In 1814, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace posited a hypothetical intelligence that, given the location of every atom in the universe and the forces acting upon them, would be able to calculate the future with the same clarity with which it observed the past. This concept, which would come to be known as Laplace’s demon, would know all the causes and thus be able to see all the effects. The entire universe, from its beginning to its end, would be contained within its mind.
Xavi, soccer’s own Laplace’s demon, announced Thursday that he would retire at the end of this season after 17 years at Barcelona and four lucrative swan-song seasons at the Qatari club Al-Sadd. No one in the history of the sport has ever controlled games like the diminutive Spaniard did; no one has ever been as good at the simple task of receiving the ball and knowing immediately where it needs to go next. He played as though he could see the future, as though the only input required for him to map out the rest of the game was the kickoff.
Xavi sat at the literal center of two of this century’s most dominant teams, and he, more than anyone—and in this case, “anyone” includes all-timers Thierry Henry, Gerard Piqué, and even Lionel Messi—dictated how Barcelona and Spain played: retaining possession through short passing in close quarters, bending and eventually exhausting defenses with their intricate movement. Xavi found little pockets of space and weaponized them. Between 2008 and 2012, he won two Champions League trophies, three Spanish La Liga titles, two European Championships, and one World Cup, or just about everything it was possible for him to win.
Yet because his game appeared so simple, because he did the things everyone is supposed to do only better, it took years for him to get the acclaim he deserved. Even after he was named the best player of the 2008 European Championship, halfway through a year spent masterminding the most dominant club season in recent history with Pep Guardiola’s first Barcelona team, the Daily Mail published a headline over a picture of the five nominees for the FIFA World Player of the Year Award that read “The Best Players in the World (and Xavi).” He might still be undervalued, despite all those trophies. The soccer magazine FourFourTwo named him the 50th best player of all time in 2017, which one day is going to seem nearly as ridiculous as “(and Xavi).”
Perhaps the difficulty of appraisal stems from the fact that he was so different from the midfield idols he supplanted: inexhaustible battlers like Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira, polished playmakers like Kaká and Pavel Nedved. Xavi was the stylistic opposite of the 2006 World Cup’s best player, Zinedine Zidane. Even at 34, Zidane dominated games, arresting the eye like a bolt of lightning. You were always conscious of him, always waiting for his next audacious display, up to and including the career-ending head-butt in that World Cup’s final.
Xavi never played that way. He was a conduit, shepherding the game but not overwhelming it. He was not the kind of player you were always aware of; indeed, he moved about the pitch so much you’d be hard-pressed to keep constant tabs on him. Instead, you’d notice his contribution—a sudden, surprising one-touch pass to split two different layers of defenders—then go back via replay or rewind and discover that of course it was him. Trying to spot Xavi’s next pass before he played it was a good way to prove how little you knew about the game. He saw his options faster than you could even with your advantage of the wide shot.
His presence on the field wasn’t additive but multiplicative. His entire game fit into one of our most-hallowed sporting clichés: He made his teammates better. On a squad of zeroes, the effect might be small; it wasn’t until this season that Al-Sadd won the Qatar Stars League with him, and he’s been hurt for much of the year anyway. But for Spain and Barcelona, his contribution was so immense it defined an era of the sport.
Following Spain’s World Cup triumph in 2010, the team’s style, known as tiki-taka, appeared poised to sweep the world. Brendan Rodgers rode a couple of seasons of overachieving possession-based soccer at Swansea to the top job at Liverpool. Jürgen Klinsmann’s hire in 2011 as the U.S. men’s national team coach hinged on his promises to bring more possession play: “If you play Brazil or Argentina, you might play differently than maybe a country in CONCACAF, but it is a starting point if you say we want to start to keep possession, we want to start to dictate the pace of the game, we want to challenge our players to improve technically in order to keep the ball.” Results were mixed, we might charitably say. The chasm between original and imitators was never bridged.
Teams such as Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan had sporadic success designing labyrinthine bunkers for Xavi and Andrés Iniesta to navigate during that 2008–12 run, but it was the development of more sophisticated pressing and counterpressing strategies that ultimately supplanted tiki-taka as the tactic du jour, largely because those schemes were the first to reliably beat it. The longest section of the tiki-taka Wikipedia page is about the strategies other teams developed to beat Spain and Barcelona, starting with the U.S. national team’s win over the Spanish in the 2009 Confederations Cup semifinal, Spain’s first defeat in 36 matches.
Surprisingly, the list doesn’t include simply waiting them out. Not to take away from the achievement of Diego Simeone’s title-winning Atlético Madrid in 2014, but it’s no coincidence the all-consuming whirlwind unleashed by Xavi’s teams subsided just as age caught up to him. Instead of a stylistic revolution, tiki-taka turned out to be a complex exoskeleton constructed around his singular genius. Remove its pilot, or slow him down a crucial step or two, and what you were left with was a clunky and easily disrupted machine like the one eliminated before the knockout round of the 2014 World Cup.
Barcelona adapted its tactics to play faster and has won four of the last five La Liga titles. Spain has clung harder to the style and, after a brilliant qualifying campaign, finally passed itself to death against the hosts during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Even Guardiola’s Manchester City doesn’t attempt what his Barcelona did with Xavi at the helm.
The next step for Xavi, the obvious step almost since he turned professional, is coaching. He may start in Qatar, perhaps with Al-Sadd, perhaps eventually even taking over the country’s national side ahead of the 2022 World Cup. There may be other stops along the way, but the final destination feels inevitable: Barcelona.
No one is more ingrained in the Barcelona way. Even in Qatar, he remained the club’s moral philosopher and an easy source for quotes on a range of Barcelona-adjacent subjects, from questioning the current status of its famed youth academy to piling slight after slight on Neymar for daring to leave for Paris Saint-Germain. The one constant to it all is a strict interpretation of what it means to play the Barcelona way. As he put it in his retirement announcement: “I love seeing the teams take the initiative on the field, play attacking football and return to the essence of what we all loved since our childhood days: football possession.”
If, or when, he does get the Barcelona job, that dogma may be tested. Will he learn to be flexible? Or does he have a solution to the problem that has stymied the world since his peak: How do you play like Xavi without Xavi?
