The corporate tentacles of Barcelonaism fuel the idea that Real Madrid is sabotaging Barça’s signing policy. The origin of this half-truth is the signing of Arda Güler, the Turkish prodigy who already strengthens the Madrid squad. It is claimed that when Barça detects talent in some corner of the planet and begins to negotiate, Madrid interferes to raise the price of the operation and, above all, to reward the representative with a good bonus. The theory has enough precedent to be defended in court, but it has a problem: this is exactly what Barça did to sign Neymar.
The signing of Güler once again shows how easily new figures emerge backed by mind-blowing game summaries. They are acts of faith that take us back to a few acts of bad faith in the past. Marketing inertia is devastating. As much as the football expectation, or that the poor experts in international football, who are a type of drawing up lists of possible talents, discover that they did not know the hottest names on the market.
Now that Barça has been able to sign Vitor Roque (for figures that go against the financial health of the club), we can choose two hypotheses. First: that Roque wanted to come and puts his wish before any other consideration. Second: that we were able to sign him because Madrid didn’t want him. Interpreting market motivations is as foolhardy as trying to make lists of possible acts of faith. What we do have the right to exploit is the pride of sympathizing with players who, despite the club’s situation, choose to come to Barça. We can also relativize its interest and attribute it to the charm of the city (watch your watch, Gündogan!).
But I like that there are still players with a name and a career who love being faithful to a childhood fantasy more than just counting the pasta from Arabia. Until relatively recently, the merit of these loyalties was relative because Barça paid well above the market average. Most of the club’s ills come from this cost overrun. The other evils have to do with emergencies that continue to move in a territory of uncertainty and the opaque transparency in which the directive’s communication has settled. The most recent case of alarming news has to do with the demand for seats at the Lluís Companys Stadium. They will not reach 17,000, and those of us who still believe that when the offer was opened to non-subscribing members the demand would soar, we were wrong again. Surely the 17,000 will know how to create a dignified and contagious entertainment atmosphere. In fact, this must have been the real proportion of active cheerleaders at the Camp Nou for years. The atmosphere has changed because the contagion does not occur between culers of reconsecrated pedigree, but through outsourced culers who take advantage of their status as tourists to satisfy the long-cherished desire to visit Camp Nou. In the end, everything ends up depending on a rare symbiosis between footballers (home or away) who want to come and militant fans who aspire not to be treated as customers squeezed to the last drop of credit card.
