The biggest change today is in terms of identifying a team when talking about Barcelona from their home stadium Camp Nou. The blue and red seats in the stands create the words "Mes Que Un Club" (roughly translated: More than a Club) that have created their brand for a century. However, now in the opposite stands, people have seen the logo of sponsor Rakuten.
If community membership and shared ownership are factors that make Barcelona more than a club, commercialization makes them like many other teams. The time they sold the shirt sponsorship rights to the Qatar Foundation in 2010 caused Barcelona to gradually lose their identity.
Since then, the Camp Nou team has become a miniature image of the commercialization process in football, especially when they successfully sold their contracts to the professional team since last year.
Of course, when everything is going against the trend of preserving the identity of a team, prioritizing profit is popular in today's football world. However, the new club's leadership's corridor campaigns have created significant changes both on and off the pitch at Barcelona.
They are a name at a different level but fell into a difficult situation when Neymar left to join PSG. The Catalan club were not prepared for a day to lose one of their best players. The way they responded to this unexpected development was not perfect.
The transfer process to find a replacement for Neymar was carried out hastily. Ousmane Dembele was brought in by Barca from Dortmund but they still tried to bring in more bright new players in the final days of the transfer market. It was almost an impossible task.
With the summer transfer market closed, Barca will only have themselves to blame for what happened. That was the peak of the lack of brilliance in the Premier League, which Barca fans began to acknowledge. President Josep Bartomeu has become the focus of the wave of protests, as fans have to witness consecutive unforgettable events.
Under coach Pep Guardiola, Barcelona always feels better than Real Madrid in terms of strategy and transfer. This summer, everything has changed completely. While the capital team easily controlled the budget, Barca were caught up in a spiral of "crazy" transfers.
For now, head coach Ernesto Valverde has a lot of work to do with his team. Barca started the new season in La Liga with all 6 points, but the defeat in the Spanish Super Cup against Real Madrid showed that the gap between these two teams needed more than a season to close.
Barca need a new direction and in terms of identity, they have more values than a club, but the summer of 2017 showed that Barca is no different from the majority.
