Most of Barcelona’s players were long gone when they found out that their coach had gone too. As a midfielder Xavi Hernández mastered space and time, controlling everything, but as a manager it is just not the same and on Saturday night he was late. He had watched his team concede five at home for the first time in more than 60 years, falling to a defeat against Villarreal which he called a portrait of their season, self-inflicted and absurd. Immediately after it finished, he had gone on TV and said he felt like he had been hit by a sledgehammer, his task now to lift footballers feeling low; and then, while those he sees as his executioners waited in the Montjuïc press room, he had disappeared.

Half an hour passed, an hour, an hour and a half. Another 90 minutes that didn’t feel right. Staff looked at watches and rolled eyes, keen to head off down the hill and home, the dressing room emptying, the stands empty ages ago. Upstairs, Xavi was talking to the president, Joan Laporta. It was a “human” conversation, he said; it was also a long one. When he eventually appeared again, he revealed he was soon to no longer be the coach. As the minutes went by, under the stand they suspected that something was up; when he came with his wife Nuria and brother Oscar some time after 10pm, they knew it was. “I have decided I will not continue beyond 30 June,” Xavi told the media. He had not told his players.

Xavi said the decision had been made days ago and it wasn’t really a surprise. He had explicitly linked his continuity to Barcelona winning trophies and then watched, one by one, as they lost them: defeated by Girona in the league, Real Madrid in the Super Cup final, and Athletic in the Copa del Rey, conceding four in all of them. Three days earlier he had talked about a new era beginning without him and one day before he had said he had little time left. At that point they were 10 points off the top, not even the best team in Catalonia let alone Spain, no one expected him to continue next season; not many wanted him to either.

Yet few anticipated him announcing his departure as he did, or when he did. Once he had, they weren’t sure it was for the best or even that it made sense. This was not a clean break. Instead, it was a yeah, but. He had said Barcelona needed a change so he was going … but not yet, nothing changing for now. “I think it’s good for the club,” he said, but it wasn’t entirely sure what good it did. He had said the players, so tense, would be liberated … but how? At least now they wouldn’t keep asking him about his future, at least this way he might salvage something in the months that remain, even if it was only pride. “He wanted to finish the season and it’s a formula I accept because it’s Xavi proposing it and he’s a Barcelona legend,” Laporta said.

When Xavi took over as Barcelona manager in 2021, he had said it was the right moment: he had turned them down twice before, once because he didn’t trust the men in charge and once because he didn’t feel ready, but while he was only 41, had only ever worked in Qatar and had a backroom staff as inexperienced as him, this was his dream and he was ready now. On Saturday as he announced he was leaving, he said it was the right moment too. He has only been in the job a little over two years. He will be in it four months more, if he lasts.

Xavi won a league title and a Super Cup, which is almost certainly all he will win, but at times it has felt a lot longer. He described the job as “cruel” and “unpleasant”, where no one respects you, your work unappreciated. Leaving was a “liberation”, he said, even if he has to wait to be finally freed. “It wears you down terribly, in terms of health, of mental health, your mood, your emotional state,” he said. “I am a positive guy but the energy goes down, down, down, until the point at which you say: it makes no sense.”

Strip all the rest of it away and there is something sad in that. Born in Terrassa, 20 miles inland, Xavi was 12 when Barcelona first won the European Cup, left in tears because he wasn’t allowed to go to Wembley with his brothers. He had joined the club at 11 and was still there 23 years later, after 17 seasons in the first team. Enamoured of Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola, defender of a footballing faith, at times he was criticised or laughed at, parodies made of his puritanism, but he meant it when he went on about philosophy and identity, their genetic makeup. Barcelona was his everything. And it ended like this, something to escape.

He knew it might, or should have done. Guardiola decided to leave Barcelona “before we hurt each other”. Luis Enrique insisted that he was “tired” when he went. “I would have liked to have offered him a club where things were easier,” Laporta said at Xavi’s presentation. He had come because Barcelona needed him, Laporta said. He knew why Lionel Messi had gone, about the crisis, the pressure: he kept saying Barcelona was the hardest club, where it wasn’t enough just to win; he targeted “excellence”. He knew about politics, press, the infamous entorno. The phrase for which Louis van Gaal was most famous, barked at journalists was: “Always negative, never positive.”

But is one thing to know about it, another to actually live it. Xavi has sat through 250 press conferences, exposed and effectively the club’s spokesman amid the silence of others, often fielding questions that should not be his to field. There to be shot at, he would echo Van Gaal’s accusations: he said it was the media’s fault players didn’t play well; the criticism was “unjust”, “exaggerated” and it “affected” them. Surely he knows, even if he won’t say so because he prefers to point to an external enemy, that it doesn’t just appear out of thin air; comments, criticism, also come from within. As Ronald Koeman had neatly put it: “I have eyes and ears.”

Xavi wasn’t the president’s man – he had initially been part of Victor Font’s candidacy, running against Laporta – and has not always felt protected. He did not always choose the signings, and even less so once Deco took over as sporting director last year. When Barcelona went to Antwerp for their final Champions League group game, he did not even choose the squad that travelled, his authority undermined when he left Ronald Araújo, Robert Lewandowski and Ilkay Gündogan out only for them to be unilaterally reinstated from above. They lost 3-2.

If blaming the media wasn’t the most convincing excuse, it wasn’t his least convincing either. There have been many: he has used almost all of them, in fact. Xavi has complained about referees and injuries, the pitches and the pressure, defensive mistakes and chances missed. He really has blamed it on the sunshine and the good times. He has talked about Barcelona being a team in construction, and noted that this is the most difficult moment in the club’s economic history. While there’s something in that, while there is something in almost all of it, the impression has been of a man looking for something to say rather than what everyone else can see. Besides, they have somehow found a way to spend more than €250m in his time in charge and he also allowed himself to be carried along on Laporta’s relentless optimism.

Despite everything, Barcelona won the 2022-23 league title after four seasons, a genuine achievement and very much Xavi’s league, his first in his first full season. But while the slogan written on their celebratory T-shirts said “the league is ours, the future too”, it hasn’t been. That was a different Barcelona: a third of their wins were 1-0 and in the moment in which the league was done they had conceded just nine league goals. The suspicion lingered that Europe was a better judge, and there Barcelona won just two of their eight games across two competitions, falling at the first hurdle of both. The shift towards something more Xavian has not come off, little sign of his ideology, that DNA. Can you talk about a team in construction if it is getting worse?

After almost every game this season, the coach has said that Barcelona had played well, which is worrying: mostly they just haven’t. Key individuals have been miles from their level – Lewandowski, Jules Koundé, even Araújo – no one has replaced Sergio Busquets, both Marc-André ter Stegen and Gavi have been injured and collectively, well, it’s hard to see what they are. Their temporary home feels all wrong, a terrible place to play football: given the chance to opt out for a year, only 18,000 members decided to keep their season tickets. Even when they were winning, it didn’t convince: they went 21 games without a margin bigger than a solitary goal. Soon they stopped winning.

When they defeated Almería 3-2 just before Christmas, yet another comeback in a season in which they have only led four times in the 75th minute, Xavi said the first half had been “unacceptable” and tore into his players, which tends not to end well. The following day they were on the other side of the Atlantic playing a friendly, which they lost. He has said they have no “soul”, that they lack concentration and intensity, that they don’t run. They have conceded three times inside the first minute. The other day he admitted he tears his hair out because they don’t do the right thing. At Las Palmas he said that it was hard to take them failing to deliver the pass he kept asking for because it was something he had been good at as a player.

In 2024, no team in Europe’s five major leagues has conceded more goals, as Barcelona have lost all the trophies that Xavi had marked as an objective. The fourth of the five they conceded in a wild game against Villarreal in which they went 2-0 down, 3-2 up and lost 5-3, was so bad, so slapstick, it could have come with a drum roll and cymbal crash, a kazoo accompanying them. “It’s not the manager’s fault if we can’t clear a ball properly,” Araújo said. “We’re with the coach; if it doesn’t come off, it’s our fault,” Frenkie de Jong said. Told that immediately after the game, Xavi said he understood but insisted: “I carry the greatest responsibility.” And so he headed off to tell the president it was time to go.