They used to be better than this.
Days before the La Liga season started, an announcement left the entire Spanish football community in disorder. It was to be expected, but even, that didn't mean it wasn't shocking. Javier Tebas, who fits his usual standard procedures, makes it known that during the coming season there was a fixed value that would be played in Miami. Tebas is determined that football in Spain should become more on a multinational company and less on a football culture. His all-supreme attitude has brought him problems and enemies with time, but few things are orchestrated by the La Liga chairman are as terribly received as this one.
It not only breaks with the spirit of the game and the competition he presents, but also opens the gate for a complete wrapping of the competition system in a country where football has already been dismantled by its ultra-dominating agenda. But if you think this marketing movement, which brings Spanish football in the heart of the Latin community in North America in Miami in Miami, would because of the insistence of Real Madrid, think carefully again.
The club of Concha Espina may have changed the way in which the Great Super Clubs views the game in the last quarter of the century, but in this case President Florentino Perez decided to position himself on the right side of things and received unexpected support from almost every corner of Spanish football. It is Barcelona, the club that once proudly the headline spot in the middle of their iconic Blaugrana shirt borrowed to UNICEF, which now opens this new ridiculous agenda. There is not much left of the Catalan club that was once, and after all the noise around the Negreira affair, the financial levers, the poor treatment of important squadron players, they now resort to. Barca used to be better than this.
Imagine the Lord of the rings and think of La Liga. Two great wizards should help their world to live in prosperity and peace, keep order and tranquility while rule the supreme in their superior knowledge, supplied by the gods themselves. Then one of the wizards turns on a wandering track while he decides to leave all that in his thirst for power, in accordance with the kind of villain that has the power to unite everyone against them. When the film came out, at the start of the Millennium, few would imagine that this would not take more than twenty -five years to see how Barcelona, the club that served as heroes for those who believed in the right causes, to become Saruman of Spanish football, a role when everyone had thrown it to their historical rivals. But here they are, prove that everyone who believed they were a Mes Que Unclub were dead wrong.
It didn't take much, and what is worse, it is not surprising either. There is not much left of their golden days. The time they collaborated with Unicef, or when they took an attitude to stand up for the Catalan society who wanted to vote but was held by the brutal police. That club, the way they played and how they behaved, has long disappeared into oblivion. Even the renovation works at the camp well are a visual metaphor of a destroyed moral compass. For more than a generation, they managed to convince almost everyone that Real Madrid were the villains of the story of Spanish football, and they remained the bastion of core values. All that was good at stake. Guardiola is gone. Messi disappeared. Beyond is the old camp. Beyond is the voice of the reason for Johan Cruyff. What remains are ruins, exploring by archaeologists as if they belonged to an old civilization.
Nowadays, Barcelona is everything that has started to represent in football. You can even choose your fate. It can be the serious accusation of having such an influential figure of the always suspicious world of referees, Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, on your payroll for years. Or the suspect that is closed every summer with companies that don't even seem to be really or, at least, at least not solvent, that have endured with the support of the authorities so that they do not go bankrupt.
The way they have behaved with the works around the new Camp Nou, which includes testimonies of terrible conditions for hundreds of employees on the spot. If you want to stretch it, try to present a club that is famous for the unassailable behavior of their players, which makes many people harassed to leave without getting what they owe or are immediately put aside with injuries, as if they are only a piece of freight. And now this. Het promoten van een competitiewedstrijd op Miami, het omdraaien van een wegdek in wat zeker een thuiswedstrijd zal zijn vanwege de enorme volgende volgende die de club in de regio heeft, dankzij de aanwezigheid van Lionel Messi, is slechts de nieuwste vorm van gebrek aan respect voor hun supporters, om te rivaliserende supporters, de aard van de concurrentie die ze willen winnen, en hun eigen spelers en staf, gedwongen op een andere geld-gemotiveerde Travel.
All because of that one ring. Barcelona was broken during the first term of Laporta, but football glory on the field helped them to escape with their reputation intact. The legacy of successors Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu were not lucky, but again, they still competed thanks to the genius of Messi, and football was confronted with new and dangerous financial forces who could blame the old aristocracy for trying? Only some did better than others. And nobody did it worse than the Blaugrana.
Fortunately for the club, Cruyff's Legacy lived among the graduates of La Masia Academy who almost saved the club on his own. Barcelona lives from borrowed time, driven by a despair to keep track of the performances. They live in a huge country house, but hardly have any furniture in it, which seems good, because they no longer keep house parties at the swimming pool. But despite all those terrible mistakes, they represented something much more than just money or success on pitch.
At least they tried to appear very hard. Of course this is the same club that fell into financial difficulty in the sixties and seventies and focused on the finger of the debt for their failures, not the way they were run poorly, but on the success of Real Madrid under General Franco, the same dictator who also prevented them not even busting in the 1950s. Under his regime, Barcelona was allowed to sell the land of the old Les Corts Ground with a high win when they built Camp Nou.
They were also the club that signed star players in the will of Cruyff, Diego Maradona, Gary Lineker, Romario and Ronaldo Nazario, even if they had not all expected the success on the field. However, what they did brilliant was to present themselves more than just a football club. And they were in a sense. Between the arrival of Josep Lluis Nunez in 1978 and the first term of office of Joan Laporta, Barcelona National and Cruyff never passed on Catalan, and none of their successful foreign managers, such as Rinus Michels, Terry Venables, Louis van Gaal or Frank Rijkaard. Not to mention their star players. It all concerned the club members, the soci and the supporters. And she too, now, in waves, seem to believe that the club went too far a bridge.
Unfortunately, the match is supposed to be a away game for Barcelona because it requires that the other side is participating. A tango contains two and Villareal wants to be part of this story. They too were a well -admired football institution, a club that seemed to be able to do everything well or, at least, with a decent standard of values. The premature death of former vice-president Jose Maria Llaneza can be part of the reason that they are no longer in that dimension.
The signing of Thomas Partey, a player who is accused of rape waiting for the process, sent the worst possible message. The club is ready to stand up for the innocence of someone accused of five charges of rape and one of sexual violence by three victims if they believe he can deliver the field. In the past, similar accusations were made as Getafe for bringing in Mason Greenwood, and rightly. Mercadona, the company that belongs to the Roig family, was seriously examined after the terrible Dana floods that were suffered in Valencia last year, and now it seems that a kind of business attitude that few people have been associated with the yellow submarine side.
That the once community-oriented club from the city of Vila-Real appeared on the wrong side of the moral trenches for two different events seems incredible to those they had praised for so long. They too, such as Barcelona, were once better than this.
If legal actions do not prevent it – and Real Madrid is insisting on the way they should – Spanish football is about to break a sacred rule, one that even the Premier League has dared with the whole world relevance of their competition. Organizing a fixture outside the country is a crime for everything that the competition stands for. It will not only undermine the spirit of the tournament, but it will also enable a side to play practically a week more at home than their competitors. The economic package offered by Villareal to their members is also an indication that every club is ready to sell his soul to the devil if the right price is placed on it.
Both clubs do it for the money – there is no doubt about it – but the La Liga board is in it for something else. Of course they want the dollars, but they also want to apply their power. To prove that they can and they will do that if they have to. All other European football competitions wait in silence to see what comes from it. The Italian and Spanish super cups that are played in Africa or the Midden -East are already an announcement of what can happen in the very near future. Who cannot say that it is only one competition now, but next year the entire league match moved abroad to, for example, Saudi Arabia? Or the home and road races, in that respect, just to 'even eliminate things'. And then, why don't think about the idea of having the Copa del Rey final and also played El Clasico all over the world, only for stairs.
Football has long been the barrier of Logica and Passed in; We are all aware of it. In the near future we will have played Champions League finals on other continents, the same as we had played the euros in different countries, and are about to have spread a world cup of six countries over three continents in 2030. That sadistic exploit of the game of the game is nothing new, but it is still a terrible face to see. For those who try to make it possible, there will be no forgiveness. Not this time.