November 29, 2010. The rain was pelting the delirious masses inside the Camp Nou. They hardly noticed. On the turf below, Barcelona had just started tearing Real Madrid apart. An ocean away, in Kingston, Ont., I was sitting in class at Queen’s University, wishing I was in front of a TV. Five minutes into the game, my phone exploded with news of Barca’s opening goal—reason enough to slam my books shut, rush out of my South African history seminar and race to my friend’s living room on Beverley Street, the gathering spot for a bunch of soccer nuts who had long ago fallen under the Blaugrana’s spell. I stumbled in just in time to watch Barca string together more than 20 consecutive passes en route to a second goal. We sat glued to the screen, peeling ourselves away only to exchange wide-eyed looks of delight. This was brilliance. Artistry. Football in its purest form. Not even the 5–0 score could do it justice. For 90 minutes, the Barca’s “tiki-taka” style was in full flow: An army of little men zipping around the turf, pinging passes back and forth through their opponents at a speed too fast for onlookers to even process. Not so much an all-out assault as an incisive and calculated attack, a grinning cat toying with its prey.
This was the Barcelona credo at its apex. Facing a previously unbeaten and dangerous counterattacking Real Madrid side, Barca churned out the highest brand of their fluid, possession-based football. Up against a starting XI bought for $375 million, the Catalans fielded eight homegrown players schooled at La Masia, the club’s famous academy. Before the final whistle had even sounded, pundits around the world were calling it the single greatest team performance in history. And to think I almost missed it.
That rainy night at the Camp Nou was the zenith of a magical era that’s now come full circle. It’s not like Barca was always the greatest. In May 2008, the team was rotting. The squad was unfit, egos ruled the dressing room and manager Frank Rijkaard had lost his players. So in came Pep Guardiola, who had arrived at La Masia in 1984 as a 13-year-old and had gone on to become a central figure on the Barca dream team that won four successive league titles and one Champions League trophy in the early 1990s under Johan Cryuff and Carles Rexach, the duo who imprinted their philosophy of passing-based play and youth development into the club’s DNA. Guardiola had no top-level managerial experience, which worried some of the Catalan faithful. His first moves were to declare Brazilian-trained stars Ronaldinho and Deco—the heartbeat of the 2006 Champions League-winning side—as surplus to requirements and then reach into La Masia to replace them. In keeping with club philosophy, Barca looked within itself to replenish greatness. The skeptics deriding Guardiola’s appointment were silenced with a 6-1 thrashing of Sporting Gijon, and the Blaugrana were off to a canter. On May 2, 2009, they travelled to meet their old enemies Real Madrid at the Bernabeu for a potential title-decider. Guardiola’s men scored for fun, running out 6–2 winners and wrapping up the La Liga title. Eleven days later, they were Spanish Cup champions. And two weeks after that, I was at the Main Event Sports Bar & Grill in Toronto, home of the Manchester United Supporters Club of Canada, to watch Barcelona defeat United 2–0 in the Champions League final. It was a telling scene: Most times United loses, the Main Event swells with rage. But this time, only silence—a tacit acceptance of how the English champions had just been beaten by something special.
It was an exceptional season, the perfect start to a five-year period that brought 14 trophies, including two Champions League titles and two Club World Cups. But it wasn’t about the championships so much as how they were earned: by carving apart world-class opponents with their own game of keep-away, leaving an enraptured world laughing, sometimes crying, in disbelief. They redefined the game: prettier than Gretzky’s Oilers, more ruthless than Brady’s Patriots, fiercer defenders than the ’89 Pistons. And they had Lionel Messi, that little genius, perhaps the greatest to ever play the game. Even in defeat, Guardiola’s men were never truly “beaten”—whether or not the scoreboard reflected it, Barcelona was always the superior team.
But every hero needs a villain. A bad guy, existing in part to reinforce the good guy’s sense of purpose. For Guardiola’s Barcelona, that man was Jose Mourinho. He cut his managerial teeth as an assistant at the Camp Nou from 1996 to 2000 before going on to become one of the most charismatic and successful managers in the world. In 2008, with Rijkaard set for departure, an older, cockier and more highly rated Mourinho came calling for the job. Barca rejected him. Furious, “The Special One” set about fashioning himself into the club’s adversary. Two years later, during the 2010 Champions League semifinal, he brought an Inter Milan squad to the Camp Nou for the second leg with a 3–1 lead and knocked Barca out by having his players set up camp in front of their own goal. That summer, Mourinho took control at Real Madrid, solidifying his status as Barca’s arch-nemesis. Immediately, El Clasico—the name given to any clash between Barca and Real—reclaimed its spot as the world’s “can’t-miss” match.
And Barcelona consistently delivered. If that 5–0 stomping was the peak, a close second came during the third game of an epic four Clasicos in 18 days during the spring of 2011, when, after two heated matches in domestic competitions, Barca stylishly overcame Mourinho’s brutish defensive tactics to brush past Real and reach the Champions League final. It was, once again, vintage Barcelona. A team hell-bent not just on winning, but winning the right way. A team with a genuine capacity to inspire, with an unwavering dedication to a philosophy valuing first touch, technique and flowing movement over size, power and direct play. A group of players sharing a steely confidence that, on their day, they were simply better than their opponents. And when those men clicked as only they knew how, when they began passing their opponents to death, the whole world—from Beirut to Beverley Street—beamed down upon the Camp Nou.
April 23, 2013. Bayern Munich 4, Barcelona 0. I had to watch the game twice to believe the result. It was the end of an era, a passing of the torch, a seismic transfer of power from Catalonia to Bavaria. Then, a week later, during the second leg of the Champions League semifinal at the Camp Nou: Bayern Munich 3, Barcelona 0. The Germans had been spectacular, combining a slick passing game and an explosive attack with fierce defensive organization, thwarting Andres Iniesta and Xavi’s attempts to dictate the rhythm of the match. But Barcelona had been limp: uninspired in attack, calamitous in defence, debilitated by a half-fit Messi, barely a shadow of the team that had spent much of a decade ruling the soccer world.
The nightmare in Munich didn’t come from nothing. The first signs that Barca’s absolute supremacy might not last forever surfaced when Guardiola walked away in May 2012, replaced by his right-hand man, Tito Vilanova. And though Barca still reached great heights this season, cruising to the Spanish title, they displayed uncharacteristic hints of mortality. They suffered Champions League defeats in Glasgow and Milan, and barely slipped past Paris Saint-Germain in the quarterfinal after consecutive draws. And, worst of all, the Blaugrana had been outplayed in consecutive losses to Mourinho’s Madrid; made to look slow in possession and cumbersome in defence, lacking any cutting edge in attack. Too often their passing game laboured. Too often they slumped through games while relying on Messi’s brilliance to steal wins. Opponents were figuring Barcelona out, learning how to survive their death-by-a-thousand-passes style. Though still top of the table in Spain, the Catalans increasingly struggled to break down world-class opponents with well-organized defences, looking vulnerable against pacey opposition.
Those refusing to accept Barca’s decline do have a few points to push: Vilanova spent much of the season receiving cancer treatment in New York. Messi missed important games through injury, and core players like Xavi and the oft-injured Carles Puyol are getting older. But those aren’t so much excuses as examples of just how hard it is to be the best team in the world.
Barcelona no longer stands alone as soccer’s standard bearer; the world is catching up. Make no mistake, they’re still Spanish champions and European semifinalists, they can still field the world’s best player, and with Brazilian wonder boy Neymar likely arriving this summer, they’ll remain one of the best teams in the world. But they won’t reach the same heights as that magical team of Pep Guardiola’s, no matter how many trophies they win. All good things come to an end. This was wonderful while it lasted. I’m just glad I was around to enjoy it.
