How Barcelona's Cathedral Crumbled

And why it can happen to your club, too.

“It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground.”

— Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, XVIII

Johan Cruyff liked to call it the entorno, an innocuous Catalan word for “environment.” The environment around FC Barcelona, though, is anything but innocuous. When Cruyff talked about the entorno he meant the fans who stake out the president’s house, the politicians always meddling in soccer, the tabloids and radio stations — loyalist or Madridista — that exist to keep fans riled up about the club, and the backbiting directors, staffers, entourages, and hangers-on who keep them stocked with rumors for maximum riling.

When Cruyff managed Barça in the nineties, he complained that the entorno kept him from winning more trophies. After he was sacked, he was consumed by it, swallowed up in the neverending drama. The most important figure in the history of the club, the brilliant player and visionary coach whom Pep Guardiola credited with building Barcelona’s “cathedral of football,” became its loudest critic, haunting his church from the bell tower. In his new book, The Barcelona Complex, Simon Kuper calls this Cruyff “a kind of permanent offstage noise.”

Kuper didn’t set out to chronicle the fall of Barcelona. His story opens in 1992, when as a 22-year-old he spent nights in a hostel and days hounding Camp Nou press officers for a newspaper interview with the man he calls “The Architect.” By the time he finally started on a book about Barça, a few years after Cruyff's death in 2016, Kuper thought he would document an institution that had enjoyed a decade of extraordinary success. But even as he interviewed everyone at the club who would talk to him about the Barcelona way, it was hard not to notice that the cathedral was crumbling around them. “It felt a bit like writing a book about Rome in AD 400,” Kuper writes, “with the barbarians already inside the gates.”

Anyone with a pulse and a passing interest in soccer can tell you the basics. From about 2008 to 2017, Barcelona was more or less the best club in the world, playing a sparkling Cruyffian short-passing style that Pep Guardiola updated for the modern game. But Guardiola got burned out, the iconic midfielders Xavi and Andrés Iniesta aged out, and the star who was supposed to help carry the team into a new era, Neymar, got bought out by Paris Saint-Germain in 2017. Ever since it’s been decline and fall: year after year of poor squad management, Champions League collapse after Champions League collapse. Lionel Messi packing for Paris last month felt like Constantine decamping to Byzantium, the end of Barcelona’s run at the center of the soccer world. As one club exec told Kuper, “After Messi you see the desert, you see darkness.”

Call me a sucker for grand historical narratives, but I wanted to know if there was some overarching cause that could explain all the self-destruction. “I think there was an inevitability about it,” Kuper told me over Zoom last week. “I think that when you’re number one you get lazy, and everyone else copies you.” One way to think about Barcelona is as a B-school parable about a complacent market leader and innovative competitors. That’s a story Kuper, a longtime Financial Times columnist, is equipped to tell. “It’s not just Barcelona. Soccer is not the cleverest industry,” he said. “In Soccernomics, Stefan Szymanski and I wrote that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the soccer business.”

As well documented as the club’s transfer business blunders have been, The Barcelona Complex still manages to round up embarrassing details that were new to me. In the weeks after Neymar left for PSG, Barcelona’s board conducted a panicked search for a new star but left Kylian Mbappé’s agent on read (he later got a WhatsApp message explaining that “as you see, neither the coaches nor the Presi wanted him”). Barça was so set on signing Ousmane Dembélé that when Dortmund’s representatives announced they had a plane to catch and no time to negotiate, president Josep Bartomeu immediately doubled his bid to around $175 million — more than what Mbappé would have cost. The official rationale was that “Mbappé plays for himself and Dembélé plays for the team.”

We know how that turned out. Mbappé has not only played almost twice as many minutes at PSG as Dembélé at Barça, he’s posted a higher rate of assists, expected assists, and goal-creating actions per 90' (while oh by the way scoring 85 more goals). We’ll get to see this season what might have been between Mbappé and Messi, while the injury-plagued Dembélé limps through the last year of a contract Barcelona is eager to get off its books.

Young players’ development is hard to predict, but if anyone had the tools to do it it was Barcelona, whose analytics and sports science teams have published leading research on injury forecasting and tactical performance. Whether the club’s decisionmakers use those tools is less clear. “I was present at this conference where Ian Graham, who’s the head of research at Liverpool, teases Barcelona. He says, ‘Look, the main advantage you can get from data analytics is who you sign,’” Kuper said. “Because you can’t really tell the best players much. You can’t tell Busquets or Messi or Mo Salah how to play football — they already know that better than you can tell them. What you can do is what Liverpool did: you can sign Mo Salah rather than a more expensive, less good player. Liverpool have done that very well, so with a relatively small budget they win the English league, they win the Champions League. And Ian Graham is essentially saying to Barcelona, ‘You’re a bigger club with more money, why aren’t you doing this?’”

Transfer fees like Dembélé’s are only a fraction of a club’s roster spending. Kuper spends more time on Barcelona’s bloated wage bill, which he frames as a Messi problem. Messi’s dad, who’s also his agent, used to come to the club almost every year threatening to walk if Leo didn’t get a raise. The strategy worked so well that by the time Messi’s contract was leaked last season, Bayern Munich CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge took one look at the published salary and burst out laughing. Paying the GOAT might have been one thing — even setting soccer aside, it’s hard to overstate Messi’s impact on revenues — but each raise got teammates grumbling that they deserved more money, too. Barcelona couldn’t say no. “In 2018, they have $1 billion in revenues, which is more than any sports club in history. It’s more than the Dallas Cowboys, the New York Yankees,” Kuper told me. “You have all this money, why not pay it out to your players? After all, a soccer club is all about talent.”

We found out why not this summer, when club president Joan Laporta held a press conference to explain that keeping Messi would take the club’s wages-to-revenue ratio to 110%, miles above UEFA’s recommended maximum of 70%. Barcelona claimed they’d be willing to re-sign him anyway if not for “financial and structural obstacles (Spanish La Liga regulations),” but there’s plenty to suggest the club had already made a choice. “Laporta must have known, ‘We don’t have any money. Sooner or later we’re going to hit the wall,’” said Kuper, who casts Laporta as a charismatic Bill Clinton type. “But he’s not the kind of guy who can break bad news to the fans and say, ‘Really the way to move forward now — Messi has been the best player in history, for 15 years we’ve built our club around him, now it’s time for him to go.’”

The unforeseeable part of the wages-to-revenue logjam was in the denominator, where the pandemic tanked revenues and plunged clubs around the world into financial crises. As a tourist city, Barcelona suffered more than most. “At some games about 30,000 spectators are tourists who bought tickets from club members at inflated prices, and who also then go to the club megastore and club museum. So the end of tourism hits Barcelona much harder than it hits Manchester United or Real Madrid,” Kuper told me.

“So the pandemic, transfer fee inflation, and overpaying on salaries — those three things together add up to a debt of about $1.5 billion.”

Could any of this have been avoided? Paying players to keep a winning squad intact doesn’t seem like the worst idea, and transfers can be hit-or-miss for even the smartest clubs. Even though he devotes plenty of pages to the education Barça’s academy offers kids, Kuper’s skeptical that the club might have saved money by leaning on La Masia. “When Barcelona fans say, ‘All they need to do is go back to the Masia, go back to the academy, do what made them great in the past,’ I think, ‘Well, do you really think that the next generation from the Masia is going to produce seven world champions and the greatest player in the world?’” he said. “Even if Barcelona had given a lot more space to players from the youth academy, as they probably should have done, I don’t really see that they would have a Masia-based team now.”

Barcelona didn’t make one big mistake, it made a lot of small ones, and the problems with its decisionmaking are just cartoon versions of what you’ll find at practically every club. Any winning team might lose its edge as competitors copy ideas and poach staff, but only Barcelona was successful enough for Manchester City to try to recreate it wholesale under Ferran Soriano, Txiki Begiristain, and Pep Guardiola. Plenty of great clubs fall in love with their own mythology and appoint underqualified ex-players to key roles, but Barcelona seems to have missed especially badly when Bartomeu replaced the sporting director Andoni Zubizarreta with Eric Abidal in 2015. Any club with a hefty enough transfer budget might occasionally make a mistake on the scale of Ousmane Dembélé, Philippe Coutinho, or Antoine Griezmann, but it’s nearly unheard of to whiff on three marquee transfers in two years. The media frenzy putting pressure on these decisions is a fact of life at every giant club, but Barcelona is the only real democracy among them, and a fundamentally local one even now.

“The president is born in the town, typically he’s going to die in the town,” Kuper said. “He wants to make decisions, buy players, keep players that will keep his children happy, the waiters at the local café, his business partners, the people he went to school with, the people he runs into on the street.” Those people aren’t just his neighbors, they’re also voting socis who keep him in the city's highest-profile job. The arrangement is a far cry from clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool, whose management is top-down and whose American billionaire owners are an ocean away from local pressure campaigns. In a way, the entorno that sometimes feels like it’s holding Barcelona back is also the club’s most authentic tie to its community and to an older, more traditional idea of what it means to be a soccer club.

One question The Barcelona Complex can’t avoid is whether Barça is still més que un club. Before it was a smarmy marketing slogan, “more than a club” was a coded reference to Catalan nationalism; later it became a byword “for Cruyffian football, for homegrown players, and for a general sense of dignity and valors (‘values’), exemplified by Barça’s charitable foundation and by President Joan Laporta’s decision in 2006 to put UNICEF on the team shirt rather than a sponsor’s name,” Kuper writes. Barça at its best was intensely local, it played a distinctive style of soccer, and it stood in at least symbolic opposition to the commercialism of the modern game. In short: it wasn’t Real Madrid.

Times have changed. Barcelona’s public alliance with Florentino Pérez’s Super League debacle made it pretty clear where the club stands on commercialism these days. The shirt, now sponsored, does still have UNICEF on it — on the part that literally covers your ass. The club’s Catalan identity becomes a little more diluted each year as the Camp Nou fills up with global fans like me whom Barça has worked hard to court. Homegrown players have been passed over for years in favor of high profile signings to keep those fans interested, although the current budget crisis may make room for new kids to get their shot. The only thing left is the soccer, and even that needs another update for a squad whose last members of the old guard are on their way out and a game that has already thoroughly absorbed Guardiola’s version of Cruyff’s ideas.

“Johan Cruyff, who’s one of the two or three key figures of the book, would find this a fascinating moment: you have to change, you have to learn now,” Kuper said, referring to the soccer, the business, the whole complex idea of Barça. He ended on an optimistic note that may or may not be convincing. “I see impulses of that starting to happen at Barcelona. They’re starting to think again.” ❧

Further reading:

• Simon Kuper, The Barcelona Complex (Penguin, 2021)

Image: Oriol Maspons, Boy and Table Football