At the end Leo Messi collapsed to the floor and for a time he just lay face down on the grass, until a teammate eventually came and lifted him to his feet. Exhausted, he was barely able to breathe. Barely able to believe it, either. When at last he walked, the noise deafening as he headed towards the touchline, he was still wondering how it could have slipped through their fingers like that.

This is not Anfield, this is the Camp Nou six days earlier.

When Ousmane Dembélé scuffed the last kick of the first leg, producing a shot unforgivably bad, Barcelona led 3-0 but it felt like it mattered, which was telling in itself – and because it felt like it mattered, it did matter. Barcelona still did not feel safe; they had seen Liverpool up close and knew how good they were, Messi admitting to feeling “asphyxiated”. Deep down, they also knew of their own vulnerability. And they had been here before. Last season they went to Rome and saw a three-goal first-leg lead disappear.

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A year on, they saw another three-goal lead disappear, at Anfield. Neither was chance alone, neither occurred in isolation. Barcelona’s manager, Ernesto Valverde, has talked about experience and how you learn from it, but what if the lessons are the wrong ones? That it had happened before meant it shouldn’t happen again, forewarned is forearmed, but it might also have contributed to the doubt, fed their fears. It has certainly fed the fallout, deepened the pain; there was misfortune sure, but this is not a one-off. “What makes it hurt more is that it happened again,” Valverde said at Anfield.

Rome had fed this entire season. At the start of it, Messi had talked about the thorn in their side, made something close to a vow to bring back that “lovely and desired cup”. The season was always going to be defined by Europe, the search for redemption. All of their emotional energy was invested in this. Judgment for this year and last; for the last four, in fact. But redemption didn’t come. Messi ended the first leg lamenting the failure to make it safe; he ended the second lamenting everything.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barcelona’s shell-shocked players fail to react as Divock Origi side-foots in the decisive goal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Barcelona might well win two doubles in a row under Ernesto Valverde, yet his time will be judged a failure. His time might also be coming to an end now. On Wednesday the president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, avoided offering an opinion while still emotional. “There will be time to reflect,” he said. Valverde, well liked, has rarely been over-popular, rarely been seen as a true believer and some of the criticism has been unfair; while what he has done should not be taken so lightly, few would be enraged if Bartomeu chose to change coach. Others doubt the president himself, seen as the architect of emptiness.

Two successive failures as similar as this will surely undermine the players’ belief in Valverde and his ability to find solutions. Some of them will be gone too, if Barcelona can find buyers. Luis Suárez said that Valverde could not be blamed, that the players must take responsibility.

There were bad errors that might have changed everything except the play itself: Dembélé in the first leg, one-on-ones for Coutinho and Suárez in the second, Messi cutting back rather than shooting, Jordi Alba’s header, that corner – which Valverde admitted even he didn’t see. “We were like kids,” Suárez said. “They can’t score two goals in a minute. We can’t make the same mistake two years in a row.” He also implied Barcelona had thought it was done and they “were not a team”.

But the fact it was two in two suggested something deeper. It is possible they adapted too much to Liverpool, “drawn into their game” as Messi had put it after the first leg when they knew the score might have been better but might also have been significantly worse. El Mundo’s suggestions for European nights as bad as this also hinted at a problem more profound, more permanent: Munich 2013, Turin 2017, Rome 2018, it offered up. This is a fourth heavy away defeat in six years, in other words – and that was without counting the 4-0 in Paris. Barcelona have won one Champions League in eight years, despite having Messi.

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They have lost the last two like this. Once can be an accident, twice is careless, it’s said. On one level, this couldn’t be considered careless: Valverde insisted that the danger had not passed, and last year lingered to remind them. There were rotations in an attempt to avoid the physical collapse they felt they had suffered last season, after which Suárez had admitted that he regretted playing before that quarter-final. Just about the only player not protected at the weekend departed injured: Dembélé pulled up 25 seconds into Barcelona’s visit to Vigo. They could have used him on Tuesday night.

But this failure suggests that there were flaws in that analysis, that seeing this in physical terms was mistaken, that the root cause was not found, that this may be more conceptual. Here the debate about Barcelona’s footballing identity is raised again, cutting to the core of their being; this is a club, some feel, that has lost its religion. And in times of pressure, when a team like Liverpool are thundering at you in all their fury, a clear identity, a defined model, offers refuge and security. Barcelona didn’t really have that shelter.

When Messi announced that Barcelona wanted the European Cup publicly, in front of the fans, the pressure was raised. Asked how the other players reacted, Suárez said they reckoned that if he announced it, it was up to him to do it. He was joking, but watching them play sometimes it is tempting to conclude that that’s exactly how they think. Messi’s words were a vow, a promise, but on Tuesday he was unable to deliver on it. Nor was anyone else, but maybe they knew that already.