A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by the mega-historian Professor David Starkey, during which the characteristically flamboyant expert on the British monarchy (and self-appointed ‘rudest man in Britain’) broke into a somewhat controversial massacre of contemporary culture with a provocative alignment of 21st-Century life with the more insidious aspects of Imperial Roman society.
Against a paradoxically egalitarian tradition of constitutional monarchy drawn from Anglo-Saxon culture, Starkey argued, 
stands the oppressive political climate of Ancient Rome, whose historical roots, though much thinner in Britain than Continental Europe, are threaded through modern consciousness and threaten to grow as we abandon our sense of social justice.
Even in Britain, where resistance to Roman occupation was as strong as the colonial power’s influence was weak, the cultural wave of the Renaissance gave birth to a fervent admiration of the Roman system of governance, justice, art and culture. Indeed, the swashbuckling military monopolisation of international trade came to be the hallmark of the British Empire as well as that of Rome; Shakespeare learned his Ancient History through Virgil, whilst Britain’s pre-Romantic (and indeed some of its Romantic) poets shaped their work along the lines of their Roman ancestors.
The very structure of our cities, centred around the physical manifestations of cultural and economic might of the ruling élites, is virtually indistinguishable from that of Ancient Rome; international commerce and a labour-surplus economic system enticing millions of migrants from place to place thrive now as they did then; and vast economic inequality is masked by the legend, the cult of celebrity, and the relentless popular satirical dissemination of all aspects of cultural and political life. As a historical bridge towards the idealized vision of ‘pure’ Greek democracy, Rome imposes its brand of egalitarianism on us and we lap it up through lenses tinted with the grey of reassuringly firm pillars, busts and testudos.
But Rome, Starkey poignantly reminded us, was a military dictatorship. Order was maintained with public executions, torture, political backstabbing and costly imperial campaigns. For ordinary people, transcendence came from the Arena. Even as the Empire crumbled, successive Emperors diverted financial resources from military campaigns towards the production of greater and grander spectacles of death, spectacles which an adoring public lapped up in decadent glee.
All of which moves us nicely onto Barcelona. Today, our Arena is a more abstract space; its idealised Form is the football stadium, but in reality, it exists in the supposedly democratised domain of the public media and internet. Our fantasies, like those of our Roman ancestors, are much the same—a search for transcendence through conquest, ownership, sex, dominance and death; as the Romans watched their Senators murder each other and their heroes were the warriors of the Coliseum, so we share links to politicians’ gaffes, enjoy with morbid detachment or righteous coffee-shop morality the bombing of faraway lands, and talk, read and write about football. Amid all this, Barcelona represent hope.
Barcelona’s approach as a team is unique to the modern game in that it is a carbon-copy of all that is attractive, all
that is beautiful and all that is true about football. Football is the satiation of communal yearning; in an era in 
which the fragmented nature of individual positions on the field reflects the multiple emptiness of barren 21st Century ‘democratic’ culture, Barcelona represent a unified whole, an absolute and physical embodiment of the fundamental creativity dripping down to us from the past, that very creativity which draws us to the game and fills our hearts and mouths. They are more than the champion gladiators of the 21st Century Arena; they connect us with the social ideals fans have imposed on the game since its inception. It is beauty as transposition through imitation, in that it takes the most attractive aspects of technical ingenuity, teamwork and physicality and blends them into a way of playing which comes to embody something else.
But then, is the beauty of Barcelona not more than the highest expression of our own sordid failures in real life? The argument that Barcelona play football the way it ‘should’ be played is little more than a self-evident step down the road to essentialism, as dangerous a doctrine in football as anywhere else. We arrive back where we started; if Ancient Greece is the idealised ‘Form’ of democracy and Rome is our bridge, so too we impose our democratic yearnings on the football which most represents freedom—that of Brazil 1970, Holland in ’74, or just little bits of Maradona—and use Barcelona to bridge the gap.
The paradox is that in their mesmerising ability to sculpt matches at will, Barcelona impose a tyrannical order on the game. Or rather, we impose it on ourselves, as fans; having moved from being a thriving expression of proletarian solidarity to the plaything of the faux-intellectual bourgeois blogosphere of which I am a proud member, football has ceased to be a localised squabblefest. It is ‘universal’. Just as the capitalist system which has nurtured (and been nurtured by) the game implies a kind of placid conformity through total openness, so the game has stiffened. Before Barcelona, beauty could be fabulous wing-play, it could be a single playmaker, it could be a deadly counter-attack, it could even be catenaccio. But with vibrant local tradition having finally given way to the pluralism of the Guardian Sport section, spectators have an entire industry between themselves and the game. Rather than questioning, we wholeheartedly accept the storming narratives presented to us because they are precisely the sorts of reassuring stories we want to hear. We want to see the freedom we don’t have, and we consider it a democratic right to demand it.
While Manchester United lined up in their reassuringly suicidal battle formation for the Champions League final, I couldn’t help but think of the pre-arranged ‘battles’ at the height of Roman decadence, when totally mismatched armies of gladiators were sent out to recreate historical battles. United’s barbarian horde, in unsophisticated 4-4-2, piled into the wonderfully well-drilled Barcelona—whose 4-3-3 as they approach the battlefield shifts to a 4-6-0, or a 4-4-2—and made a marvellous mess of things for about ten minutes before they were duly picked apart. Barcelona played the game as it ‘should’ be played and the crowds roared with delight. They had their spectacle.
As Starkey argued to a baffled audience, political systems whose power comes from the bottom up very often result in tyranny and are much harder to dislodge than top-down autocracies, in which competing factions in the social pyramid create the conditions for genuine thought. Having traded in dictators for denim long ago, we Westerners prefer to think of politics as the choice between religions, sexualities and social lives rather than the fundamental problems underpinning them all. Whilst we have next to no say over the international credit-rating agencies which can cripple a nation on a whim, or the multinational corporations dictating the policies of supposedly popular governments, we are free to choose how we like our football played. We live in a democracy, after all.
Augusto Neto strings thirty passes together and hits the post at www.soccerlens.com.
Sir Karl Popper noted, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, that essentialism, as a process of historicism and philosophical faith, was a fundamental pillar of tribalism. Is there a better parallel in modern society than hyperpartisanship?
Read More: Alienation and Dread, Barcelona, Globalization
by Augusto Neto · June 7, 2011
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Mourinho is most definitely Theodoric then. If Starkey presented this, I’m interested to hear how he dealt with many American historians’ extant critique and comparison of the United States as the Roman Empire. Historiographically, that idea isn’t particularly new, and owes itself in some sense to the protestant and Puritan psyche (as much as there is a unified “Puritan” psyche). Railing against bread and circuses goes back a fair distance. In addition, Shakespeare didn’t learn history from Virgil, he probably got it from Plutarch and Tacitus.
The dialectic between Classicism and Romanticism (not that Romanticism is a particularly good descriptive term- in art history terms think perhaps the shift from Renaissance Classicism to Mannerism, and as usual, there’s a term in german that’s the polar opposite of Classicism) is pretty well stated, and essentialism usually signifies a drift towards Classicism- that the ancients had it right, that there’s a “form” out there that’s attainable. Thankfully, we have SAF and Mourinho to be our El Grecos, Carvaggios, and Rodins- and break up the essentialist dialogue (Hiddink is Gaugin, and I would say that di Mateo is probably Ingres).
I can’t decide if I want to share this piece because of the image of Lionel Messi leading his well-drilled Roman Football Unit on the battlefield, slicing up inferior opponents or the last thought-provoking paragraph which left me feeling slightly depressed.
Powerful post. We don’t often stop to consider what ‘war minus the shooting’ really implies, do we?
Part of the greatness of Democracy, is that it affords room for privileged intellectuals to wax and lament the awfulness of their system.
Highly paid jester that he is, Starkey conveniently ignores actual tyrannies. The state of football, and actual life in North Korea come to mind.
It must be my next week its my turn to write an article on Barcelona with a philosophical or high-culture twist. I’m thinking Gramsci. It’ll be tough to match the above effort though
That said, I disagree with Starkey on a number of points. Most obviously, he is simply wrong in his historical comparison. Not only are cities and trade hardly unique to Rome and not only is modern European society infinitely more in debt to the feudal/Germanic societies that replaced the Empire, but its hard to overstate just how shockingly different the Roman world was to our’s. Roman concepts of “conquest, ownership, sex, dominance and death” are entirely removed from modern equivalents. That Ingerlandish academics have traditionally admired Antiquity does not change that
And that’s just historical nitpicking. I’ll not even go on to the sense of (British) exceptionalism and condensing elitism that comes across from his arguments. If only because it would be unfair without seeing them first-hand and I haven’t even mentioned football yet
Isn’t Barcelona one of the most democratic teams in Europe? You can become a member and vote for the people who head it. I guess it’s a republic, but that’s far more democratic than Man U or Liverpool. Notice how the anti-glazer protest has sputtered due to a lack of actual influence the local fans can have on a commercial behemoth like Man U. Fans had no say on the debt that has been piled on their team. Where is the 80 million pounds from Ronaldo’s sale? It sure as hell wasn’t on the pitch at Wembley, 7 million of it was spent hopelessly outmached and denied of service. What about the other 73 milion?
lol yall
This post reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where Homer compacts what looks like 3 kilograms of spaghetti and meatballs into bar size. He takes a bite, then calmly reaches over, dials the telephone, and says: “Hospital please.”
The current Barcelona team seem more like Athens under Pericles, a seeming golden age, redolent with soaring cultural achievements, but built on a bedrock of pragmatism, populism, providence and political guile, and in large part due to a fortuitous confluence of historical events.
Pericles had Zeno, Protagoras, and Phidias.
Guardiola has Xavi, Iniesta and Messi.
That’s a great photo, by the way
@Fast Eddie Gramsci! *swoons* I wrote my bachelor thesis on Gramsci and language. Looking forward to it 😀
@Benderinho so you’re saying they’re doomed within a generation?
“But then, is the beauty of Barcelona not more than the highest expression of our own sordid failures in real life? ”
I couldn’t agree more. We’re so fixated on the dazzling interplay between Xavi, Iniesta and Messi that we choose to ignore the context, the inescapable conclusion that this team’s superiority is built on ever-increasing footballing inequality.
The construction of this Barcelona team is a work of staggering genius, but it couldn’t have happened without the utter lack of checks and balances within the Spanish league system. Barcelona’s freedom to negotiate their own tv deals and to recruit young players from wherever they wish and work with them for as long as they like, are the key foundations upon which this team has been built. You can still admire the amazing architecture, but surely you have to wonder why all of the other houses (but one) on the same street look so shabby?
How can poor Depor compete with a team that, unencumbered by any kind of tv revenue sharing scheme, can spend 46 million euros on Zlatan, write him off after one season and then go and spend another 40 million on David Villa? Aren’t Manchester United at a distinct disadvantage when their academy can only sign players who live within a 90 minute journey, when it would take twice that amount of time to travel from Fuentealbilla (Iniesta’s hometown) to Barcelona?
So what? Who cares? Does it matter? The product is good, right? All of us who tune in from across the globe to watch these amazing champions league games are being kept thrilled and entertained, so what does it matter if the Spanish league is becoming indistinguishable from the Scottish Premier League?
It matters to all those people who love football, who love their local club, but don’t find themselves living in a mega-city.
It’s going to matter to all the parents in the UK who have a child with an aptitude for football, when the 90 minute rule is abolished and they are either forced to ferry them vast distances every week or let someone else bring them up, before watching them being spat out by the football machine, having received an inadequate club-provided academic education along the way.
It matters because a football that is only about a small number of mega-clubs and nothing about what is going on where you live, is not a football worth having.
@Benderinho Have you read Plutarch? He provides an interesting opinion on the nature of Athens under Pericles
Athens was not so great under Pericles because of a lack of virtue of his followers despite his personal greatness, and lost the war in theory if not in practice during his reign, because they were not willing to practice the discipline to win the Pelopponesian war. In fact, to Plutarch, Pelopidas and Lysander’s discipline (and the discipline of those under them) are what turn the war against the Athenians.
@Alex My father took personal exception to the football machine, and, given what happened to the kids who took the long, uncertain journey to Europe, he was right. It’s a meat market with an all too doubtful outcome
@Alex I’m not convinced of the usefulness of citing the 90- minute rule to compare clubs in different countries. The population living within 90 minutes of Old Trafford – at the heart of one of the most densely populated areas in Europe – is over twice that within 90 minutes of the Camp Nou. In order for the Masía’s shopping shelves to be as packed as Manchester United’s, you’d have to drive quite a lot farther out than Fuenteabilla. When Macheda was plucked from Italy at 16, he was over a year younger than Pedro was when he was flown in from Tenerife (which, despite its distance from peninsular Spain, is a Spanish province all the same).
I don’t really understand your local thing, either. Barcelona is owned by its supporters (the vast majority of them Catalans), run by Catalans (the current president, Sandro Rosell, is Barcelona born and bred, as are all his directors), and coached by Catalans,* while 35% of the first-team squad – and five of the first-choice XI – are Catalans too. Manchester United is owned by Americans, run by a bloke from the Thames Valley, coached by a Scot, and now that Paul Scholes and Gary Neville have retired, I’m fairly sure that there’s only one Mancunian left in the first team – and he probably won’t be around for much longer (Ryan Giggs).
Professional football (or any other professional team sport, come to that) hasn’t really been locally based for decades now, but to claim that Barcelona’s advantage comes in part from how far they’re allowed to cast their net is quite a remarkable distortion: it’s almost certainly the most locally oriented of all the big clubs.
_____
*Under the strong influence of a Dutchman, true, but he did name his son Jordi, so let’s give him a pass.
@Archie_V Don’t forget to mention that Spanish law only allows legal adults (18+, I believe) to sign contracts, whereas “civilized” England has no such restrictions. This is the chief reason Wenger can poach young Masia talent without compensating the program. La Masia hemorrhages brilliant young footballers every year — at tremendous cost to Barcelona — with only glory and tribal affinity to offer promising 16 year olds as a bulwark against multi-million euro contracts and first-team time.
Which, of course, makes all the fans’ whining about Barcelona’s “unsettling” of Fabregas that much more bizarre. At least Arsenal will get paid for their loss…
Excuse me for putting my nose in this discussion, but if we were to compare the Ages of football to classic/modern history, then wouldn’t the Roman Empire be better suited to, let’s say, AC Milan in the Eighties/Nineties (the Sacchi and Capello years, and I’m writing with envy, as an Inter fan)? After those years of conquers (let’s say, the Julius Caesar days of the Roman Republic or the first part of Imperial era) came the crazy, final, decadent years of the Empire, when all was to be lost to the barbarians (the decline of Serie A in the ’00s, the lack of attractive in a top player’s perspective to come to play in Italy, all that jazz)… Following this thought, Barcelona could very well be a Renaissance city, or Charles V’s Spain, or something like that. And Mourinho would be the Francis Drake of Football.
@Oxnard You miss Augusto’s point. He was looking at states from the perspective of being organized top down or bottom up. Whether or not such a regime is tyrranical is an entirely separate matter. That NoKo is terrifying is exactly the point. It sets a bar- popular tyrranies are more frightening.
This is actually quite funny with respect to Barcelona. Not only do they “impose a tyrranical order on the game”, but their supporters hold beliefs that are, in the soccer world, fundamentalist. Essentialism is exactly right. There is only one way to play the game. Managers come and go, but the style remains the same. La Masia might as well be divinity school.
Other teams seek to win, to merely beat you. Their supporters pray to graven idols, hoping that the right demi-god will appear to lead them to victory. They augur the transfer market, hoping for signs that fortune smiles upon them. But Barcelona seek a different confrontation on the pitch. They don’t just want to win, they wish to prostheletize. They have the One True Faith, and you are either for it or against it. Their players, while spectacular, are subservient to their style.
@Alex I agree with the gist of your argument, but think it is a little strange to imply that the premier league of all leagues is being put at a disadvantage because of different rules. The premier league doesn’t seem to have much difficulty in attracting talent; in fact in a way it has sucked much of the continent dry of class A talents and increasingly its class B talents as well.
The way I see it, the really important difference in the premier league has been a handful of (mostly) foreign billionaire owners lifting a number of ‘other’ clubs to a level comparable to the traditional powers.
@Groy “That NoKo is terrifying is exactly the point. It sets a bar- popular tyrranies are more frightening.”
I may be missing something here, but are you suggesting that N Korea is somehow a “popular tyranny”? If not, perhaps you name such a “popular tyranny” that is worse than N Korea? I ask because from the outside it appears to be a typical police state governed ‘from above’ by a narrow elite
Secondly, “fundamentalist” is entirely the wrong word to use with regards Barcelona. That implies a rigid dogmatism or adherence to scripture. I much prefer to describe them as ‘ideologues’. There is no suggestion that the Barcelona style is the “only one way” to play football, and their philosophy is a world removed from the rigid conservatism that once plagued English football.
What there is is the simple, if arrogant, claim that this is the best way to play. From the perspective of actually winning things, this is an unassailable position. From an aesthetical point of view, well, most people would agree that Barcelona play beautiful football. The latter is of course a social construct rather than some ethereal ideal
@Salvo Yeah you’re missing the point.
@Brouhaha I totally did, I beg your pardon. It just got the best of me, making comparisons between apparently unconnected things is my passion:D!
@Oxnard Starkey ignores “actual tyrannies” because he is primarily a historian of the British monarchy. His was simply an interesting – and provocative, true – dissemination of our faith in a political system which is far from democratic. He used his comparison with the Roman Empire as a counter to the other strand running through British history; namely, that of the Anglo-Saxons.
@Brian Davis I don’t think they’re all that fussed. Have you seen Nolito? 22 years old, hardly a sniff of first team action during his time there, free transfer to Benfica.
The point is, it’s a great academy, but Barca are just as ruthless as anybody else when it comes to poaching other people’s talent. David Villa is a prime example, as is Dani Alves.
@Fast Eddie A materialist could always argue that ethereal ideals are always social constructs anyway, but my main point here is this (and I touched on this in the post): Barcelona are not a footballing revolution, and most people who watch them don’t really claim them as such. As supporters, we impose our own ideals – socially-constructed or otherwise (I personally don’t like the term, bit too Althusserian for me) – on the team we see on the pitch precisely because there already exists a notion that there is only one way to play football.
Where this ‘way’ really came from should be the subject of a thesis (‘is it an old expression of democracy which has, like all those exciting modern ideas, been re-packaged, sold and marketed to us as a commodity?’; ‘is it an expression of our evolutionary cunning and wit?’ etc). However, the fact remains that we idealise a certain essence, so essential that it’s impossible to resist comparisons with Platonic Forms, and we revel in Barcelona’s expression of it. It’s utterly nonsensical when you consider that football is about excitement, joy and, let’s be honest, winning.
Indeed, even those fans who claim to prefer style over substance (your Wengerists, your Colchester United fans who ‘just like watching Barcelona’), derive a pleasure from not winning precisely because they have ‘not won’ on their terms: a moral victory.
However, there is nothing fundamentalist about the way Barcelona go about things. They’re as ruthless a capitalist institution as anyone else and they are just as hell-bent on winning as Real Madrid or Manchester United. What they do is market themselves to fit that fundamentalist tendency which already exists in general society: we want transcendence, we want absolutes, and we find them presented to us in crude renderings of the past. The ‘revolution’ on the pitch is precisely that: the promise of a return.
@Augusto Neto Nolito is almost 25. Great article though.
@Archie_V If Alex Ferguson didn’t think that the 90 minute rule (along with the dictate on allowed amount of coaching hours) was putting him at a disadvantage to Barceloma in terms of developing talented players, then he wouldn’t be pushing for change: http://bit.ly/itjVZj
Under a Spanish system, Fergie could have tempted a bright young talent like Ipswich’s Conor Wickham over to the Old Trafford academy when he was, say, 12. If something like the English system existed in Spain (adjusted to match the differing demographics as you point out), then no matter how much he wanted to head off to La Masia when he was 12, Andres Iniesta wouldn’t have been allowed to. Instead, perhaps he would have ended up on Valenica’s books.
According to this Reuters article (http://reut.rs/lYX4YG), “since 1979 more than 440 youngsters have left their homes and families to live at the Masia, about half from Catalonia and the rest from Spain and beyond, including 15 from Cameroon, seven from Brazil, five from Senegal and three from Argentina.” Frustatingly, we’re not given the full breakdown of the number of Spanish players from outside Catalonia, but it’s obviously pretty significant.
We could carry on having an enjoyable debate about how significant an advantage is for Barcelona to be able to cast a wider net than Manchester United, but I can’t see how it can be argued that it isn’t indeed an advantage.
I don’t wish to see these rules on youth development in England abandoned. I’d like to see even stricter structures in place so we can’t keep on asset-stripping young talent from other countries and so smaller clubs in our league are given more opportunity to develop and nurture outstanding young players and be compensated fairly if they depart for a bigger stage. I couldn’t care less if that meant that English clubs went backwards in the Champions League.
These kind of rules and structures don’t respect the desires of the individual. If you’re a 14 old boy and Manchester United think you’re good enough for their academy but you can’t go because your nearest league club is Plymouth, then you’re probably good. But it’s these kind of rules, and the values that underpin them, that exist for the greater good and help preserve what is truly special about what you’ve got. US sport so often gets this right, perhaps because administrators know that promoting parity makes good business sense, but also because they believe in the principle of every team (if they can get their act together) having a shot at the title.
@Alex Even if England-style restrictions had applied in Spain, Barcelona would still be able to continue to field five Catalan players in their first-choice starting eleven (Valdés, Puyol, Piqué, Busquets and Xavi), plus contributions over the course of last season from six more (Bojan, Sergi Roberto, Fontás, Bartra, Montoya, Edu Oriol), plus four players who – like Fábregas at Arsenal or Macheda at Manchester United – only joined Barcelona when they were 16 (Pedro, Jeffren, Nolito and Jonathan Dos Santos).
Iniesta is often cited as an example of the “unfairness” of the system, but he and Messi are the exceptions, not the rule. (Thiago joined when he was 14, but he’s not really from anywhere, having spent his childhood followed his footballing dad around from club to club).
No, the explanation for the strength of Barcelona’s academy players has to lie elsewhere. And I think it’s plain to see in that Irish Independent article you link to. It’s not the distance restriction but the hours-of-practice one that’s holding English clubs back. Does anybody understand the reasoning behind that? As far as I’m aware music conservatories aren’t forced to limit their violin prodigies to three hours’ fiddling a day, so why limit the time that kids at academies are allowed to be in contact with a ball (provided their basic educational needs are being covered, as they are at the Masía and Ajax)?
The inescapable conclusion is that Barcelona’s homegrown players are so good not because of the size of the pool the club can fish them from. As outlined above, those are excuses that are not actually supported by the facts. No, they are so good simply because of the quality of the training they get. Arsene Wenger, for one, knows this. Which is presumably why, as Brian Davis points out, he has no qualms about waving juicy professional contracts in the faces of Masía teenagers as soon as they hit 16. Cesc Fàbregas may be the best known example, but he’s certainly not the only one.
A final clarification: The presence at the Masía of those kids from Cameroon – which at first sight might look suspiciously like some kind of neocolonialist raiding exercise – can in fact be put down to an agreement between several clubs, including Barcelona, and the Samuel Eto’o Foundation.
@Archie_V Sir, I think the facts speak for themselves. One football club can recruit football players to it’s academy from the whole of Spain, the other only from within a 90 minute travel zone. Which club has the advantage?
You make a great case for why this might not be as big an advantage as I make out and we could debate it long and hard. But that would be tedium writ large.
Good night and good luck.
@Fast Eddie NoKo isn’t a popular tyrrany. For all of his bluster, Kim Jong Il is quite happy ruling his little kingdom.
A popular tyrrany is something more like the Soviet Union or Fascist Germany. Similar terror, but extremely interested in exporting it around the world. NoKo isn’t in the same ballgame as those guys.
As for the second half of your comment, I fail to see how what you have described isn’t fundamentalism. Exactly what part of the Book of Cruyff do they not adhere to?
@Archie_V & Alex: Both of you may be interested in this article on La Masia (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2011/0528/1224297949511.html). Most obviously it scotches the ’90 minute rule’ theory by noting that Barcelona prospects typically spend – you guessed it – no more than 90 minutes a day training. From 16:30-18:00 to be precise. The other observation that jumps out, and this is rather more relevant to the success of the respective academies, is that Barca spends three times as much money as Utd in scouting and developing players
@Gory: “A popular tyrrany is something more like the Soviet Union or Fascist Germany”
So the only difference is scale? Or are you suggesting that there was anything “popular” about these repressive dictatorships? Neither of them could be seriously described as ‘bottom up’. You know, what with all that state-directed mass violence and propaganda to keep the populace in check
“I fail to see how what you have described isn’t fundamentalism. Exactly what part of the Book of Cruyff do they not adhere to?”
Probably the bit where there is no “Book of Cruyff”. The Dutch school is obviously a huge influence on Barcelona but its silly to suggest that tiki-taka is simply a carbon copy of totaalvoetbal or that they play as they do simply because of St Johan’s commandments
Barcelona have developed a fairly radical style of play that is if, perhaps, not revolutionary then at least a significant departure from previous models. Their game is determined by the conditions of modern football and within this framework they have developed an incredibly successful philosophy. Moreover, they continue to innovate – in the ‘inverted winger’ and the ‘false forward’, Barcelona showcase two of the most notable tactical developments of recent years
(And self-consciously so. I read an interesting article a few weeks ago where Valdes specifically referred to Messi as a ‘false forward’)
@Augusto Neto: Can it really be argued that “there already exists a notion that there is only one way to play football” when so much of the narrative surrounding Barca (in the English press at least) has focused on the difference in footballing styles/cultures? There is a definite ‘clash of civilisations’ subtext to much of the writing about Barcelona in English. Even when someone defends 4-4-2 and ‘getting rid of it’ (take a bow, Andy Gray), its almost invariably in reference/contrast to another system or style. Perhaps inevitably so
I suppose that I view the footballing landscape as being littered with competing views as to how the game should be played. This has been the case ever since a few Scots decided to pass rather than dribble (or as far back as William Webb Ellis allegedly picking up the ball) and is natural given the different conditions in which the game has evolved. The only real difference today is that it is the club game that most often highlights differences in footballing cultures. If the Barcelona ‘way’ is currently in the ascendency (although its questionable as to whether its truly hegemonic) then it is because it is so devastatingly effective in competition*. And not just because of the technical mastery of their players or the broad acceptance of some ideal style or nostalgia
Which may just be my materialism coming through. I’m not really a fan of Forms
Entirely agreed with you on that they are just as capitalist an institution as any other club; strongly disagree that there is some “fundamentalist tendency” inherent in society. But that is an entirely different matter and a much larger question than football
*If this were lacking then tiki-taka would no doubt be dismissed as ‘faffing about’, a phrase that goes naturally with ‘Arsenal’
@Fast Eddie Messi himself refers to his role as being a delantero mentiroso – a “mendacious/lying/deceitful striker” – which I rather like.
@Fast Eddie I’d disagree with your first point, where you disagreed with my idea that there is ‘only one way to play’ on the basis that, whilst different cultures adopt different approaches at different times, it is pretty much universally accepted that the pinnacle of footballing greatness is to be able to win matches with the flair, style and which Barca embody. That the English press contrasts their style with of say, Manchester United, is a moot point when you consider that the difference being described is primarily one of quality. United’s style is different because they can’t play as well as Barca, not because it isn’t in their culture to keep the ball or to attack.
You go on to discuss the Barcelona ‘way’ in terms of a fad almost, popularised by the Catalans’ success; how many people championed the style of West Germany at Italia ’90? Or Greece at Euro 2004 (forget the fact that people loved the sheer shock of their success).
I hate the idea of ‘Forms’ too, but, sadly, it’s an idea which has taken root in much of Western culture and I believe it feeds into football. As with many things, our current political system fosters the idea of free democratic choice, yet this ‘choice’ is underpinned by deep socio-historical undercurrents which serve to reduce said ‘choice’ to a mere surface decisio, above a more fundamental paralysis afflicting the development of true thought.
When it comes to football, while we are free to debate the finer points of how Barcelona can be stopped and if there can ever be a team who play the game ‘better’, our idea of what is ‘better’ remains rooted in a romanticised aesthetic immortalised by the few teams who had success with it. This is why thrilling sides like Real Madrid (oh yes) and Manchester United are labelled as conservative in spite of the astonishing evidence against such claims. It seems that cold calculation in possession is art, and cold calculation out of it is little more than a parked bus.
A word on Tiki-Taka and faffing about: of course, ‘tiki-taka’ needs success in order to sustain itself as an ideal; but even if Barca didn’t win, they play in ‘the image’, or ‘the Form”; people would still flock and, indeed, they may even become even more popular for it. As for Arsenal, they are a different case altogether. They ‘faff about’ because, whilst in principle they share some characteristics with The Form, they are too far removed from it in an attacking sense. They are incomplete ‘degenerations’ if you like – they don’t cross, they lack the complete mobility of Barca, their tempo is too quick and not measured enough. It’s practically a different style.
@Augusto Neto: Not so much a “fad” as a current of thought or an approach, the popularity of which may ebb or flow. The history of football is, on one level at least, a procession of .conflicting styles and philosophies. And I don’t just mean chalkboard and formations: these are, along with the personnel, just one aspect of how a team plays. Typically these styles develop within national leagues, which provides us with a host of footballing stereotypes, but the most interesting interchanges take place at international level where teams with very different philosophies meet. Sometimes the effects of these encounters can be lasting as one culture digests the lessons and changes their way of playing. Think of England/Hungary 1953 or Brazil/Netherlands 1974
(Personally I think that Barcelona’s obsession with possession could well be the most significant tactical development since the integration of pressing into the modern game. The only real question is whether this style of play is replicable outside of the confines of La Masia. Either way other teams will have to either adopt the same system or develop countermeasures to defeat it. Assuming that the model is sustainable of course)
Nor is the “flair and style” of Barca “universally accepted” as the ideal way to play football, or an echo of such. It should be a safe assumption that there would indeed be universal admiration for the ability of this Barcelona side – although are they really that much more technically gifted than, say, the last great Red Star Belgrade team? – but unfortunately its actually a false one. Once again England provides the extreme example of a football culture that until recently (late 90s for the club game, late 00s at international level) remained intensely suspicious of technical ability. This is a country where Messrs Reep and Hughes set out to ‘prove’ the efficiency of the long ball, and where an outrageously gifted player like Le Tissier could be dismissed as a ‘luxury’ player. This sort of muscular disdain for technical ability is still widespread at many levels of English football. There really are people today who think that “Barcelona would struggle in the EPL as they’ve never played the likes of Stoke”, while Run of Play favourite Barney Ronay has, perhaps mischievously, favourably compared Birmingham v Stoke to Arsenal v Barcelona
(Such sentiment is obviously not so prevalent at the higher club levels, of course. For that we have the Cantonas, Bergkamps and Wengers to thank. Nonetheless Utd lined up in 4-4-2 at Wembley not just because they’re not capable of playing a Barca passing game but because such a style is largely alien to their footballing culture. Retaining possession is simply not a priority in England and the skills needed to execute such a game-plan are rarely required in the EPL)
Obviously few countries are as focused on the physical side of the game as England (although I noted a certain pride in US ‘ruggedness’ in S Africa) and for most people the levels of technical excellence that Barca display are in themselves worthy of praise. But I do think that this lends credence to the conceptualisation of multiple footballing ‘ways’ engaged in a pseudo-evolutionary struggle on a number of levels. This is as opposed to striving towards one particular idealised view of how the game should be played. Certainly the English press is not imposing any romantic view on Barcelona; its often quite the opposite
Now winning is important, in that it obviously validates a tactical approach, but its fair to say, and I think I’m paraphrasing Sacchi here, that great teams also have to leave a legacy. This is why Greece winning Euro 2004 was not so important: Greece retreated to past and half-forgotten principles rather than proposing a new way to play the game. That campaign probably contributed to the growing defensiveness of tactics in that decade but was of no wider significance. In contrast, there can be no denying that Herrera’s Inter was a truly great side, despite being almost the polar opposite of Barca’s proactive possession football. The difference being that Herrera’s tactics were genuinely innovative for the time, while those of Greece, or perhaps Mourinho, are largely derivative
“As with many things, our current political system fosters the idea of free democratic choice, yet this ‘choice’ is underpinned by deep socio-historical undercurrents which serve to reduce said ‘choice’ to a mere surface decision, above a more fundamental paralysis afflicting the development of true thought.
When it comes to football, while we are free to debate the finer points of how Barcelona can be stopped and if there can ever be a team who play the game ‘better’, our idea of what is ‘better’ remains rooted in a romanticised aesthetic immortalised by the few teams who had success with it”
I’m not going to argue with the first argument but isn’t there is a contradiction between that and the second? If we accept that ‘choice’ is tempered/conditioned by material conditions then surely a style of play is similarly “underpinned by deep socio-historical undercurrents”. Or, to put it another way, isn’t our conception of the ideal way to play football (the “romanticised aesthetic”) primarily a product of the specific environment in which it develops?
@Archie_V: Heh, that is a fantastic description of the role. I really like that
@Fast Eddie You make some fair points about football history. I’m not disputing that there is an ebb and flow of tactics, methodologies, even ideologies; what I’m saying is that our view of them becomes abstracted.
First, there is the process by which the ideology of ‘Forms’ takes root. I don’t want to take this down deeper and darker philosophical avenues, but bear with me:
– Football history has, as you said, evolved through a series of tactical, technical and physical developments which can loosely be defined as an ‘ebb and flow’ of contrasting styles. The national leagues were, for generations, the test tubes in which various styles developed; the international stage was where the styles would meet. Lessons would be dealt and learned, but there was still a state of tension, if you will, between competing ideas.
– Gradually, with the belated development of free market ideology within the game, the convergence of these separate ideas into what I like to think of as a ‘comformity through multiplicity’ has led to ‘The Forms’ taking root. I personally don’t believe in them, so I don’t believe they always existed; however, the ideology running through the modern game is one which commodifies styles into, at the risk of sounding like an old Marxist fart, a range of packages determined by their market value. The highest market value is determined by the ‘best style’. The ‘best style’ is that which is most in demand and, crucially, that which can be most readily supplied to meet this demand. The demand is created by a re-fabrication of history by the third parties between the consumer and the producer: the media. Thus, ready-made Forms.
Then, there is the actual process of abstraction:
– When what we appear to have is a definite choice about how we prefer the game to be played (and, theoretically, that choice is a real one), there still exists an ‘idea’ of how the game ‘should’ be played. The English rejection of flair until the mid-nineties, in my opinion, was the pragmatic cultural reflex of a country unable to compete rather than a dominant ideology; most England fans would happily claim Brazil 1970 as their ideal example of how the game ‘should’ be played (excluding 1966 ‘n’ all that, naturally); football is about ‘winning’, but there is a moral distinction between winning by having more of the ball and attacking, and winning by having little of the ball and picking your moments. The distinction between the first example and winning by defending and hoping for set-pieces and corners (Greece) is even greater.
– We are imbued with a hierarchical vision of how the game should be played. Barcelona embody its peak because they do everything all our favourite products do, and because they provide the practical satisfaction of actually successfully applying those ideals. Capitalism about ‘freedom’ (to have sex with who you want, to not be discriminated against for the colour of your skin, and to buy whatever you want; not the right to have your desires represented democratically, nor the freedom FROM a zillion horrible things I shan’t list here); it’s about ‘choice’ (basically, the expression of ‘freedoms’: for the rich, it’s a choice of surgeon; for the poor, it’s a choice of bus to the hospital); and it’s about ‘individuality’ (the accumulated result of those hundreds of little choices as viewed by others). Barcelona embody that spontaneity, that IMAGE, wonderfully. The expansive, limitless nature of their game, the marketed image of socialist utopia/anti-Madrid-centralism/anti-Fascism as embodied by the beauty of their football, form a harmonious body irresistible to a public who, ultimately, want to buy little dreams, not listen to historical epics.
–
Q. Isn’t Barcelona one of the most democratic teams in Europe?
http://www.qatarisbooming.com/2011/05/18/the-wait-is-over-the-new-fcb-qatar-foundation-team-kit-presented/
A. They are Blackshirts now.
@Archie_V
You say: “Iniesta is often cited as an example of the “unfairness” of the system, but he and Messi are the exceptions, not the rule.”
I say: These “exceptions” play a really big role for Barcelona. Messi is responsible for 80 goals this season.
53 goals 27 assists.
Iniesta is responsible 24 goals.
9 goals 15 assists.
Now if you don’t think that Barcelona has a significant advantage by having a larger pool for their academy then, your just not looking at the facts.
Thiago is another great example he seems to be one of the brightest upcoming stars for Barcelona he did not live in Barcelona or near it.
Barcelona have the advantage that they can get the best potential athletes around the world. And there are very few kids who would reject the chance to play for Barcelona.