Barca. The rise and fall of the club that built modern football, Simon Kuper (ISBN 978-1780724744, Short Books)

This was really an enjoyable read. I don’t remember how exactly it ended up on my to read list but I must have read about it somewhere and as I used to enjoy watching Barcelona games on Dutch tv in the nineties I bought it and put it on the pile. Then a few weeks ago when the World Championship in Qutar started and I wasn’t going to watch a lot of the games due the continuous controversy around it (corruption, slave labour, …) I decided to read this book instead. I have to confess I didn’t ban watching the world championship games completely but I haven’t watched much except a few half games from Brazil, Spain and Argentina. And every time I watched I was just frustrated by the very tolerant refereeing. Compared to that the book has been time spent well indeed. Obviously the book is about the Barcelona football club but it also tells the story about their playing style going back to Dutch totaalvoetbal and Johan Cruijff. Johan Cruijff moved from Ajax to Barcelona as a player and then came back in the nineties as a coach to Barcelona where he made them play the Cruijff way. At the time it was something of a revival of totaalvoetbal but nowadays a lot of teams play more or less according to that philosophy. I always liked watching Dutch football more than Belgian football as a kid as especially Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord played football that put the emphasis on attack instead on defending. It didn’t always work and the teams didn’t always win but there was always something to enjoy. Reading the book and the early sections brought back memories of watching these games on tv, especially in the seasons when Cruijff made a comeback at Ajax because he ran out of money. In his 30s he could still lead his team to the Dutch title because of his brilliant technique and vista. The book then covers his passage as coach at Barca and how others like Pep Guardiola continued his legacy. It also describes how Barca came to rely more and more on Messi, had to pay him and the others more and more each year until the system more or less crashed with the 2020 pandemic. And now Barca may be doomed to be a club much like Everton as they have been forced to a much constrained budged. That is more or less the note on which the book ends. I really liked reading this book even though I am not a big football fan anymore. There is too much money going around and probably as a consequence the rules aren’ enforced enough. Too many times games have been decided by players that should have been sent off or by teams that should have had players sent off but weren’t because fouls were not penalised according to the rules. I watch hockey nowadays, referees are a lot more strict and as a consequence less fouls are made. What probably also helps is that players get sent off only for a few minutes so decisions to award a player a card are not that final. But that is another story.