Barcelona hired former Germany and Bayern Munich coach Hansi Flick on Wednesday as the replacement for Xavi Hernández.
It’s the 59-year-old Flick’s first coaching job since being fired by Germany in September last year. He previously spent two years at Bayern Munich, winning the Champions League and back-to-back German league titles.
Flick signed a two-year contract with the Catalan club, which announced his hiring minutes after confirming that it reached an agreement with Xavi “to sever the contract the coach and his staff had” until the end of the 2024-25 season.
Flick was Bayern’s coach when the German club routed Barcelona 8-2 in the quarterfinals of the Champions League in 2020.
Xavi, a midfield great as a player at Barcelona, has left after the team finished a distant second to Real Madrid in the Spanish league this season.
Xavi coached his last game with the Catalan club on Sunday in the Spanish league, a 2-1 win at Sevilla.
His departure came a month after he had walked back a previous decision he made in January to leave the club this summer. In April, he said that he had changed his mind because the team was playing better and he believed it could bounce back from a trophy-less season.
Barcelona president Joan Laporta had publicly celebrated Xavi’s commitment to stay at that time. But last week the president was reportedly unhappy when the head coach spoke openly about how the club’s poor finances would impede it from competing with fierce rival Real Madrid.
Flick’s Bayern won the Champions League title against Paris Saint-Germain after the 8-2 trouncing of Barcelona. It was part of a stunning streak of titles in the depths of the pandemic which also included the Bundesliga, German Cup and Club World Cup.
Until now, that two-year stint at Bayern was Flick’s only career job with a top-division club. Before that he was best known as an assistant coach on the World Cup-winning German team of 2014.
Flick left Bayern for the German national team in 2021 but was fired last year after overseeing a 4-1 friendly loss to Japan that was Germany’s sixth game in a row without a win. Germany’s group-stage exit at the World Cup in 2022 was also a major factor and fans were concerned his management style had alienated key players.
A documentary following the German team in 2022 included scenes of Flick trying to inspire positive thinking among players who seemed bored or distant. One scene featured the squad being shown video of geese in an exercise apparently meant to improve teamwork, prompting widespread mockery from German fans. AP
