how Barcelona, the club who used to serve as heroes for those who believed in the right causes, to become Spanish football’s Saruman, a role at the time everyone would have pitched it to their historic rivals Real Madrid. But here they are, proving everyone who believed they were Mes que un Club dead wrong.

It hasn’t taken much, and what’s worse, it’s not surprising either. Not much remains of their golden days. The time when they partnered with UNICEF, or when they took a stance to stand up for the Catalan society that wanted to vote but was detained by brutal police force. That club, the way they played and how they behaved, has long since disappeared into oblivion. Even the refurbishment works on the Camp Nou are a visual metaphor of a ruined moral compass. For more than a generation, they managed to persuade almost everyone that Real Madrid were the villains of the narrative of Spanish football, and they remained the bastion of core values. Of all that was good within the game. Gone is Guardiola. Gone is Messi. Gone is the old Camp Nou. Gone is the voice of reason of Johan Cruyff. What remains are ruins, to be explored by archaeologists as if they belonged to an ancient civilisation.

Today, Barcelona have come to represent everything that is wrong in football. You can even pick your lot. It can be the grave accusation of having such an influential figure of the always suspicious world of referees, Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, on your payroll for years. Or the suspicious deals made each summer with companies that appear not even to be real or, at least, not solvent anyway, that have been endured with the support of the authorities so that they don’t go out of business.

The way they conducted themselves with the works around the new Camp Nou, which includes testimonies of appalling conditions for the hundreds of workers on site. If you want to stretch it out, try picturing a club famed for the untouchable behaviour of their players, harassing many to leave without getting paid what they are due or directly sidelined with injuries, as if they were just a piece of cargo. And now this. Promoting a league fixture on Miami, turning an away tie in what surely will be a home match due to the huge following the club has in the region, thanks to the presence of Lionel Messi, is just the latest form of disrespect to their supporters, to rival supporters, the nature of the competition they aim to win, and their own players and staff, forced on another money-motivated continental trip.

All because of that one ring. Barcelona went broke during Laporta’s first term, but football glory on the pitch helped them to escape with their reputation intact. The legacy of successors Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu didn’t have as much luck, but, then again, they were still competing thanks to the genius of Messi, and football was facing new and dangerous financial powers, who could blame the old aristocracy for trying to hold on to power? Only some did it better than others. And no one did it worse than the Blaugrana.

Thankfully for the club, Cruyff’s legacy lived on under the La Masia academy graduates who almost single-handedly saved the club. Barcelona live on borrowed time, driven by a desperation to keep up appearances. They live in a huge mansion but hardly have any furniture in it, which seems ok since they don’t hold home parties by the pool anymore. Yet, despite all those dreadful mistakes, they used to represent something much more than just money or on-pitch success.

At least they tried really hard to appear so. Of course this is the same club that fell into financial difficulty in the 1960s and 1970s, and pointed the finger of blame for their failures not on the way they were poorly run, but on Real Madrid’s success under General Franco, the same dictator who in the 1950s also prevented them to go bust not once but twice. Under his regime, Barcelona were allowed to re-sell at a high profit the land of the old Les Corts ground as they built Camp Nou.

They were also the club that signed star players in the likes of Cruyff, Diego Maradona, Gary Lineker, Romario and Ronaldo Nazario, even if not all of them had the success expected of them on the pitch. What they did brilliantly, though, was to present themselves as more than just a football club. And they were, in a way. Between the arrival of Josep Lluis Nunez in 1978 and Joan Laporta’s first tenure, Barcelona passed on national and  Cruyff never learned Catalan, and nor did any of their successful foreign managers, such as Rinus Michels, Terry Venables, Louis van Gaal or Frank Rijkaard. Not to mention their star players. It was all about the club members, the soci, and the supporters. And they, too, now, in waves, seem to believe that the club went a bridge too far.

Sadly, the match is supposed to be an away fixture for Barcelona because it requires the other side to join in. A tango contains two, and Villareal want to be part of this narrative. They, too, were a well-admired football institution, a club that seemed to be able to do everything right or, at least, with a decent standard of values. The premature passing of former Vice-President Jose Maria Llaneza may be part of the reason they are no longer in that dimension.

The signing of Thomas Partey, a player accused of rape who awaits trial, sent the worst possible message. The club is ready to stand up for the innocence of someone accused of five charges of rape and one of sexual assault by three victims, if they believe he can deliver on the pitch. Similar accusations had been made in the past to the likes of Getafe for bringing in Mason Greenwood, and rightly so. Mercadona, the company that belongs to the Roig family, have come under serious scrutiny following the dreadful DANA floods suffered in Valencia last year, and now it seems that sort of corporate attitude that few associated with the Yellow Submarine side has come to stay.

That the once community-minded club from the town of Vila-real, appeared on the wrong side of the moral trenches for two different events seems unbelievable for those who had lauded them for so long. They, too, like Barcelona, were once better than this.

El presidente de LaLiga, Javier Tebas. EFE/ Quique García

If legal actions don’t prevent it – and Real Madrid is pushing for it as they should – Spanish football is about to break a sacred rule, one that not even the Premier League, with all the world relevance of their competition, has dared to. Staging a fixture outside of the country constitutes an offence to everything the competition stands for. It will not only subvert the spirit of the tournament, but it will also allow a side to play practically on home ground for a week more than their competitors. The economic package offered by Villareal to their members is also an indication that any club is ready to sell its soul to the devil if the right price is put on it.

Both clubs are doing it for the money – there is no doubt about it – but the La Liga board is in on it for something else. They want the dollars, of course, but they want to assert their power as well. To prove they can and that they will if they need to. All the other European football leagues are waiting, silently, to see what comes of it. The Italian and Spanish Supercups being played in Africa or the Middle East are already an announcement of what may happen in the very near future. Who can’t say that now is just a single match, but next year is the whole league fixture moved abroad to, say, Saudi Arabia? Or the home and away fixtures, for that matter, just to ‘even things out’. And then, why not contemplate the idea of having the Copa del Rey final and El Clasico also played around the world, just for kicks.

Football has long since passed the barrier of logic and belonging; we are all aware of it. In the near future, we will have Champions League finals played in other continents, the same as we had the Euros played in several nations, and are about to have a six-nation World Cup spread across three continents in 2030. That sadistic exploit of the game’s soul is nothing new, but it still makes for a horrendous sight to behold. For those who are trying to make it possible, there will be no forgiveness. Not this time around.