Marcus Rashford’s Barcelona future hangs on presidential election

He has also been around Barça long enough to appreciate that the demonstration of love from the fans who ushered him off the pitch at the Nou Camp on Saturday, with Barça two goals up on the way to a 3-0 win against Real Mallorca, counts for a great deal in the present context. As he was being lauded, the club were officially entering a presidential election campaign: many of the cheering Rashfordistas are the voters who, in mid-March, choose who gets to run Barça for the next five years.

The incumbent president, Joan Laporta, is the favourite to extend a mandate that began in 2021 but built heavily on happy memories of his previous presidency of more than a decade earlier, when epoch-defining decisions, such as the appointment of a novice Pep Guardiola as head coach and the emergence of Lionel Messi, made him a local Midas.

The Laporta of late middle age is more pragmatic and will seek re-election less as a bold idealist and more as a deft firefighter. It was Laporta who steered Barça, post-Covid, though the restrictions of a mountainous debt, initiated the stadium rebuild and oversaw nimble manoeuvres in a challenging transfer market. They include the capture of Rashford, 28; the revival of a talent marginalised at United, and, come the summer, available long-term for a shrewd value-for-money price. All these aspects of the Rashford package look good on Laporta’s election manifesto.

Rivals for the presidency will, until the March 15 polling day, attack Laporta for his short-termism, for his ad hoc solutions to tackling institutional debt by mortgaging projected future income to third parties. Campaigning will, as ever, turn catty and personal. Laporta’s leading rival, the businessman Victor Font, is urging voters — club members, a majority of them season-ticket holders — “to decide if we want to carry on with a 1980s-style system based around a single individual or choose a pluralist project that brings in the best in the world in every area to maintain sporting success and protect the club’s future”.

Font’s difficulty, right now, is that “sporting success” holds up a rather flattering mirror to Laporta’s tenure. Barça stand top of La Liga; they are into the last 16 of the Champions League, where they narrowly lost a semi-final last season. They won last month’s Spanish Super Cup final against Real Madrid, whom Barça beat in the Copa del Rey final last year as well as in five of the past six Clásicos.

So this is not fertile territory in which to promise voters a radical overhaul, at least as far as it would affect matters on the pitch. Font is obliged to recognise what the club are doing well: he has committed that, were he to be elected, he would stick with Hansi Flick as head coach. So, naturally, would Laporta, who hired Flick ten months and four trophies ago.

The position of director of football, held by the ex-Barça player Deco, would change under a Font presidency. Yet Flick has spoken favourably of his working relationship with Deco, who, although he spent last summer vainly pursuing the transfers of Nico Williams, of Athletic Bilbao, and Luis Díaz — who moved to Bayern Munich rather than Barça from Liverpool — ended up with Rashford instead. Deco has since been advertising what a coup that seems, especially as Michael Carrick, the stand-in United head coach, now says he would like to see Rashford back at Old Trafford.

A return to Manchester seems a distant prospect, given the good Rashford vibes at Barcelona. But a presidential election can alter the landscape suddenly. The wisest posture for any player at Barça at these times is to keep the political noise at a remove, to ignore what can be wild claims of promised new signings if candidate X or Y should win, and, if your stock is high, to quietly count up your allies.

Flick is one. “I am delighted with Marcus, and I think with his potential, his speed and technique, he can offer us even more,” the head coach said. If Rashford is often used from the bench, it is because Flick likes what his directness and confidence as a finisher brings to second halves. Nor should Rashford’s frequent role as an impact substitute be taken as a sign he is subordinate in the striking hierarchy. Only Lamine Yamal, of Barça’s stellar roster of forwards, has played more minutes this season than Rashford. Only Yamal has directly set up as many Barça goals as Rashford with his 13 assists.

He is in double figures for goals too, from 34 appearances, a total he did his best to add to against Mallorca, when a willingness to shoot, sometimes from ambitious distance, gave an often bland first half its moments of urgency. Barça took the lead when Robert Lewandowski capitalised on the ricochet from a Rashford thunderbolt; Barça might have doubled their advantage just before half-time when a Rashford free kick, arrowed towards the top left corner, was scooped clear by Leo Román, the Mallorca goalkeeper.

Hence the applause for Rashford when he was withdrawn with 23 minutes to go, in part to preserve energies for Thursday’s cup semi-final away to Atletico Madrid. With Raphinha, Rashford’s most direct competitor — and a high-class one — for the position on the left of Flick’s front three, still recuperating from injury, Rashford would be favoured to start.

He’s had a good Copa del Rey: three starts, a goal, an assist and a much-appreciated cameo in the previous round at Albacete, when Rashford’s vigilance off the ball created the circumstances for Barça to take command. His muscular recovery of possession led to Yamal’s goal, the first of a 2-1 win, and to the sight of Rashford, left floored after his decisive challenge, clenching his fist defiantly. The chasing and the harrying are part of what endears him to Flick — and to his loyal Nou Camp constituents.

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