Wonderful artist at Akyanme.com Some great vector football graphics

Will the inept English continue their inevitable freefall at Wembley?

“Real Madrid have a cancer and its name is Florentino Perez. He has made the same mistakes that he made in his first term. Mourinho is a super-professional but he has a problem. He’s come here and the weight of the world has come down on him because he never thought he find what he’s found. Let the socios complain too, because they accepted a President who returned under-cover and without elections. He’s a coward though, remember how he left Madrid last time, and he’ll do it again if he doesn’t win any titles. When a ship sinks, the first to flee are the rats. In Madrid, absolutely nothing functions properly. Andres Iniesta was a madridista and when his Mom saw the street where he was going to live, Montera Street, filled with transvestites and prostitutes, she said, ‘Here? My son will not stay here’, and when she saw La Masia she said, ‘He’ll stay here.’ They don’t even have a residence in Madrid for the youth-teamers to stay in.”

That was Jose Maria Garcia, crotchety ex-radio host and full-time annoying grandpa, telling anyone who’d listen how there is a crisis at the legendary club and its architect is the guy who runs the shop. Don’t you just love old people? The fact is though, that he’s right.

“This club isn’t prepared to play these many games in January.”

Uh, Willis, what darest thou say? You have a full squad. You’ve got 11 players playing significant minutes for you. Where’s Canales, Pedro Leon and Gago. Probably playing some slap-and-tickle with each other, but that’s beside the point, they might have played some minutes from CR7 and the gang.

Haven’t you heard what Walter Pandiani M.D. said about the greasy one? He has a screw-loose. An amazing diagnosis. Too many games carrying Jose’s lunchboxes. Listen to the Rifleman. Bench Cristiano. His baby needs him. His admirers need him. God, even I need him. Benched I mean. It’s a bad haircut.

And stop blaming the schedule congestion. Use your squad.

As is usual for slow weeks, international breaks and such, the Madrid papers like to dredge up old stories, like nudging Joan Laporta awake with an attack on Barca or writing a piece to bury or praise Raul Gonzalez Blanco, but recently the one constant has been to write about the Galactico that got away: Cesc Fabregas. Here’s Cesc, Catalan by culture and either, or, or neither, Spanish by birth, who willfully plays for Spain’s red fury, who left the confines of La Masia, the youth team set-up at the Camp Nou in Barcelona, and now plies his trade amongst the uncultured hordes of Ashburton Grove near Highbury at Arsenal Stadium. He says he loves the Arsenal, and he’s adapted as well as any foreigner ever has (or has ever been allowed to adapt I should say) but there has always been that unspoken notion, the player talks around it, the press poke at it but only to the point that they are allowed to in a country where the press and the players rarely mix for substantive interviews, that one day he will leave home, for Spain, for good.
The English would say, Arsenal fans primarily, that Fabregas has all he needs in England. Cesc is happy. He helped pioneer the way for a young Spaniard to have success in a foreign culture with different customs and habits. He has adapted and learned the language. The English game’s unparalleled success has made him who he is, elevated his profile off the pitch, beyond where he would have been playing behind Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta at FC Barcelona. On the pitch, playing in the fluid style that Arsene Wenger prefers, Cesc has developed into the focal point of their attack, the Gunner’s equivalent of Kaka when he was Milan or Totti at Roma. He has the loyalty of the Arsenal board, his manager Arsene Wenger, and at such a young age he could be the next Arsenal captain to be sung about in the same breath as Tony Adams or Patrick Viera. While Cesc is not one known to complain, it is obvious he is also becoming impatient. The trophies that were once a given, at a club whose profile was matched in the Premiership era by only Manchester United, were now not so easy to come by. A club that once went a season without losing a game, now struggled to maintain their much valued Champions League place, challenged by once also-rans like Aston Villa and Manchester City. Would he join ex-teamate Adebayor, as reports were surfacing this past week, for an immense payday at Eastlands? Doubtful I’d say.
No, it’s clear that Cesc will return to Spain one day, he’s mentioned it in numerous interviews that he’d like to end his playing career at home and most have assumed that he’d just return to Barca, the heir apparent to 29 year old Xavi Hernandez.  It would be fitting, Xavi himself replaced coach Pep Guardiola in his youth, but it’s alot more complicated than that. Xavi’s outsized contract doesn’t end until 2014 when he’ll be 34 years old, so at least until then Cesc would be in some sort of rotational role in Barca’s 3 man midfield. Another impeding factor, is that Cesc did not himself leave his hometown club on the best of terms. He took a professional contract in England, when legally he couldn’t from any club in Spain let alone the club his grandfather introduced him to, so there has always been a sense that money was of more importance to Cesc and his agent than he let on and that returning to the Nou Camp was never as much of a foregone conclusion as everyone thinks. Not everyone would welcome him with open arms. Joan Laporta himself is said to have said, when asked in an interview on Spanish radio, “that man, as long as I’m here, will never step foot at FC Barcelona.” Granted, Laporta is a lame-duck, cannot renew his Presidency according to club mandates, so the way is open for Cesc, but maybe not at his favored blaugrana but at the eternal enemy Real Madrid.

Madrid are already brimming with options in attack, and many are still calling for reinforcements to cover their defensive liabilities, but I think their biggest weakness was hardly addressed. Real Madrid lack the quality, pace and creativity in their midfield to link well with the attacking instincts of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka and Benzema. They addressed it to a certain extent with Xabi Alonso, but Cesc would finalize it and he would fit in nicely with his Red Fury mate. Cesc’s signing would mean another Spaniard returning to a club that see themselves as the custodians of Spanish football, plus it would be another dig at Catalan nationalists who view Cesc as the prodigal son returning home. I think the biggest impediment though, for Real Madrid signing Fabregas, is that it would mean one more  Galactico in the place of the Raul Madrid mafia, the clique of players led by the Real Madrid captain that form the operational (if not actual) spine of the squad.

Honestly, I’m not convinced that he’ll leave England just yet. He has real leadership qualities that are being drawn upon in England and I don’t think he’d walk into a side in Spain right now and become automatic first choice, week in and week out, with Madrid’s rotational policies and Barcelona’s glut in the midfield. I think Arsenal will retain him until 2014. After that, it’s a Barcelona for sure.

When a tragedy happens in sports, especially in football where people identify so strongly with their own and you have derby games or rivalry matches that bring the worst emotions out of people, more than just competitiveness I mean, real hatred for the shirt of your opponent, and something like this happens, you find all of baggage matters one iota. None of it does. You find you have more in common with your rival than you think.

You bleed for your shirt, you support your club, but you realize how close we all really are. It could have been anyone’s team. It could have been ours. If you support Sevilla you know very well what it feels like to be a Perico tonight. If yours is Real Madrid, well all my best to the family of Ruben de la Red, it’s been a scary ride for him, he doesn’t even know if he’ll play again, but that may be best for a kid with a whole life ahead of him.

Sadly, this won’t be the last time a young kid dies playing the sport he loves. Cardiomyopathy. A disease of the heart muscle with no one cause. High blood pressure, heart trauma, valve disease, artery disease, even viral or bacterial infections. There’s talk of screening tests, cutting back on midweek games, fixture congestion and such, and just better health care for the players in general. So thanks to everyone for leaving a message here. I hope these well wishes get back to the club and to the families involved. Rest in peace Dani Jarque.

Here’s the latest from Spain about the tragedy. Some bulleted notes that I thought were interesting:

• More information is coming out: Pochettino had given the players the afternoon off after practice. Most went to nearby Florence, Italia to sightsee but Dani stayed behind because he wasn’t feeling well. He was on the phone with his partner Jessica. She was 7 months pregnant. Like Antonio Puerta’s child before, another kid will grow up never knowing his or her father. Heartbreaking.
• Wisely the friendly against Bologna has been cancelled as has the rest of the Italian tour. Espanyol will return to Barcelona tomorrow.
• The remains will stay in Florence for the time being where an autopsy will be performed.
• Reactions from the world of football: Raul, captain of Real Madrid showed what a classy player he can be by sending his and the clubs deeply felt condolensces. From Washington, D.C. Ernesto Valverde, former Espanyol and current Villareal coach, still can’t believe the news, “His hair is still on end.” Joan Laporta and FC Barcelona are in mourning with us.
• A minute of silence was observed at Mestalla for Valencia v Arsenal and at Betis v Zaragoza.
• Marc Torrejon, former team-mate who now plays in central defense with Racing Santander, could not continue playing against Real Union in Irun when he heard his friend had passed.
• Quique Iglesias in as.com thinks the club should rename the new stadium Estadio Dani Jarque. Any opinions, I’m still mulling it over.
• Dani Jarque was given Espanyol’s armband after former captain Raul Tamudo and the club decided to make the switch by mutual agreement. Jarque had been in charge for less than a month.
• Jarque was on the sub-19 side that won the youth title in 2002. His team-mates on that squad were, amongst others, Ferran Corominas who found him unconscious, Andres Iniesta of FC Barcelona and Fernando Torres of Liverpool. I need to mention too that Dani Jarque was the captain of that squad.

Being a fan in this country has always been hard. In the days before Fox Sports there was the NASL, then the indoor leagues, and maybe the Mexican League stand-offs on the weekends, but overall this wasn’t considered a real hotbed of soccer fandom. Sure, we’d see a World Cup every 4 years and we’d get a hint of what the great players in the world were doing, we heard of Real Madrid and Manchester United, Milan and Juventus, Barcelona and Liverpool, but they were foreign, seductive to a fault, but from another time and place that had little to do with what was happening in my youth and in my town.

No, where I grew up, in South Central Los Angeles, there were two clubs and only two in the world that anyone knew about: Las Chivas Rayadas de Guadalajara and Las Aguilas de America. Goats and Eagles, eternal rivals, like Barcelona and Real Madrid, their derby that is not a derby divides not only one country, but divides many cities where the Mexican Diaspora hit, and Los Angeles, the real Los Angeles that visitors fail to venture into when they come and they write about what a crappy city this is, is filled with passionate, even rabid soccer fans. Red and white or blue and gold, you could choose either or go with the neutrals best bet of El Tri for the national team, but don’t bother with a European kit or a South American kit. Real Madrid didn’t exist for my friends until Hugo Sanchez went there, but even the most rabid Hugo-centric fan would rather have seen him doing cartwheels at UNAM or Club America than being out-of-sight out-of mind. We even laughed at his accent. What was this whole affectation he had, lisping his esses like a true Spaniard, the tone and the inflection not of a proud Mexican, but of a poseur. No, my friends had a comfortable disdain for Europeans and the European Leagues.

Sunday afternoon games, at a civilized hour, trips to the Swap Meet before where knock-off kits were going for scandalous prices, soccer balls, hats and caps, paraphernalia, and the sounds of the game in the background, the staccato bursts punctuated by elongated goal celebrations, and the beer of course, always the watered down lagers of cheap Mexican beer.

I was aware of all this, but I’m Cuban and growing up what separated us from our neighbours was our love of Baseball. That was my sport. I played them all certainly, I played horse in the fall, two hand tag in the Winter, sprinkled with five a side pick-up matches, but as soon as February would hit and pitchers and catchers would report to Spring Training, well everything fell by the wayside and it was Baseball Fever in my household. Soccer? It wasn’t our sport. I spoke the language, to a certain extent, the rhythms are faster for us than for them, the vocabulary miles apart, like Scottish and English you could say, and in a sense that’s the sort of relationship we Cubans have with Mexicans here in California. Very few of us here, surrounded by rabid soccer fans, so we held onto what made us different, Baseball, and when we did consider soccer, it was European: an antidote to the cultural indoctrination I was getting in elementary school. The World Cup would hit, Italy in 1982 and Mexico City in 1986 after Colombia lost the chance to host it, and my myopic friends insisted that Mexico would win it, and would complain about referee bias after the fact, that Brazil and Argentina were no match for them if everything were equal.

I won’t go into the particulars about my disinfatuation with most American Sports, there are lots of reasons and no it isn’t about one thing in particular, but a matter of a million mosquito bites. Suffice it to say, that soccer was practically all I had left. I started watching Soccer, religiously, after the 1994 World Cup. Then the satellite boom hit and the world’s soccer stadia opened up. England was a good place to start. Italy followed with Spain and Germany neck and neck afterwards. The marketing wing of Sky and Fox were very comfortable extolling the virtues of the sport in Europe, over that of the game back home. Starved for the best players playing thousands of miles away, we bought into the myth that the game in Europe was somehow innately better than that in our hemisphere, that the clubs had a grander history or were better suited for our sensibilities. We glommed onto the ghosts of Munich, or Superga, the Kop or the Camp Nou, the derbies, the rivalries of a Old-World social structure that held little meaning for a New World resident. I’m guilty of it. I support a European club, a small one with little fan base outside of Barcelona, but I kiss the shirt, I go through the motions, and in the end I’m no more Catalan than any of you.

No, this is an uncivil war. For 100 years, the top European clubs have been poaching the top talent in the Americas, naturalizing them, making them their own, profiting from them and contributing nothing back to the game here. Certainly players would come back, invest in the clubs, and help with youth development, but always to benefit their adoptive teams in Europe. Think of what Europe did for Diego Maradona. He was already a star, they just made him an addict. What about Ronaldo, the real one, or even more recent Adriano? Used up, washed up, and tossed aside for the latest 17 year old sensation from Cruzeiro or River Plate. What of Gio Dos Santos, Mexican wunderkind, a U-17 World Champion? He was Ronaldinho’s heir, a spectacular player, until the homegrown Bojan took column inches and minutes away from the Mexican starlet. Off he went to Tottenham and then loaned out to Ipswich Town. Horrors. In the end, the immigrant in Europe is always a commodity to be tossed aside as easily as that.

East v West, Europe v America, I think it’s time we started looking closer to home again, supporting our local team, giving them our money first and building the sport that way. Our players are better off here, the cultural divide much closer between Latin American countries, the language barrier slight if non-existant. Look at Landon Donovan. Do people still believe his failure in Europe is due to lack of talent or drive? What about Juan Roma Riquelme? Why is Boca Juniors the only squad in the world willing to hand the keys of their operation to this mercurial genius? Would a Nilmar or Hernanes, a Diego Buonanotte or Radamel Falcao, be better off playing here in MLS if it were more financially viable for them to remain on the same hemisphere? They’d be better received here. The more I think about it, if the pay were better, if the stadia were soccer-specific and we gave the same amount of time and energy to Chivas USA like I should, or LA Galaxy like my partner does, would we see a higher quality of player and game here, that player that is just about to dive into the European abyss, or just coming back from it?

I’m not saying we should give up watching the best players, playing in the best leagues in the World, I love the game in Spain and Italy in particular, but our game here in North America and South America, deserves the same respect.

I’m not a Real Madrid supporter. I have no vested interest in rooting for them, nor do I in their rivals Barcelona for that matter, other than being the enemy of my enemy or some-such, but am I wrong if I don’t really care that they buy all the great players in the world? Cristiano, Kaka, Benzema and a score of players either on their way, or fighting to sign on for, essentially 10 big money contract positions. Then you read the headlines: “Real Madrid are buying up all the great players. They are distorting the market. They are making it difficult for clubs like Arsenal, Everton, Aston Villa and even Liverpool to compete in the marketplace.” Does anyone notice that the biggest complaints are coming from the English papers? Are pundits changing their tune already considering that mere months ago the English Premier League had become the pinnacle of World Football; the place where the best players and coaches were flocking to play?

How quickly things change. When Roman Abramovich was spending 200 million pounds early on, few were complaining as long as the money was circulating and the level of competition increased in England. Clubs like Southampton, Sunderland, West Ham, Aston Villa amongst many others benefited from the influx of foreign money. Glen Johnson, Steve Sidwell, Shawn Wright-Phillips, and many other home-grown players grew rich from the Russian’s easy largesse. Were there complaints in England that these were sub-par talents, that Chelsea were spending far too much on English players that were lacking in skill, foot-balling intelligence and tactical awareness? As long as the ratings grew and the money flowed everything was fine. Then Setanta went belly-up and the Premiership pie shrunk a little. Cristiano left England for Spain. English clubs found it difficult to attract the best foreign players, snubbed for the lure of Spain. Where was Michel Platini now? Why wasn’t he worried? UEFA were in cahoots, ready and willing to knock England back down a peg. He is worried and he has come down hard on Los Merengues stating that “they have ruined the market. Close to half of all clubs function at a loss and that cannot be.” It’s a popular opinion, but he’s wrong.

The market isn’t ruined just as it wasn’t ruined after Zinedine Zidane was signed from Juventus. The market adjusted itself and prices came down again. Let’s not delude ourselves. This is just part of the cyclical nature of the game. All Real Madrid is doing is what Chelsea were doing 6 years ago, what Real Madrid themselves were doing 8 years ago and what AC Milan were doing 20 years ago. Big clubs buy big players.  Florentino Perez, like Roman Abramovich before and Silvio Berlusconi before him, identified that his club was filled with an aging core of first-team players and saddled with over-priced squad players decided that he needed to help fund a revolution of sorts: three years of transfer business into one. Like Chelsea with Arsenal and Manchester United, Real Madrid knew that they didn’t have the youth development system of their closest rivals FC Barcelona and it would take too long to rebuild one from scratch. The Galactico tag comes up again and rightly so, but this isn’t the end of football as we know it.

For every high spending Chelsea in football there is a conservative spending Arsenal. For every Barcelona, building from the youth system, there is a free spending Valencia, failing in its mission. The game corrects itself. Real Betis spent unwisely and look where they are. Leeds United tried it and failed as well, but this is Real Madrid here, the richest club in the world. You can’t compare them to the rabble. Manchester United spend liberally and people rarely question Sir Alex. He knows what he’s doing, they can spend what they like, that’s the richest club in the world, but they’re wrong. Madrid are a special case. They’re the richest club in the world. They have an equivalent reach, a better television contract, a better ownership structure, and a favoured status politically. That’s not an overstatement, that’s the reality of the situation, and only Barcelona in Spain have been able to compete consistently and right now the Catalans have set the bar higher than anyone imagined. Barca won the treble, humiliating the Merengues in the process. Their brand of football has branded the Spanish National Team as theirs. This Galactico 2.0 is as much an escalation of the grand conflict in Spain as a rebuilding of Real Madrid globally; an accelerated rebuild aimed to destabilise the opponent as much as heighten themselves. Players aren’t leaving England for Spain, they’re joining Real Madrid in their search for their 10th European Championship, and helping in their bid to one-up Barcelona for another treble.

Real Madrid aren’t distorting the market, everyone’s just caught in their wake again, the biggest ship in the sea finally left safe harbor after 5 years in dry-dock.