Like every coach, Xavi Hernández, who had just won La Liga and the Spanish Super Cup 2023 in the 2022/23 season, was hoping for an even more successful season in terms of victories. With the Blaugrana team keeping the core players who had lifted a couple of trophies and adding players of the caliber of İlkay Gündoğan, Iñigo Martínez, João Cancelo, João Félix, and Oriol Romeu, the expectations for the 23/24 season were sky-high.
Indeed, Xavi's forecast for the 2023/24 season was so significant that, as revealed this Monday through the Blaugrana team's audiovisual content platform, Barça One, in the first episode of the series 'The Next Generation', he delivered an inaugural speech to motivate his squad to start the new period in the best possible way. At the beginning of his address, the Terrassa-born coach emphasized the challenges that could arise in that campaign and pointed out what, in his opinion, would be the keys for the team to move towards victory.
"It's going to be tough, but lads, we need control, mentality, humility, ambition in football, if we don't have these, we won't win anything, guys. Train hard, be ambitious, be humble, and stick together, guys. Stick together, be united," began the Terrassa native.
Subsequently, Xavi expressed his desire for FC Barcelona to lift more than one trophy that season and saw the squad as capable of achieving it. "Humility, ambition, mentality, that's the team. Desire to win, to win the league again, and the Cup, and the Champions League, and The Super Cup again. This is the mentality, you already have the football," he concluded.
The Unfortunate End of Xavi Hernández's Cycle as FC Barcelona Coach
Unfortunately, the 2023/24 season turned out to be very different from expectations for Xavi Hernández. Despite the team finishing with a decent numerical record (35 wins, eight draws, and 10 losses in 53 matches), the absence of titles weighed heavily. This, combined with tensions with the Barcelona board and instability in the sporting project, led to the dismissal of the Terrassa-born coach on May 24th, despite having a year left on his contract (2025), paving the way for a new sporting cycle with Hansi Flick as the coach of FC Barcelona.