Existential Damage

 

Once again, a club has been hijacked by the actions of a fan or group of fans and forced to pay, in this case 1,500 Euros to a fan in Napoli, who was “damaged” by banners in a Napol v Inter Milan match at the Guiseppe Meazza Stadium in Milan last October. The banners in question were a response to a work stoppage organized by the Camorra-run, garbage collectors who were in disagreement with landfill operators and the government, causing a build-up of refuse in the streets of Napoli. They mentioned Naples as the “sewer of Italy”, another one that called residents “cholera sufferers” and others that said, “Neapolitans have got tuberculosis”. The anonymous fan was left “indignant and deeply hurt” and sued the club for “existential damage” with the verdict coming in his favor this week despite the clubs arguing that the courts had no jjurisdiction. The club and the supporters had already been sited by the league, but the Italian courts had the ultimate say.

 

I won’t get into much of a value judgment on what was said. The banners were pretty idiotic and petty. It’s typical of the usual North/South animosities that have been in place and certainly not the first salvo in such a highly charged rivalry; one that has decades of history between the two clubs and the two groups of supporters. I also won’t go into the legalities, as the details of Italian law and how it differs from U.S. law is ultimately beyond me, and other countries do have different definitions of personal freedom, but in my opinion, “what sort of damage exactly was done?” Was this an isolated incident? Was this any different from the scores of other times that Northern fans have reaped scorn at Southerners in the past? Lastly, will it ultimately correct the behavior in question?

 

I don’t think so really. I’m all for correcting past wrongs and solving this ethnic problem but this is not the

time nor the case to do that with. This smacks of one opportunistic fan sticking it to the establishment and while I usually side with guys like him in these cases, I just can’t get by the fact that he was left with “existential damages” from reading a series of banners.

How Ronaldinho Gets His Groove Back

Well it is official. Ronaldinho has found a new how with a few less dollar signs.

 

I think this is a very good move for Ronaldinho and has the opportunity to be a great move for Milan.

 

Let’s start with the player. Ronaldinho has not set the world on fire for quit some time now. First things first, lets get him back in shape. Milan love talking about the Milan Labs, now lets work on him. Have him get back into playing shape and ready for the season. We all know Ronaldinho possesses the skills to dazzle millions. But will he change his recent ways in Milan? I think he will. Yes there are still a huge party environment in Milan but I think for at least the mean time he will be good and get back on track by training and watching the weight. How long that lasts well, I hope until the day his contract runs out.

 

Let’s go over to the club. Milan know that his name will sell and sell a lot. He will sell even more for the team if they are performing well on the pitch. Which takes me to my next point, as long as Milan do well on the pitch, we really can’t complain.

 

I am looking forward to this season beginning and I am hopeful we will see Ronaldinho back at his best entertaining millions and winning games for Milan.

Football Slavery? I don’t think so.

‘I think in football there’s too much modern slavery in transferring players or buying players here and there, and putting them somewhere,’ Sepp Blatter.

 

‘I agree with the comments of the president of FIFA. What he said is right,’ he told Portuguese channel TVI. Cristiano Ronaldo.

 

Cristiano Ronaldo believes he is being treated like a slave? Last time I checked slaves didn’t get paid. I am appalled anyone would make such a statement, not surprising it comes from Blatter. That is utterly ridiculous and extremely offensive. You might want to check yourself Cristiano, you get paid to do a job, no one holds a gun to your head or chains you to a post. Last time I checked you get paid a nice penny for your job and are under contract which apparently means nothing to you, FIFA or UEFA.

 

Yes, Sepp Blatter first made the analogy but I think it is absolutely ridiculous for the statement in the first place and then for the comment by Ronaldo agreeing with him. I’m sick of the run around about is he going is he not. If Manchester United are smart they will sell Ronaldo to Real Madrid and soon. Get as much as they can for him and stop this circus of crap coming out of everyone’s mouth.

 

Blatter quote taken from http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=554472&sec=england&cc=5901

 

Ronaldo quote taken from http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=554655&sec=england&cc=5901

Soccer Blows

I was going over some old posts that I wrote a couple of years back, and I think it’s a good piece. It was written before Forza Futbol started so it might be a little rough, but I wanted to clue you our fine reader that we’ve been thinking critically about the sport for a very long time. Plus, you read this sort of article anyway, especially during a World Cup year so consider this two years ahead of schedule in the grand scheme of things. Enjoy.

So, the  7/7/06 issue of USA Today has another Soccer hater article up and  the  stupidity continues. Have a read  and see what you think. Check it out here.
So, the main reasons that they give are:
1)Lack of scoring. Not only is this insipid but just ignorant. Baseball has less action, less of a build up for action, and more breaks between the action. Ah, but the Baseball purists say that the game is about more than scoring and it is about the individual matchups and the build-up for dramatic moments. Soccer has that and more. There is nothing more dramatic than a soccer goal when it comes because it can happen at anytime.

2)Our best athletes gravitate to other sports: frankly, my interests aren’t just about this country and I couldn’t care less that Reggie Bush or Lebron James don’t play soccer. I admire great athletes from anywhere. Frankly, I see more to admire from Thierry Henry, Zinedine Zidane or Lionel Messi than I ever did when I was following the overpaid idiots that play Baseball or Basketball.

3)It gets lost in the “shuffle” of “major” sports. How major are these other sports? Other than Basketball which has embraced globalization, how “major” are American football or Baseball in the grand scheme of things. In the end, American Football=Australian Rules Football=Gaelic Football, as a passionately followed regional sport. Baseball? Don’t be ridiculous. The game doesn’t need the USA. It is a major sport, if not THE major sport, and until we learn it and understand it, we wll never understand the world around us.

4)It was not created in the USA: This was one of the most ridiculous reasons. I realize that sports in this country reinforce the idea of American individuality, that it is somehow different or better than other countries, but please, how arrogant do you have to be to ignore soccer because a Brit invented it? Was baseball not a form of rounders or cricket? Is American football not derived from rugby? Was basketball not created from soccer so that youngsters could play indoor during frozen Indiana winters? Please, anyone with any knowledge of history knows that no game is created from a vacuum.

5)The use of feet instead of hands. Feet-only sports have been around since the dawn of time. God, isn’t hackey-sack the favorite sport of white dopeheads? Plus, every sport has some ingrained rule that limits participation. Why can’t you hold in American Football? Why can’t you kick the ball in Basketball? Why are substitutions limited  in Baseball? Anyway, there is more skill in artistry in Zidane’s left foot than there is in Barry Bond’s juiced-up right arm.

6)Ties go against the American idea of competition. Easy, Football allowed ties up into the 1980’s. Hockey thrived with it. Some would say that Baseball in it’s incessant search for the winning run even to exhaustion lessens the sport. Soccer allows ties not because it teaches the student of the game some stupidly liberal idea that there are no winners or losers in life, but that winning a season is more important than a single individual match and that a great team must sometimes take a draw to succeed in the end.

7)Finally, that it is too “middle-class” to penetrate US society. It is right that white liberals sometimes use the supposed safety of the suburbs to create soccer-mom enclaves where they use the sport more like a window treatment to decorate their parks, but there is and has always been a fraction of American society that is wholely ignored that uses the sport as an escape from the trials of urban life. Go to Griffith park, or Echo Park or Hancock Park in Los Angeles and see that the sport is not a middle-class knick-knack but a vital part of the immigrant backdrop.

Media Value

Today’s topic of the week is this intangible thing we call player value. Now, I’m not talking about the value that a young Paolo Maldini brought to pitch, orchestrating the great Milan defense under Arrigo Sacchi, or even what Lionel Messi clearly brings to the Barcelona attack. I’m talking about intangibles. Oh, and not the unquantifiable, pitch related abilities of leadership, heart, “quality”, even vision which isn’t necessarily correctable by laser surgery. I’m talking about the real reason behind the big-name transfers: “Media Value”.

Now, certainly I didn’t invent the term. My friend Elisa sent me this article from the University of Navarra in Spain. They published a paper on “Media Value in Football“. It’s a pretty vague term as they describe it, calling it the value “of sportsmen(’s) prestige, public attraction and mass media exposure.” What I call it is the Beckham factor.

Now, I’m not denigrating the guy’s skill on the pitch, certainly not in his youth when what little pace he had was still available to him in spurts, but any other English player faced with the specter of his diminishing skills would have been forced to retire or fall back to the level of playing for Wigan, Charlton or Derby. I would have said Liverpool but that would be mean.

Instead, because of his unparalleled media footprint, he has been able to extend his playing career because of his worth as a global marketing brand. Fiorentino Perez knew it, so did half the companies he brought in to finance his Galacticos. It’s process that a club has to follow in the new scheme of global football. A club like Real Madrid essentially became the biggest club on Earth in the 1990’s because of the Galactico’s. In John Carlin’s book, White Angels; Beckham, Real Madrid & The New Football, the author tells of the impact that Beckham had irrespective of playing for the club. Companies that would never have invested in the sport were brought in because of his marketing appeal. It’s no wonder, that despite his advancing age, a club in a fledgling league like MLS has taken him in with the same expectations.

What now though? Manchester United have Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Carlos Tevez. All three are in the top 10 in the report. Barcelona are well represented for the time being with Lionel Messi and the ubiquitous Ronaldinho but that will change with the buck-toothed one’s imminent escape to Milan to join Brazil compatriot and fellow media-value darling Kaka.

Is there a trend? Well, from what I see it isn’t just the ability to sell a product, talent on the pitch or definitely attractiveness. It could be tied to a good management team or a savvy gaggle of lawyers. It may even be one’s own force of personality. More than likely it’s the club that makes the idol instead of the other way ’round.

O Fenomeno

It’s a shame really. You know him as the fat-nomeno, a caricature of a carioca forward, butt of a thousand Real Madrid jokes, last remnant of a Galactico winter, but those like me who remember 1994, when Brazil won the World Cup against favored Italy, the name Ronaldo still carries weight.

For me, he was the paciest player I have ever seen. At PSV he was, a gangly center forward, just off the shuttle from Brazil, spending two fruitful years in Eindhoven bagging 42 goals in 46 appearances and drawing notice from Barcelona, leaving for the waiting arms of Sir Bobby Robson and big time European football.

We often forget how dominant a forward he really was at his heights. He pulled Brazil almost singlehandedly into the 2002 World Cup, won the Golden Shoe scoring eight goals, and lifting the trophy for the selecao. He was called up for the last 4 World Cups, playing in three, becoming the greatest goal scorer in the history of the World Cup. He trails only Pele and Zico as the greatest international goal scorers in the history of the Brazilian national team. In 11 years playing on the biggest stage, for three of the biggest clubs in the world (Inter Milan, Barcelona and Real Madrid), Ronaldo scored 166 goals.

Despite all the accomplishments, we often note that he never won the Champions League and that his clubs often struggled to win league titles with him. We remember him for the weird soul-patch haircut on his forehead, the weirder chia-pet one for Milan, the epileptic seizures that took him before the 1998 World Cup final against France, and the devastating knee injuries that robbed him of most of his pace, but none of skill and panache on the ball. Instead of remembering him for his perseverance, returning to play for Inter after many had written him off, we call him a mercenary for repaying Moratti’s loyalty by taking Real Madrid’s money and leaving for Spain. We call him an destabilizing force, a poor teammate, undedicated, and the worst of the Galactico policy.

We even remember him more for his personal life, filled with a litany of Brazilian supermodels, television presenters, singers and actresses. We see the fast cars, the easy money, and the high life. We see him slow down, gain weight and we call him lazy. Even the President of Brazil calls him fat and lazy.

We all age and change, but a phenomenon has no business being human, he is constantly compared to the player he was, even if he has a lot left to give. It would be so much easier if he went away, if we could just remember the good times, then he could be a legend one that burned brightly and flamed out, rather than the one who lagged about and overstayed his welcome.

Now he has injured himself again. A twin injury to his first, one in rossoneri compared to one in nerazzurri. We blame Milan labs, or the PSV doctors, or the Brazilians themselves, and again we ignore the player. We continue to ignore the man for the myth. We break down our idols after building them up. Will we be able to appreciate his skill only after he has retired?

I think he still has a great deal to play for and to play towards. Is it in Brazil or in the U.S.? Who knows. Remember, he is younger than Hernan Crespo, David Beckham, Alessandro Del Piero, Clarence Seedorf and Fernando Morientes. He is only slightly older than Thierry Henry and Raul Gonzalez, and he is the same age within days of Francesco Totti. I think he has earned a right to choose for himself.

He is not just a commodity, a manufactured image, a poster on a wall. Nike’s football savior, until they find another one, a younger, slimmer model with rock star good looks, and pretty step-overs, but none of the definition and serene finishing. Despite sharing the same name, and a common language, this new Ronaldo (Cristiano) will never fill the shoes of Ronaldo Luis Nazario da Lima. Ronaldinho before Ronaldinho.  O Fenomeno.

Batten Down the Hatches

This won’t be a long post for the week, we’ve closed up shop at Forza Futbol and we’re moving to Champions Soccer Radio Network. The leagues have grown dark for midweek games, Italy dominated Portugal in a friendly and Spain did enough to win against France as well, Fabio Capello has swept away the last vestiges of the entitlement culture in the England squad and 9,000 miles away little old me was watching the Argentinian B-team pummel an over matched Guatemalan side that was clearly missing captain and L.A. Galaxy forward Carlos Ruiz.

I know, a completely diferent class of player. What I did get to see was some of the most exciting Argentinian players playing in what is essentially their U-23 youth side.

The most recognizable name on the pitch was of course ex-Villareal general Juan Roman Riquelme who was his usual, efficient self, setting up Napoli dynamo Ezequiel Lavezzi for their second goal, which was obviously a complete howler by the Guatemalan keeper who barely touched the ball at all despite it being a fairly weak shot point blank.  Playing just in front of Lavezzi, was Real Madrid winger Gonzalo Higuain, who looked tentative early on, but scored the first goal in tight quarters in front of goal.

Argentina soon got in a rhythm, a dominant display not only by Liverpool midfielder Javier Mascherano, but by Valencia youngster Ever Banega who was by far the class player on the pitch. He was incisive in his passes, passed well especially over 30 yards, and directed traffic at the back in a role similar to Pirlo’s role for AC Milan. Of course, Mascherano can make anyone look good because of his skills in front of the back line, but the next generation of Argentinian players is in good hands with Higuain, Banega, Lavezzi and Mascherano.

While the final score said 5-0 to the Argentinians, it was exciting nontheless, less a contest than a training session of course, but a very interesting window into the future of the Argentinean squad. Weird that not everyone got the same out of it as me.

I was sitting in the Guatemala section at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum at the opposite end to the famous peristyle and the Olympic torch, and at times there was a tangible sense of danger, with dozens of fights going on all around me. The crowd was lively and sarcastic at first, but became the more frustrated as the Chapines made the match more and more difficult for themselves. Inexplicably, the fans around me insisted that their players had been “bought” and were tanking the game on purpose against a bunch of “nameless Argies” and a “useless Riquelme”.  Just shows you how delusional you can get with a bit of liquid courage in your system.

Fifa Player of the Year?

Every year, the infamous Fifa World Player of the Year Award comes out and every year I find myself wondering why I ever paid attention. Yes, if you’ve been living under a rock, or as I have suffering the after effects of jet lag and Barcelona, here’s the list. ‘ll join you after you read it.

FIFA World Player of the Year nominees:
Gianluigi Buffon (Italy), Fabio Cannavaro (Italy), Petr Cech (Czech Republic), Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal), Deco (Portugal), Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast), Michael Essien (Ghana), Samuel Eto’o (Cameroon), Gennaro Gattuso (Italy), Steven Gerrard (England), Thierry Henry (France), Juninho (Brazil), Kaka (Brazil), Miroslav Klose (Germany), Philipp Lahm (Germany), Frank Lampard (England), Rafael Marquez (Mexico), Lionel Messi (Argentina), Alessandro Nesta (Italy), Andrea Pirlo (Italy), Franck Ribery (France), Juan Roman Riquelme (Argentina), Ronaldinho (Brazil), Wayne Rooney (England), John Terry (England), Carlos Tevez (Argentina), Lilian Thuram (France), Fernando Torres (Spain), Ruud van Nistelrooy (Netherlands), Patrick Vieira (France.

See anything glaring? Now I won’t argue that Lionel Messi, Didier Drogba, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ruud or even Riquelme deserve to be on that list. Maybe Essien. They all had spectacular years. Kaka, Gerrard, Pirlo and Gattuso met in the Champions League final so you could also make a case for them as well. But the rest? How many of these are here because of reputation? Thuram and Viera are washed up has beens. Ribery hadn’t yet come into his own, and Torres had never lived up to his billing in Spain. Tevez spent most of the year on the bench at West Ham, Buffon most of the year in Serie B, and most everyone else spent a significant portion of the year injured; except for Deco who spent most of the year being confused with Iniesta and Xavi. Am I getting to my point yet?

I think I’m not arguing that these people shouldn’t be nominated, I’m not even worried so much with who will win because it’s obvious that one of these, Kaka, Drogba, C. Ronaldo, or Messi, deserve it just as much as any.

Yet, eternally injured Rafa Marquez gets nominated, over the Golden Boot winner in Europe- Francesco Totti?

I realize that I’m biased for Totti, but I’m trying to be objective here as well. Is Petr Cech more deserving of the award than Pepe Reina who got his club to the CL final? Is Miroslav Klose more deserving than Raul Tamudo or Daniel Alves who both met on the field in Scotland for the UEFA Cup final? God, even David Beckham deserves votes for inspiring his club to wins down the stretch for Real Madrid.

I realize this is a popularity contest, and Francesco Totti, who isn’t even liked by the majority in his own country (outside of Rome I guess) won’t be winning any, but there are glaring cases like this that completely underscore how stupid this award really is. Give it to Kaka, who seems the darling of Fifa anyway, and of Brazilian extraction which helps for starters but don’t come to me afterwards and tout a player by how many individual awards he’s won, because clearly don’t matter.

My Barcelona Adventure

Covering La Liga from far away as we’ve been doing for the past 6 months like we have on forza futbol, we tend to see things antiseptically, second hand or translated and repackaged to fit another culture or another way of seeing things, whether it’s to reach the ex-pat Spaniard, the curious Brit or the nonsensical American like myself. Sure, I speak the language and I can read the websites that As or Marca provides as a service, but it has never seemed to fit together, it has never seemed to make sense, until you come here like I did and you cover the league first hand, you read the ragsheets, you talk to the people on the street, and you sit in the seats and see the competition for yourself.

What have I learned? The place is old, it has a history that goes back generations in football terms, but there are Roman ruins here, there are events hardwired to people’s genes here that we have no clue about, even if we speak the language, so I’m going to even try to make sense of the place in one sitting or in one two week holiday, but I do know more about it’s football.

1. Football is king. Sure, they have something called futsala which is what Ronaldinho played I guess in those Nike commercials, and another weird invention that looks like water-polo but without the water, or even the swimming, the NBA and basketball in general is popular, and Formula 1 is always on, but football is front and center.
2. Spanish television, real over the air television, is stranger than I had thought, as there are hours upon hours of telebasura (or literally garbage tv), and while one could get spoiled by the one hour football pregame shows on free over-the-air tv like the one laSexta had, some games are changed and rescheduled or not run at all (like the Real Madrid game from last week) on a moments’ notice, so fans needs or wants are secondary. Oh, and the announcers talk over the action just as much as the English broadcasters do on Gol TV, so it really wouldn’t be that much of a difference. I even heard Ray Hudson’s voice on that Madrid pregame show, weird huh?
3. Spanish newspapers. To get any real sense as to what is really happening in La Liga you have to play the, “let’s buy all the papers in Madrid(As and Marca) and Barcelona(Sport and Mundo Deportivo) and try to find the truth somewhere in between. When 8-10 pages are given in Madrid to Real Madrid and the other teams are given anywhere from half a page to a full page of coverage, then bias is inherant in the system. It’s the same for Barcelona in the Catalan press as well, but it is nice to get a better look at the players, their tendencies, what formations clubs have been playing, and all number of useless statistical data to wet the appetite. Yes, the sports dailies have their uses as well.
4. FC Barcelona. Barcelona is a city of monuments, the AgBar Tower which looks like a blaugrana cucumber in the night sky, the Sagrada Familia which is probably the strangest looking psychedelic Church in the world, but I can see why Barca is one of the biggest clubs in the world just by looking at their own monument to their city. Yes, they’re planning on a new facade for the exterior (shown here) and a brand new coat of paint for the interior, but the club while very modern is all about its links to the past and making its members or socios feel part of the process of running the football club. For a measly 16 euros, I got the chance to tour the visiting training rooms, the media center and even the President’s box, I took a picture with cardboard cutouts of Leo Messi and Ronaldinho, I saw the FC Barcelona Megastore and I even took a picture at field level with Mes Que un Club in the background. I came, I saw and I was looking for Walt Disney’s hand in prepackaging the Barca experience. I must say that it did seem just a little phony to me, but it could just be me, the deluded, cynical American who is conditioned to it.
5. Espanyol were another story. The gritty club of overachievers that almost beat mighty Sevilla are actually situated on some nice property. Their stadium situated in the Montjuic area, a park and conventions area just south of their more popular cousins, is actually in a nice part of town, or at least as nice for different reasons as Barca, but the stadium while it was renovated for the Barcelona Olympics looks much worse for wear. The Espanyol supporters I talked to pretty much agreed that they were counting the days until their new stadium was built. I don’t know though, maybe it’s different on match days at Barca, but I got a better vibe at Espanyol. As one of the supporters told me, “It’s easy to be a Barcelona fan, their stadium is beautiful, they win, you expect them to, but here at Espanyol you suffer, sometimes waiting for that goal that might keep you from being relegated on the last day of the season.” And I told him, yeah but when you get one goal away from winning the UEFA Cup it seems all the sweeter no? He said he’d rather have won than had any moral victories.

I guess there’s a story in there somewhere, that the League is as vibrant at ground level as we see on television, and that maybe you need to get out of your comfort zone and travel, see the sights for yourself and not just be spoon fed team or a league

Being a Fan, part 2

The last time I asked this sort of question, it was whether or not someone could call themselves a true fan if you questioned a manager or the direction that your team was going in (clearly I don´t know what I´m talking about because my team is first place in the Premiership in spite of the criticisms I gave it), but instead I have another question for you all.

Can someone support more than one club?

Well, I interviewed Tim Stannardt of football365.com the other day here in Barcelona, you´ll hear the interview when I get back and not a minute sooner, but one of the questions I asked him was if you still support a club. and while I won´t reveal his club, he did say that you couldn´t in his opinion support more than one club. A club chooses you, it defines who you are, and you could no more choose more than one club as choose more than one set of parents. Those are my words, not his in case anyone cares.

Well, I support Arsenal in England and they define who I am in that sense. I´ve watched them since Dennis Bergkamp came to them in the early 1990´s and they have a style that suits what I like about football, but I also care deeply about AS Roma, for not as long and yes I´ve only followed them since Batistuta went there to win Fabio Capello a scudetto, but I have the scarf and I sing the songs, and I consider myself a fan. Which makes sense to you?

I´m ambivalent about it actually, there were times that I felt like I was cheating on my girlfriend, but I´ve sort of squared it by saying to myself that Arsenal hold my interest intellectually, they define what I think is good and precise, almost mathematical about football.

AS Roma on the other hand hold my heart, and I root for them despite them not being very good most years and when they´re good I rub it in people´s faces and when they lose I spin out of control by it, it has nothing to do with my head or a choice I´ve made but a gut feeling I had all along.

If asked to choose between the two I almost always say Roma, but I still think you can support more than one team in one league or else I wouldn´t be struggling with really finding a squad to support in La Liga, or the fact that I like Werder Bremen, PSG or Ajax, Chivas de Guadalajara or especially Boca Juniors in other leagues around the world.

What do you think? Send us your comments and we´ll read them out loud