The Barcelona Complex
Lionel Messi and the Making--and Unmaking--of the World's Greatest Soccer Club
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
With rare and unrivaled access, bestselling coauthor of Soccernomics and longtime Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper tells the story of how FC Barcelona became the most successful club in the world—and how that era is now ending
FC Barcelona is not just the world’s highest grossing sports club, it is simply one of the most influential organizations on the planet. At last count, it had approximately 214 million social media followers, more than any other sports club except Real Madrid CF—and by one earlier measure, more than all thirty-two NFL teams combined. It has more in common with multinational megacompanies like Netflix or small nation-states than it does with most soccer teams. No wonder its motto is “More than a club.” But it was not always so. In the past three decades, Barcelona went from a regional team to a global powerhouse, becoming a model of sustained excellence and beautiful soccer, and a consistent winner of championships. Simon Kuper unravels exactly how this transformation took place, paying special attention to the club’s two biggest stars, Johan Cruyff and Lionel Messi, who is arguably the greatest soccer player of all time. Messi joined Barça at age thirteen and, more than anyone, has been the engine and standard-bearer of Barcelona’s glory. But his era is coming to an end—and with it, a once-in-a-lifetime golden run. This book charts Barça’s rise and fall.
Like many world-beating organizations, FC Barcelona closely guards its secrets, granting few outsiders access to the Camp Nou, its legendary home stadium. But after decades of writing about the sport and the club, Kuper was given access to the inner sanctum and the people behind the scenes who strive daily to keep Barcelona at the top. Erudite, personal, and capturing all the latest upheavals, his portrait of this incredible institution goes beyond soccer to understand FC Barcelona as a unique social, cultural, and political phenomenon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Financial Times reporter Kuper (Soccernomics) translates his decades of coverage of the world's highest-grossing sports club into a fascinating record of its legacy. FC Barcelona, popularly known as Barca, was founded in 1899 by a Swiss immigrant accountant and became an essential fixture of Catalan society. At present, Kuper notes, there are about 150,000 dues-paying club members who elect Barca's directors and who view their seat assignments as treasured status symbols. Kuper describes how Barca went from a humble local team to an international phenomenon with "five times as many followers" on social-media as the L.A. Lakers after opening offices in Hong Kong and New York in the 2010s; he also reveals a dark side to the story, detailing how directors have crossed ethical lines by signing underage players, and how, in 2020, they hired a communications company to create fake online media accounts to defend the club's president. The team's triumphs are framed by the career of superstar player Lionel Messi, the "single most powerful person inside the club" and whose $80 million-a-year salary is the club's biggest financial charge. Though some information verges on too granular—such as Kuper's painstaking parsing of the team's nutritional regimen—the end result brilliantly captures the business of sports. This is likely to be the definitive account of the business side of the famous club.