Highway Penguin
01-29-2005, 05:26 AM
Article From "Four Four Two" Magazine.
In Parts:::
A decade ago, FC Barcelona were the epitome of footballing glamour, packed with stars playing thrilling football in Europe's most spectacular stadium. But the 21st century has seen the club sink to the depths of despair, close to financial ruin and light years behind Real Madrid. What went wrong? And are they posed for a stunning comeback?
It's February 2003, and outside the entrance to Milan's magnificent Duomo cathedral, a wiry, be suited 58-years-old man is attracting unlikely attention from a group of elderly tourists. One minute they are queuing to enter the building; the next they have formed two distinct factions, one requesting autographs and photos, the other booing and heckling with passion.
Understandably, the man carries a look of weary resignation. For Joan Gaspart, until two weeks before the president of FC Barcelona, this reaction has become all too familiar. In Milan to see Barca take on Inter in the Champions League, Gaspart is left in no doubt that he is responsible for the dramatic decline of one of the world’s greatest clubs. After a disastrous three-year tenure, he has left Barca deep in crisis – 15th in the league and close to financial ruin, hopeless on the pitch and rudderless off it.
A Barca member since the age of nine, Gaspart was overjoyed at their 1992 Wembley European Cup win that he stripped to his underpants for a midnight dip in the River Thames. Yet as president, Gaspart oversaw the most traumatic period in Barcelona’s recent history, a stint which saw the club plunge ₤120m into the red, without a single trophy to show for their profligacy. Not only that, the once-mighty giants of world football were twice humiliated in the Spanish Cup by Third Division opposition.
“Under Gaspart, the club saw its reputation badly damaged,� says Toni Frieros, chief writer of Sport, the Barcelona-based daily sports paper. “Barca have a proud history, but people stopped talking about them. Instead they were talking about Real Madrid, about Manchester United, about Juventus.�
For the (other) self styled Biggest Club in The World, a club for whom second place in the league had always been constituted failure, such loss of face hit hard. And nowhere was the decline better illustrated than last summer, when David Beckham dismissed their offer without even bothering to speak to the Catalans. “Four years ago Beckham would have come here because we were perceived to be the biggest,� claims lifelong fan Marc Caballe i Puig, “but nobody was surprised when he went to Madrid.�
The club had fallen far and fallen fast. In January 2000, Michel Platini called the Barca side containing Rivaldo and Figo “the most exciting team in Europe�. To outsiders, it was the epitome of football glamour. This was a club that routinely signed the world’s biggest starts – Cruyff, Maradona, Stoichkov, Laudrup, et al – while the arrivals of Terry Venables, Steve Archibald, Gary Lineker and Mark Hughes at the Nou Camp in the ‘80s stoked British interest in the club. Lineker went in his prime, arriving with the Golden Boot from the Mexico World Cup, and when Hughes left Old Trafford in 1986, no one doubted that he was moving on to bigger and better things. Others fell in love with Barca’s romanticism, with their proud defiance of General Franco’s brutal repression, with their refusal to sully their shirt with a commercial sponsor. Everything about Barca oozed class.
Yet three years after Platini’s purring proclamation, Barca sat two points above the relegation zone in Spain’s top division behind teams from towns whose entire population would fit into the Nou Camp. In that time, they dispensed of four managers and spent more on new talent than Real Madrid – but with the exception of Argentine striker Javier Saviola, these costly investments yielded only routine mediocrity.
Foreign fans may have retained romantic notions of Barca, but the mood among the club’s 104,000 socios (members) had deteriorated badly. On December 15 2002, a dreadful Barcelona were thrashed 3-0 at home by mid-table Sevilla, and the fans finally snapped.
Primal screams of “dimision, dimision� [“resign, resign�] joined the familiar white hankies of protest as the entire stadium, spitting venom, turned to face Gaspart, sitting in the president’s seat at the very front of the Nou Camp’s second tier. At the final whistle, Gaspart didn’t hide. As his fellow directors scurried away to the safety of the stadium’s inner sanctum, he stood motionless while 50,000 hanky-wielding cules cranked up the abuse.
For close to five minutes, Gaspart remained, silent and still, facing his tormentors. Though motionless, his face betrayed him. A broken man close to tears, Gaspart seemed to be taking one last, lingering look at the Nou Camp as of trying to male a final, defiant gesture of dignity. One by one the directors returned, encouraging him to leave, to escape the stinging lashes of the Nou Camp crowd. Each time he refused, pushing them away to face his humiliation. It was pure theatre.
“He was like a bad actor,� sneers Caballe. “Yes, he was respected as a good supporter, but I’m a good supporter and I would never run for president. By that time we had had enough, we wanted a complete change.�
What Gaspart did not know – what he could not know as he soaked up the torrent of abuse – was that he had inadvertently sowed the seeds for a remarkable revolution in the politics of this extraordinary club, a revolution which may yet prove its salvation.
To chart the incredible decline of FC Barcelona, it is necessary to go back over a decade to the club’s finest hour, their European Cup triumph of 1992. The president on the glorious spring evening in north London was Josep Nunez, a Basque who arrived in Catalunya in a pram and built up a personal fortune from construction. Nunez had money, but his humble upbringing had denied him the social status he craved. All that changed overnight in 1978, however, when he built up sufficient support to be elected into the position often regarded as the top job in Catalunya: president of Barcelona. His vice-president was Joan Gaspart.
In his first decade at the club, Nunez oversaw the rebuilding of the Nou Camp, creating the biggest stadium in Europe. In tandem, season-tickets sales rose from 77,000 to 107,000. But Nunez was impatient for success, hiring and firing nine coaches, only one of whom, Terry Venables, the longest-serving, was able to deliver a league title.
Under pressure to win trophies, in 1988 Nunez made the decision that would prove to be both masterstroke and his personal undoing: his next coach was Johan Cruyff, a Barca hero on the pitch back in the 1970s. Cruyff’s methods took two years to bed down but for once Nunez was patient and he was rewarded with a side that defined an era. Cruyff’s “Dream Team� is legendary in Spain. Welding home-grown talents like the cerebral Pep Guardiola to expensive imports such as Michael Laudrup, Hristo Stoichkov, Romario and Ronald Koeman, Cruyff’s team played some of the finest football the Nou Camp had ever witnessed on their way to four successive league titles and the club’s only European Cup in 1992. Were it not for the brilliance of AC Milan they might have dominated Europe too. “Cruyff had a simple philosophy for his attacking football,� recalls Marc Caballe. “He said that the ball, not the players, should do the running. The football was incredible. We didn’t have the best defence in the world, but we seemed to win every game. Nothing has compared since.�
But with the success came a clash of two giant egos. Both Cruyff and Nunez wanted to be seen as the central character in the success story and as they vied for pride of place in the history books, their spats, usually played through the media, became increasingly personal. Cruyff accused Nunez of being and autocrat. “He’s a builder,� the Dutchman sneered, “and as bricks don’t answer back, he’s not used to arguing.� In return, Nunez accused Barca’s most successful ever coach of accepting a commission when taking the club to friendly matches in Holland and lf leaking stories to the press for money.
Other Cruyff critics claimed that he was arrogant and nepotistic. The consensus was that his son Jordi was not of the same pedigree as previous strikers, and yet there he was in the first team – never mind that Jordi had established himself in the Holland team too. Amore curious affair was the promotion of Cruyff’s goalkeeper son-in-law Jesus Angoy to the first team squad at the age of 29 after playing with Barcelona’s nursery team. Whatever the finer points – and there were many – two camps developed among the media and fans, the Cruffistas and the Nunistas.
For Nunez, clearly unable to sack the most popular man in Catalunya, it was a waiting game; for Cruyff, yet more pressure to continue the success. After two potless seasons, Nunez gleefully delivered the bullet in 1996, replacing Cruyff with Bobby Robson. The genial Geordie had no idea what he was walking into. “I was completely unaware of the infighting when I arrived,� he admitted later. “Senor Nunez was trying to cling to his presidency in the face of growing hostility and Barcelona was a divided city with half of them on the side of the current regime and half backing Cruyff. I was the unwelcome guest.�
Robson lasted only a season and had reason to fell aggrieved about the way he was treated. Statistics showed him to be the most successful coach in Europe as he led the team to the European Cup Winners’ Cup, the Spanish Cup and domestic Super Cup, but not – crucially – the league. He was relegated to the role of a glorified (albeit extremely well paid) scout as Dutchman Louis van Gaal took control of first team affairs.
Robson had been Gaspart’s choice, the pair having links that went back 15 years. The Anglophile vice-president was from a well-respected Catalan family of hoteliers and had trained at London’s exclusive Connaught hotel. He initially offered Robson the Barcelona job as early as 1984, but the Englishman opted to stay at Ipswich and instead recommended Terry Venables, a virtual unknown outside of England. In later years, Gaspart would ring Robson and ask him opinion on potential acquisitions. Eventually, the two worked well together at the Nou Camp. When Robson identified as a transfer target PSV Eindhoven’s young Brazilian Ronaldo – a player he said was “as good as Pele� – Gaspart’s response to the then-huge $20m fee was typical of his attitude to finance. “He said that it was no use dying and leaving the money to someone else,� recalled Robson. One season later, Ronaldo’s sublime form made $20m look like a snip.
---To Be Continued---
In Parts:::
A decade ago, FC Barcelona were the epitome of footballing glamour, packed with stars playing thrilling football in Europe's most spectacular stadium. But the 21st century has seen the club sink to the depths of despair, close to financial ruin and light years behind Real Madrid. What went wrong? And are they posed for a stunning comeback?
It's February 2003, and outside the entrance to Milan's magnificent Duomo cathedral, a wiry, be suited 58-years-old man is attracting unlikely attention from a group of elderly tourists. One minute they are queuing to enter the building; the next they have formed two distinct factions, one requesting autographs and photos, the other booing and heckling with passion.
Understandably, the man carries a look of weary resignation. For Joan Gaspart, until two weeks before the president of FC Barcelona, this reaction has become all too familiar. In Milan to see Barca take on Inter in the Champions League, Gaspart is left in no doubt that he is responsible for the dramatic decline of one of the world’s greatest clubs. After a disastrous three-year tenure, he has left Barca deep in crisis – 15th in the league and close to financial ruin, hopeless on the pitch and rudderless off it.
A Barca member since the age of nine, Gaspart was overjoyed at their 1992 Wembley European Cup win that he stripped to his underpants for a midnight dip in the River Thames. Yet as president, Gaspart oversaw the most traumatic period in Barcelona’s recent history, a stint which saw the club plunge ₤120m into the red, without a single trophy to show for their profligacy. Not only that, the once-mighty giants of world football were twice humiliated in the Spanish Cup by Third Division opposition.
“Under Gaspart, the club saw its reputation badly damaged,� says Toni Frieros, chief writer of Sport, the Barcelona-based daily sports paper. “Barca have a proud history, but people stopped talking about them. Instead they were talking about Real Madrid, about Manchester United, about Juventus.�
For the (other) self styled Biggest Club in The World, a club for whom second place in the league had always been constituted failure, such loss of face hit hard. And nowhere was the decline better illustrated than last summer, when David Beckham dismissed their offer without even bothering to speak to the Catalans. “Four years ago Beckham would have come here because we were perceived to be the biggest,� claims lifelong fan Marc Caballe i Puig, “but nobody was surprised when he went to Madrid.�
The club had fallen far and fallen fast. In January 2000, Michel Platini called the Barca side containing Rivaldo and Figo “the most exciting team in Europe�. To outsiders, it was the epitome of football glamour. This was a club that routinely signed the world’s biggest starts – Cruyff, Maradona, Stoichkov, Laudrup, et al – while the arrivals of Terry Venables, Steve Archibald, Gary Lineker and Mark Hughes at the Nou Camp in the ‘80s stoked British interest in the club. Lineker went in his prime, arriving with the Golden Boot from the Mexico World Cup, and when Hughes left Old Trafford in 1986, no one doubted that he was moving on to bigger and better things. Others fell in love with Barca’s romanticism, with their proud defiance of General Franco’s brutal repression, with their refusal to sully their shirt with a commercial sponsor. Everything about Barca oozed class.
Yet three years after Platini’s purring proclamation, Barca sat two points above the relegation zone in Spain’s top division behind teams from towns whose entire population would fit into the Nou Camp. In that time, they dispensed of four managers and spent more on new talent than Real Madrid – but with the exception of Argentine striker Javier Saviola, these costly investments yielded only routine mediocrity.
Foreign fans may have retained romantic notions of Barca, but the mood among the club’s 104,000 socios (members) had deteriorated badly. On December 15 2002, a dreadful Barcelona were thrashed 3-0 at home by mid-table Sevilla, and the fans finally snapped.
Primal screams of “dimision, dimision� [“resign, resign�] joined the familiar white hankies of protest as the entire stadium, spitting venom, turned to face Gaspart, sitting in the president’s seat at the very front of the Nou Camp’s second tier. At the final whistle, Gaspart didn’t hide. As his fellow directors scurried away to the safety of the stadium’s inner sanctum, he stood motionless while 50,000 hanky-wielding cules cranked up the abuse.
For close to five minutes, Gaspart remained, silent and still, facing his tormentors. Though motionless, his face betrayed him. A broken man close to tears, Gaspart seemed to be taking one last, lingering look at the Nou Camp as of trying to male a final, defiant gesture of dignity. One by one the directors returned, encouraging him to leave, to escape the stinging lashes of the Nou Camp crowd. Each time he refused, pushing them away to face his humiliation. It was pure theatre.
“He was like a bad actor,� sneers Caballe. “Yes, he was respected as a good supporter, but I’m a good supporter and I would never run for president. By that time we had had enough, we wanted a complete change.�
What Gaspart did not know – what he could not know as he soaked up the torrent of abuse – was that he had inadvertently sowed the seeds for a remarkable revolution in the politics of this extraordinary club, a revolution which may yet prove its salvation.
To chart the incredible decline of FC Barcelona, it is necessary to go back over a decade to the club’s finest hour, their European Cup triumph of 1992. The president on the glorious spring evening in north London was Josep Nunez, a Basque who arrived in Catalunya in a pram and built up a personal fortune from construction. Nunez had money, but his humble upbringing had denied him the social status he craved. All that changed overnight in 1978, however, when he built up sufficient support to be elected into the position often regarded as the top job in Catalunya: president of Barcelona. His vice-president was Joan Gaspart.
In his first decade at the club, Nunez oversaw the rebuilding of the Nou Camp, creating the biggest stadium in Europe. In tandem, season-tickets sales rose from 77,000 to 107,000. But Nunez was impatient for success, hiring and firing nine coaches, only one of whom, Terry Venables, the longest-serving, was able to deliver a league title.
Under pressure to win trophies, in 1988 Nunez made the decision that would prove to be both masterstroke and his personal undoing: his next coach was Johan Cruyff, a Barca hero on the pitch back in the 1970s. Cruyff’s methods took two years to bed down but for once Nunez was patient and he was rewarded with a side that defined an era. Cruyff’s “Dream Team� is legendary in Spain. Welding home-grown talents like the cerebral Pep Guardiola to expensive imports such as Michael Laudrup, Hristo Stoichkov, Romario and Ronald Koeman, Cruyff’s team played some of the finest football the Nou Camp had ever witnessed on their way to four successive league titles and the club’s only European Cup in 1992. Were it not for the brilliance of AC Milan they might have dominated Europe too. “Cruyff had a simple philosophy for his attacking football,� recalls Marc Caballe. “He said that the ball, not the players, should do the running. The football was incredible. We didn’t have the best defence in the world, but we seemed to win every game. Nothing has compared since.�
But with the success came a clash of two giant egos. Both Cruyff and Nunez wanted to be seen as the central character in the success story and as they vied for pride of place in the history books, their spats, usually played through the media, became increasingly personal. Cruyff accused Nunez of being and autocrat. “He’s a builder,� the Dutchman sneered, “and as bricks don’t answer back, he’s not used to arguing.� In return, Nunez accused Barca’s most successful ever coach of accepting a commission when taking the club to friendly matches in Holland and lf leaking stories to the press for money.
Other Cruyff critics claimed that he was arrogant and nepotistic. The consensus was that his son Jordi was not of the same pedigree as previous strikers, and yet there he was in the first team – never mind that Jordi had established himself in the Holland team too. Amore curious affair was the promotion of Cruyff’s goalkeeper son-in-law Jesus Angoy to the first team squad at the age of 29 after playing with Barcelona’s nursery team. Whatever the finer points – and there were many – two camps developed among the media and fans, the Cruffistas and the Nunistas.
For Nunez, clearly unable to sack the most popular man in Catalunya, it was a waiting game; for Cruyff, yet more pressure to continue the success. After two potless seasons, Nunez gleefully delivered the bullet in 1996, replacing Cruyff with Bobby Robson. The genial Geordie had no idea what he was walking into. “I was completely unaware of the infighting when I arrived,� he admitted later. “Senor Nunez was trying to cling to his presidency in the face of growing hostility and Barcelona was a divided city with half of them on the side of the current regime and half backing Cruyff. I was the unwelcome guest.�
Robson lasted only a season and had reason to fell aggrieved about the way he was treated. Statistics showed him to be the most successful coach in Europe as he led the team to the European Cup Winners’ Cup, the Spanish Cup and domestic Super Cup, but not – crucially – the league. He was relegated to the role of a glorified (albeit extremely well paid) scout as Dutchman Louis van Gaal took control of first team affairs.
Robson had been Gaspart’s choice, the pair having links that went back 15 years. The Anglophile vice-president was from a well-respected Catalan family of hoteliers and had trained at London’s exclusive Connaught hotel. He initially offered Robson the Barcelona job as early as 1984, but the Englishman opted to stay at Ipswich and instead recommended Terry Venables, a virtual unknown outside of England. In later years, Gaspart would ring Robson and ask him opinion on potential acquisitions. Eventually, the two worked well together at the Nou Camp. When Robson identified as a transfer target PSV Eindhoven’s young Brazilian Ronaldo – a player he said was “as good as Pele� – Gaspart’s response to the then-huge $20m fee was typical of his attitude to finance. “He said that it was no use dying and leaving the money to someone else,� recalled Robson. One season later, Ronaldo’s sublime form made $20m look like a snip.
---To Be Continued---