Europe is waiting to rediscover a new FC Barcelona

A new era. Barça return to the Champions League with the fresh memory of two years in which the club's economic crisis worsened and ended up affecting the pillars of the club itself. The club has always budgeted to reach the quarter-finals of the competition, so not getting past the qualifying round two years in a row was a considerable financial blow.  

The use of the 'palancas' -- levers -- has served to alleviate, to a certain extent, the lack of resources that caused these eliminations. Life after Messi was very hard both financially (due to the reduced attractiveness for brands of betting on a club that no longer has the number one in the world) and in sporting terms. 

After winning the elections, the team needed a revamp for which a significant economic investment was necessary. Laporta highlighted Bartomeu's poisoned inheritance to get the nod to raise money and use it to put together a team that would allow him to rediscover the path to victory.

Having won the league, and with reigning optimism after this start to the season in the domestic competition, it is now time to take another look in the mirror to see where Barça are. And this mirror is none other than the Champions League itself, in which the team previously reflected and saw a horror and now hopes to see that Barça has changed. That the past was a thing of the past and that the team is in a position to forget these bad memories by overlapping them with new memorable nights. This is what Barça hopes will happen as of tomorrow.

Given Laporta's major overhaul, there are few players left who suffered through those nights that silenced the fans. It was a team capable of much but rotten inside and the renovation must have done away with the rotten apples that plunged the team into a black phase. Europe is waiting to rediscover the new Barça. The one that dazzled, that won or even lost but that never, ever ended up being an embarrassment for the fans.