Barcelona are not in the best of conditions as of now. With the crumbling debt and lack of quality in the player roster, the departure of Messi literally put the final nail in the coffin for the club. Now it's out of sorts. From a world class menacing attack which they had a few years ago, they are in shambles now. But the new sun will dawn upon this club again. Sooner or later. Till then all the club and the fans have is themselves. Meanwhile reliving the past glories is an option. Today we look back at the greatest achievement in club football. Of Barcelona winning the sextuple in the 2009 calendar year.
Winning six trophies in a calendar year is literally no joke. It's about as hard as it gets. But under Pep Guardiola Barcelona were a different beast. This menacing team was the nightmare of every other club in Europe. But it wasn't just about the results. In fact the best thing about that Barcelona was the way the played. Back then Pep said in an interview that if people remember them 25 years later, they'll remember them because of how impressive they've played, and not by how many trophies they won. Well people do remember them for trophies, because they won a ton of them, but still their style of play remains the main attraction. That style was Tiki-Taka. Inspired from the mouth watering "Total Football" invented by the Dutch footballing great and Barca and Ajax legend Johan Cruijff. Total Football was all about passing the ball from teammate to teammate. And not player had a fixed position. Depending on the situation the players were flexible about their positions on the pitch. This is where the Tiki-Taka was invented from. But Tiki-Taka had more flair and passiveness at the same time. In other words it was more adaptive than Total Football.
So Pep used mostly a 4-3-3 formation during that period with flexible players. The front 6 would rotate as a hexagon and squeeze from a certain angle when needed, to press the opposition. Especially their passing was exquisite. The speed of their passes made it very difficult for their opponents to press them. And the preciseness of those passes led to the demise of those opponents. And of course messi was the star man of this team. He scored a lot of goals in these system. With the monsterous performance of this team the La Liga wasn't much hard to win. As they would outplay every team throughout the campaign and even go on and score 6 goals against Real Madrid at their own backyard. That was some audacity and a sign of dominance, Gerrard Pique scored his first goal for the club that day. That year along with the La Liga Barcelona also won the Copa del Rey. The cup competition of spain. Beating Athletic Bilbao by 4 goals to 1. It was quite the humiliation for Bilbao in the hands of the Catalan giants. Later on a days after they appeared in the UEFA champions league final. Against English giant Manchester United. They had previously beaten another English club on the way to the final and that would be Chelsea, in a match which is still considered as the biggest robbery in club football. It's a shame that Chelsea were handed such a blow, in a fair game they might have just beaten Barcelona. But in the final the case was nothing similar. Barcelona eased passed Manchester United and Ronaldo along with it. As they won by 2 goals to nil. They just won the treble of the 2008-09 season. But sad for everyone else they weren't done just then. They went on to win the Supercopa de Espana, the spanish super cup. Here they faced Athletic Bilbao again. And this time the deficit was bigger. They were thrashed 5-1 on aggregate by Barcelona. Bilbao conceded 9 goals in the three finals they played against Barcelona. This was very miserable for them. A few days later they prevailed in the UEFA super cup. A match contested by the two winners of the two biggest UEFA competitions. The Champions league and the Europa league. In this game they also outplayed Shakhtar Donetsk and won the game by a score of 1-0. And lastly, in December of 2009, Barcelona did the extraordinary. They lifted their 6th piece of silverware of the year as they won the FIFA club world cup. Here they played against Argentinian club Estudiantes. It was a tight game though. As Barcelona somehow squeezed to win it by 2 goals to 1 after extra time. These finals and their scores are visible proof of how good this team was, and why people will always remember them.
The six trophies are the most that can be achieved in a calendar year. And Barcelona has done it all. They are still the only club to achieve this. This reminds us of how much ruthless and dominant Barcelona can be. Today might be a bad day but the good times are not too far ahead. Barcelona will be back to the top. And they will create history again.