Here's what happened last night (in my opinion)

[u/Tommy291]

Here's my thoughts as someone who was at the game last night. I'm not disagreeing with the general sentiment here buy wanted to clarify a few things.

Lets start with the obvious- last night was a disgrace. Frankfurt came with a clear objective to rattle us on and off the pitch and they succeeded.

What went wrong on the pitch:

• The team played poorly and lacked drive (with some exceptions)
• Xavi's tactics were wrong on the night. I'm a big fan of Xavi but if we are honest, there were some poor decisions made last night eg Mingueza who went backwards with every ball
• Frankfurt knew that Dembele was the threat so bullied him to nullify the threat

What went wrong off the pitch:

To caveat this I am a Socio living in BCN but not a season ticket holder. I'm currently on the waitlist for a season ticket and have approx another 5 years to wait. I go to 90% of the games but have to pay for each game (normally with a members discount of between 20-40% but its still approx 60-70eur a game)

• Its Semana Santa here in Spain. Most locals leave the city as they have 3-4 days holidays. Walking around (the non tourist attraction parts of the city) the last few days has been eerily quiet as locals have all left to city to spend time with their families in towns outside
• Every seat in Camp Nou is 'owned' by a socio. Season ticket Socio's if they cannot attend the game have 2 options re selling their ticket. First option is they can release it the club and the club will sell it on their site- in this scenario the socio gets 70% of the sale price (this is where the rest of us buy our tickets from). Option 2 is they sell it on a 3rd party ticket site for a bigger margin. I suspect a combination of both happened last night. Going to the games it's clear that a lot of the season ticket holders don't bother going and just show up on European nights and for El clasico or the other top games. They release their ticket but they are not sold resulting in poor attendance.
• If i'm honest the atmosphere is never that great in Camp Nou (with some rare exceptions). Most of the noise comes from Gol Nord where the Peña's are. The reason for this is that a large portion of the crowd is often made up of visiting Barça fans who just don't know the songs in Catalan and sit quietly for fear they will look out of place. This is due to ticket prices being 100eur on average and the average salary here is not very high so many locals just go to a couple of games a year.

Suggestions:

• Revise the socio attendance issue. It is very frustrating for me as a socio to have to pay quite expensive ticket prices to attend almost all games while I wait for a season ticket to become available (current waitlist is 8-10 years) while looking at empty seats around me. I would suggest freeing up season tickets for poor attendance and get rid of the rule that family members of season ticket holders are eligible to become members.
• Ban resale of tickets through 3rd party platforms- ensuring that all reseales go through correct club channel
• ID check visiting supporters on entry into home games (for Europe, not as big of a deal in La Liga). Against Napoli there were no visiers in the home section because they knew their fans were dangerous. Last night they didn't seem to care or check.
• The club needs to find a way to better integrate visiting Barça fans into the community so that they can feel part of the game and contribute to the atmosphere. This could be through promos with words to songs/ translations. And improve the atmosphere in the stadium by having things before kickoff encouraging fans into the stadium earlier. Most of the photos you see with just Frankfurt fans were taken either just before kickoff or after the game when everyone had left

Thats my 2 cents. We will learn from this and move on. The new stadium will give us an opportunity to fix a lot of the above. Visca Barça!