Barca: The Rise and Fall of the Club That Built Modern Football by Simon Kuper
This is an excellent sport book. That’s no surprise because Kuper is a talented and well-connected sports journalist who has produced several critically acclaimed books. He is in the same mould as Duncan Hamilton and Tim Vickery who have a clear understanding about the cultural significance and essential irrelevance of sport; they see all the beauty and romance in sport but can be objective about its absurdities as well as the moments of transcendence that it can provide at its best.
It’s also an excellent book because it has a good story to tell. Prior to the arrival of Johan Cryuff as manager, the club, based in a provincial Spanish city, had a history of patchy successes and underachievement in comparison with the hated big city fat cats at Real Madrid (and that’s before we factor in the civil war overtones). He laid the tactical and philosophical foundations that Louis Van Gaal and, gloriously, Pep Guardiola perfected in order to establish Barcelona as the coolest, most forward-thinking and successful team in the world – and that’s only half the story, and probably the least interesting half.
As the title highlights, after such a dazzling period of success, where not only did they win with aesthetic attacking grace but with a moral force, the very things that led to their ascendancy became the fatal flaws that caused their decline as the world’s premier sports team. As covid engulfed the world and Kuper began his book, the decline of this mighty empire accelerated at such pace – debts fuelled by ageing stars on inflated contracts, the European failures and the departure of Messi – that the narrative arc resembled a classical tragedy.
It is the second half of the book, when Kuper analyses Barcelona’s operation as an example of an elite club in the modern sporting world, that I found particularly fascinating. But first things first and let’s start with Cryuff which is where Kuper starts his story.
The chain-smoking, fitness averse Dutch maestro was a footballing phenomenon. He played the game as much in his head as on the pitch. At Ajax and with Holland in the early 70s, and alongside Rinus Michels who shared his footballing philosophy, Cryuff revolutionised the way the beautiful game was played. Cryuff introduced an approach to the game that was revolutionary at the time but which now provides the basic foundations of most professional sides. Training was always with a ball and was shorter and more intensive than the long sessions of shuttle runs and laps of the pitch particularly associated with English teams of the 70s and 80s. Cryuff’s four second rule was about trying to win the ball back within that time and as near to the opponent’s goal as possible; and this has evolved into the sort of high intensity pressing that Manchester City have now perfected. City are so good because they have a hard-working team of athletes whereas, ironically, Cryuff saw it as a way to avoid long, lung-bursting runs back down the pitch to defend.
There were many other training and tactical evolutions from the skinny Dutch master but it was Guardiola who would eventually perfect his mentor’s methods. Cryuff had spotted something in Pep’s technical skill and awareness that were more important than his lack of athletic ability. He was Cryuff’s leader on the pitch but when he took over as manager he was determined to discard the creative conflict model of management that Cryuff thrived on. In that sense, Guardiola, as a Catalan, was aligning the football side with the traditional community ethos of the club. The motto “more than a club” not only reflected the team’s symbolic status for the Catalans but referred to the ethos within the organisation about the way players, staff and fans should be treated. Talk of creating the feel of a family was more than marketing bluster. The fact that the club was owned by the fans and run by Catalan bourgeoisie who were wealthy but rooted in their community, not like the super-rich who run most other huge clubs, was key to this culture. That’s why they were able to establish an innovative football academy that produced the crop of world class players, including Messi, who formed the basis of perhaps the greatest club side in modern football history. Unlike more traditional football academies in England, where young boys inhabited a world of harsh, macho discipline and a ruthlessness that meant they could be discarded with little preparation or support, Barca’s academy provided the pastoral support and human warmth of the best sort of boarding school.
As the title of the book suggests, this is the model now adopted across the world. As world class players such as Xavi, Iniesta and Messi emerged from this academy and were brilliantly coached by Guardiola, their possession-based, high intensity and attacking approach swept all before them. However, when Guardiola left and was replaced by less high profile figures from within the club, the seeds of decline were planted. Of course, there were many other factors than Pep’s departure that caused this slow but steady decline. Ironically, the very family ethos that created a sense of unity in the club also led to the directors showing too much loyalty to ageing stars, rewarding them with generous, over long contracts. For a while, Messi’s brilliance kept them in the top end of the global game but even this then became a weakness as the all-round team approach was subjugated to the little genius’ needs. As the moments of Messi magic reduced, the inadequacies of the team became more apparent; and their inability to get through to the knockout stages of the Champions League this year for the first time in ages, reflects their reduced status.
This book is worth reading just for the insight into the way Messi approaches the game explaining how he has been able to produce match-winning moments for so long. Yet there was also something rather sad about this book. It was not to do with Barca’s fall from the heights they set, after all that is part of the beauty of sport. No, it was more to do with the nature of modern football in the very top clubs, those clubs who were looking to form the abortive European Super League. There’s something soulless about the lives of the elite players and the way they feel about the game – to them it has become just a job. The loyalties and the passion for playing that existed in the last century don’t seem there. Players seem to be on a treadmill of great financial reward but less internal satisfaction. I don’t think that was Kuper’s intention when writing this fascinating account of how the modern game operates, and I may be putting my own spin on things, but that was the impression with which I came away.
By the end, I thought it might be best for those wealthy European clubs to go off and start their Super League and leave the real fans, real clubs to renew their link to the verities of the game. I’m not decrying the global product that some football clubs have become, it’s just that they seem to be involved in a different sport altogether than the majority of clubs that are still firmly rooted in and central to their communities and fans’ sense of identity.