FC Barcelona - motivational video

It is much more important than that

"Football is not just a matter of life and death: it's much more important than
that" - Bill Shankly

Regular readers of this blog will know that I do not write about football very often, particularly about FC Barcelona. That is even though I am a paying member of the club and have been so for many years. The issue is that FC Barcelona is an anomaly, the freak result of a series of historical accidents and social circumstances that would have been impossible anywhere else. As much as I love the club and enjoy the recent superb performances of the football team (always on Sky Sports), the truth is that the club has a perverse influence in the relationship between Catalonia and Spain.

Again, this was explained very clearly by Victor Alexandre (cat, eng). Barça is “more than a club” because Catalonia is less of a nation that it could be.

Anyway, today I am not going to write about the social role the club plays in the conscience of the nation. Today is about Chelsea and that game.

If you are interested in football at all, you will know that Barça went through on Wednesday against Chelsea to play in this year’s Champions League final in Rome against Manchester United.

There has been a big stooshie in the English (and some Spanish) media about the alleged referee bias against Chelsea. Conspiracy theorists claim that UEFA did not want an English final and the referee obliged.

Well, I have had a lot of fund winding up Chelsea fans since the end of the game in the different English newspapers. Very amusing.

Here is a selection of comments posted:
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+ first leg: Henry's penalty and second yellow for Ballack
+ second leg: Dubious accidental handball by Piqué (hardly a clear-cut penalty) and sending off of Abidal for nothing.
I think the referee was poor indeed .

These other penalty claims only exist in the febrile imagination of some Chelsea fans or by some blinkered English journalists. The thing is that the English media wanted an English final (revenues are down this year) and it did not happen and hence we have to put up with the most stupid and ludicrous ref bashing ever. Chelsea's classless antics are bringing down (a lot of) the English media too.

I don't remember all this outrage at Collina's a few years back... remember the special one going to the ref's dressing room at half-time? That did word, didn't it?
Chelsea is the football equivalent of fast food: cheap nasty and tasteless.

Get over it folks: Chelsea are out and most people in the football world are happy about it.
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Brilliant: Drogba is so good at cheating that he even fooled his own manager!
Chelsea is proof that money does not buy titles, let alone class.
Against the thuggery and diving of Chelsea, the values of FC Barcelona.
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Chelsea is the football equivalent of fast food: cheap, nasty and tasteless.
Justice was done and karma does exist.
Remember the shocking refererring of Collina?Or even the Henry penalty denied last week or the blatant second yellow card for Ballack? And what about Ballacks handling of the ball early in the game before Chelsea's goal?
Well, what goes around comes around boys. Get over it.
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The vitriol coming back was quite remarkable. Poor souls.

But even after the debatable referering, football values and styles of the two clubs, which I admit are debatable as there is no shame in being a solid defensive unit (as long as your players do not constantly cheat and dive when they go forward); even after the different reactions over the two legs with regards to refereeing decisions, even after all that, there remains a fact:
On a moral and ethical basis, Chelsea CF are well, well below FC Barcelona.

Who are Chelsea? Chelsea is a London club, infamous for its minority of neonazi, BNP support. OK everybody has skeletons in the closet.

Chelsea is a club that should have gone down a few divisions, drowned by debt, until a Russian billionaire bought it for a token sum a few years ago.
And this man, in London to escape Putin’s attentions, has poured million and millions into this football club. And still they have players that are nothing more than thugs and cheating divers. And play shite, really shite football. And with their antics and behaviour, keep bringing the game into disrepute.

I hope UEFA takes some action against these bunch of overpaid whining, cheating, diving thugs.

Chelsea is a club whose ethos and whose modus operandi, on and off the pitch, is the antithesis of the values of FC Barcelona.

The sad thing here is that there must be, surely, some Chelsea fans out there hugely embarrassed about what has become of their club. The playground for Russian mafiosos, thuggish footballers and pathetic football. The day FC Barcelona becomes an plc or something similar and we become a “business”, I will give up my membership.

Fallacy No 3: Ciudadanos

If you follow Catalan/Spanish politics, you will remember the set up of a political party named Ciudadanos/Ciutadans. On the 2006 elections, the party won 3 seats in the Catalan parliament in the province of Barcelona, getting just about 3.5% of the vote.

This party, and its supporters in the media, claimed at the time that this party was not bothered by matters of national identity and culture, but by things that matter to people: unemployment, energy prices, inflation, access to property, etc. In theory, a good proposition, isn’t it?

Well, if only. Those of us without blinkers in our eyes knew full well that this was a very good PR exercise encouraged by the most rabid nationalist outlets within the Spanish media, El Mundo and COPE, who took over from where El País, the original inventor of this farcical party, started.

The truth is that Ciudadanos is a party exclusively defined by its stance on national identity issues and by its policy of undermining the already precarious status of Catalan-language, and to threaten social cohesion in our cities and towns.

Ciudadanos has always been about being a Spanish nationalist, in the open, and confronting anyone or anybody who dared to pursue a policy of emancipation outwith a Spanish framework, at any level, for Catalonia.

The latest example of the Ciudadanos non-identitarian fallacy is their farcical intervention a few days ago. Instead of challenging the government on the issues that matter, as they told everyone they would, they brought to the attention of the Catalan parliament a football tournament:

http://www.avui.cat/article/mon_politica/34765/rivera/porta/una/samarreta/la/seleccio/espanyola/parlament.html

And that is the problem with Ciudadanos. Every one of their interventions are designed to undermine and attack a Catalan initiative in any given area, and at the same time use another Spanish-wide initiative as an example to follow.

Their politics of identity is accurately reflected in their website, which uses Catalan for headings and links, but all significant contents, including their key policy documents, are only available in Spanish. For Ciudadanos, Catalan, the language of Catalonia, is just a nuisance and something to put up with rather than protect and cherish.

If Ciudadanos were a party without an identity agenda, surely all their policy documents and party website would be available in both languages? Well, think again.

So these are the people who were elected on the basis of the new politics of non-nationalism: a bunch of resentful Spanish nationalists making a point about a football tournament.

Fallacy No 1: Leave politics out of sport

The latest fallacy that has been exposed has been the explosion of Spanish nationalism following Spain’s victory in the Euro Championships. We have witnessed an orgy of flag-waving, appeals to national unity and demonstrations of emotional attachment to the (Spanish) homeland.

But, er wait a minute. I thought that politics should be left out of sport, as the Spanish media always reminds us whenever Catalan people demand their national teams be allowed to play in international competitions.

Alas, not so when the Spanish team wins a tournament. Then, mixing politics and sport, for the greater cause of Spanish unity and to undermine the movement for Catalan independence is encouraged. This latest show of Spanish nationalism has been driven and executed by the same Spanish media that ticks off Catalan people for allegedly mixing politics and sport.

What we have witnessed these days is the comeback of a more confident display of Spanish nationalism. Under perceived threat by the “peripheral” nationalisms of Catalonia and the Basque Country, Spanish people have come out and showed their national allegiance in a show of patriotic fervour not since the Franco days.

And the usual suspects, the apologetics for Spanish Nationalism, the neo-Francoist converted to “democracy” (democracy in their own terms only) have come out praising this show of Spanish fervour. One of them even managed to get an opinion article published in The Guardian.

Victor de la Serna, editor of the paper that has done the most to attach social cohesion in Catalonia, the paper that spearheaded a lunatic and poisonous conspiracy theory about the train bombs in Madrid, in an article riddled with outright lies and blatant manipulation, manages to get his hate-message to an international audience. Fortunately, Guardian readers know better and the comments left in the page show that an educated international audience does not swallow the lies of the Spanish media.

Urgent: tickets needed for Celtic - Barça game

Necessito urgentment una entrada per al partit de demá entre el Celtic i el Barça. Jo vaig aconseguir una a través del club, peró no vull anar al partit sense la meva xicota!

Si algú té previst de venir a Glasgow a veure el partit i pot aconseguir-me una entrada, li agrairia eternament! Pintes a dojo garantitzades!

Salut i Força Barça!!
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Actualització divendres 22 Marc: voldria donar les gràcies a en Ferran, a qui vaig tenir la gran sort de trobar al Sports Bar a Sauchiehall St a Glasgow.
Quan torni a Barcelona de vacances penso trucar-te per pagar-te la ronda que vaig prometre.

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Well, I only got one ticket from the club for the Celtic – Barça game on Wednesday 20 February. Apparently security will be tight for this game.

I urgently need another ticket for my gorgeous girlfriend!

Whoever provides a ticket will have a generous supply of pints before and after the game in Glasgow’s finest drinking dens.

Leave a comment with your email address and I will get in contact, or send me an email.