Patience for Pedri, the new star of Barcelona’s reluctant evolution

Hurtled from shock to acceptance, it will be a long time before Barcelona escapes its grief. After all, there can be no preparation for the fall of an empire and a hollow feeling like this. When Lionel Messi was unveiled in Paris on Tuesday evening, nothing was left but for Barcelona to scour the rubble of its own ruin, this incomprehensible reality that has snuffed the light of its greatest legend and left an absent throne.

It is a shame and a scandal, a beast of negligence enabled by half-pint executives, but no amount of anger or denial can absolve the truth. While Messi’s royal procession continues at PSG, the posters and hoardings are being pulled down in Barcelona. Where once stood the city’s greatest idol, there will be grey walls, the canvases stripped of their soul and spirit, a portrait of a demise.

Messi will still reign over hearts and minds, but the breakneck nature of football soon tramples sentimentality. This Sunday, Barcelona will begin their first season without their greatest player. After 672 goals and a museum of silverware that will forever gleam in history, the uncertainty of the future will slowly smother the past. A new idol will adorn the city and stoke belief that there is life after this death. It is a cursed inheritance but one that is unavoidable, and the crown has never been so heavy to bear.

When Barcelona’s butchered finances were laid bare last week and the prospect of Messi’s exit became an inevitability, that successor collapsed on his haunches 7,000 miles away at the Olympics. For Pedri, the spellbinding 18-year-old midfielder, the interminable marathon was finally over. After playing 73 matches and over 5,000 minutes of competitive football he had reached the end of his breakout season, becoming a mainstay in Barcelona’s midfield before starring with Spain at back-to-back tournaments. A talisman dressed as a teenager, in Japan’s suffocating heat, his weariness revealed itself in heavy bags under his eyes and a gaunt expression, a prisoner of his own desire and success.

Already so often hailed as the next Andres Iniesta, it is he who will be cast as Barcelona’s saviour. Those comparisons have been a heavy burden, but at least Pedri can already claim to have walked in shoes impossible to fill. Nobody could possibly expect any player to replicate Messi’s standards, but the club will require a new standard-bearer who can lead it out of this chaos.

It is an unfair demand to place on anyone, let alone a fatigued teenager reeling from two tournament heartbreaks. If Pedri’s performances this summer announced him as Barcelona’s future, and perhaps the most talented 18-year-old player on the planet, his distraught reaction to Spain’s semi-final defeat against Italy told of the true tenderness of his age. At a time like this, when tempers are fraying, egos are fragile and fans feel bruised, it is the youngest that require the greatest protection.

It is hardly to suggest Pedri cannot handle the pressure. After returning to Spain, he turned down Ronald Koeman’s offer to take a holiday, instead reporting immediately to Barcelona’s pre-season training camp and thereby making himself available for their opening match against Real Sociedad. Time waits for no man, even if they are still almost a boy. But sometimes it is not an environment from which players need shielding, but their own willpower. The toll of playing such an unprecedented number of elite-level matches at Pedri’s age is yet another gamble. A reliance that threatens even more unseen risk, this time with a player primed to lead Barcelona’s reluctant evolution - Ansu Fati, Barcelona’s other great teenage prodigy, has already spent the last nine months out injured.

In this last week, Barcelona’s reckless disregard for the long-term came to roost in a way that has left a club and much of football in mourning. If they are to learn any lessons from this present misery, it is that patience and sacrifice are required to preserve the future. Of that, Pedri is just one stricken example. Barcelona have lost their greatest star. They cannot afford to let the next burn out.