Despite all the diving, the card-waving and general theatrics, I still love to watch Barcelona play football. If you love football, there is no way around it: Barcelona play the best, and most enjoyable to watch, football in Europe at the moment.
But there is something quite despicable about the Catalan club and this is mostly to do with the things that happen outside the football arena, at least initially. Barcelona have a tendency to buy players they do not really need, and will happily let them waste away on the bench or totally on the side-lines, without giving them a proper opportunity to proof themselves. I reckon a lot of this has to do with the way the club is organised from a managerial/governance point of view.
Every so many years, elections are being held in which the members of the club vote to choose their president. Since 2010, Sandro Rosell has been Barcelona’s president, and as the members of the club are all supporters – Rosell received 61% of the vote of a record turnout of 57000 members back in 2010 – one can only become president by promising lots of things.
And the best way to get members to vote for a candidate-president is by promising to buy players. With Barcelona’s fine first squad, and the continuous high-quality output from their youth development schemes, there is usually very little need for the sort of players Barcelona purchase. The likes of Hleb, Afellay, and now Alex Song, and to a certain extent the same goes for Fabregas, are the players who come to mind. But there are more players who were mainly bought for one key purpose: the president giving the members something back for having been voted in by them and/or keep them happy going forward.
And buying players from Arsenal, or from one of the Dutch top clubs – there is a strong historic link between Barcelona and Holland as many of you will know – is a sexy thing to do and which is likely to appease the fans.
Barcelona is not the only club who is guilty of this – indeed it can be argued that Arsenal did the same with the purchase of Park – but we seem to suffer disproportionately from it. Of course, Arsenal do not have to let them go, but a combination of a BoD who loves to balance the books and the gullibility of the players in question, has often led to the club letting key players go to the Catalans without much resistance.
Hleb has become a shadow of the promising player he was at Arsenal and the same could easily happen to Alex Song. He has been used sparingly by Barcelona this season and very often as a late substitute. I reckon he was bought mainly, and simply, because Barcelona could, and Rosell wanted to keep the members happy and on his side.
I hate it when that happens: Song is a fine player who is at a stage in his career when he has to play a lot in order to become better and better. He had a great season for us; finding the middle way between helping out defensively, and providing attacking impetus at the same time. I reckon we miss him even more than Van Judas this season, and he would have been once again one of our key players.
I would love to see him back in the squad and becoming our deepest laying DM. Some of you will say he is not disciplined enough for this, but I reckon that is nonsense. Last season, he was asked to help out creating opportunities up-front, and he did so with great verve. And I am sure if he was asked to fully concentrate on sitting back and protecting our defence, he will do so with full commitment and great quality. And it is also nice to know that sometimes he can produce a bit of magic when nobody is expecting it.
He was a player Arsenal could not afford to let go without replacing him properly. And if there is any chance to get him back for a decent price this summer, I hope Arsene will forget and forgive whatever it was that made him agree to sell the Cameroonian last summer, and bring him back to the home of football as soon as possible.
Let’s hope that his great talent does not get wasted in the same way as Hleb’s got wasted. Arsene if you can, please bring him back home: he belongs at Arsenal.
Written by: TotalArsenal.
Bergkampesque 