FC Barcelona are making their Spanish League wins look so easy that they are in danger of becoming football’s equivalent of the Harlem Globe Trotters.
For those of you unfamiliar with the HBT, they are the legendary basketball team that became just so skilful and so much better than any of their rivals that at one point they decided just to focus on exhibition matches- with a bit of theatrics thrown in- as there was no point in pretending there was any competition capable of beating them. They became very successful, attracting a huge global following, and making a lot of money.
There is a sense in which FC Barcelona are already playing exhibition matches. For all its history, the noble Basque club Real Sociedad proved a weak opponent, as did Real Madrid on its recent visit to the Nou Camp. But Real Madrid have been playing much better against other teams, and the kind of opposition Barca have been facing not just in La Liga but in the early rounds of the Champions League, have barely put them to the test. It is in the coming weeks, when the race for La Liga hots up, and enter the final stages of the Champions league, that Barca will need to prove definitely that it is the best football team since the Real Madrid of the Golden years in the 1950’s.
That Barca is playing extraordinary collective, one-touch, flowing football, the game at its most beautiful, poetry in motion etc etc.- is not in doubt. The question is how long will it go on winning, will it keep ahead of Real Madrid, and is Barca destined for Wembley next spring and another, historic European title?
These questions are important because victory or humiliatiion in the coming months will dictate the level of tolerance among Barca fans for the controversial strategy being pursued by Sandro Rosell, FC Barcelona’s recently elected new president.
Having accused Joan Laporta, his predecessor of financial mismanagement and dealing with dictators, Rosell has signed a lucrative sponsorship deal with Qatar, an absolute monarchy which served as one of the main launching sites for the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003. While not as repressive or corrupt as Uzbekistan, Qatar’s current Emir and his cronies have not exactly an unblemished human rights record. Last June Amnesty criticised Qatar for its lack of freedom of expression, its discrimination against women, and its violence against domestic workers.
But then what has motivated the Qatar deal is money pure and simple. It is one of the biggest sponsorship deals in the history of sport involving a country that has been picked by that bastion of democracy FIFA to host a future World Cup.
The official word from the Rosell camp is that the deal is more than this, just as Barca is ‘more than a club’. It is important to remember, we are told, that UNICEF will remain prominent on the players’ shirts so that the club maintains a moral compass after all. It is also pointed out that deal will make it easier to pay off the debts left by Laporta, and to afford buying Cesc Fabregas from Arsenal, if not this season, next.
Rosell is trying to transform Barca into a less politicised but more financialy stable and lucrative brand while trying to retain those elements that set it apart from other football clubs, and make it one of the most popular, if not most popular sporting institutions world. Essential, among those elements, is Pep Guardiola and the Barca players. Let’s see of they can go on playing the way they do, and winning, however tough, and real, the opposition.
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