One of the most prolific writers on football (soccer), Simon Kuper is the author of several books, including Football Against the Enemy; Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War; Soccernomics (with Stefan Szymanski); and most recently, Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club That Built Modern Football (released in the U.S. as The Barcelona Complex).
I spoke with Kuper last week via Zoom about his new book on FC Barcelona (Barça, as fans call it), the economic realities of football, and whether commercial agendas have bereft the beautiful game of its beauty. I’m a huge Barça fan, so I cherished the opportunity to have this conversation, especially in a week when the club announced a controversial sponsorship deal with already controversial (Joe Rogan!) Spotify. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Enjoy!
Tim Leberecht
Tim Leberecht: FC Barcelona just announced a three-year sponsorship deal with Spotify for 280 million euros. The Spotify logo will front the men’s and women’s team jerseys, but the really big news is that the legendary Camp Nou stadium will be called Spotify Camp Nou from now on. Barcelona’s CEO Ferran Reverter reportedly resigned in protest, and many members of the club, the so-called socios, are not happy. Is the agreement with Spotify the beginning of the ultimate selling out?
Simon Kuper: The selling out, if you call it that, started more than a decade ago when Barcelona got Qatar on their shirts after decades of refusing to feature a commercial brand (only UNICEF was given that honor). But giving the stadium a sponsor’s name, that’s another step. You’re becoming just like other clubs, and Barcelona’s claim was always to be more than a club, mes que un club. That’s their motto. Now I’m finding it harder and harder to believe.
I estimate for the stadium naming rights, they’re getting about 40 million euros a year more than they got from their previous sponsor Rakuten for a deal without naming rights. I don’t see it making a huge difference. Real Madrid, Barça’s big rival, is about to turn their stadium, the Bernabéu, into a year-round concert and conference venue. And they reckon they’ll be making about 250 million euros a year from that. So Barcelona is racing to keep up with other big clubs, and it’s going to be very difficult.
This begs the question of whether clubs like Barcelona even have a choice. Given the 1.4 billion euro debt the club is in and how inflated player salaries have become, isn’t full-on commercialization their only means of survival?
It’s difficult. As sponsorship values increased and other clubs started selling their stadium names and football became this huge global—I wouldn’t say business because these clubs are not trying to make a profit—but as football becomes this global phenomenon it fires up the value of sponsorship. Twenty years ago if you didn’t have a shirt sponsor your loss was pretty small, now it’s becoming significant. The iron rule of football is that player wages predict success almost perfectly. Great players like Messi, Iniesta, Xavi—to keep players like them you have to pay them very high salaries, you need a lot of money, you need a sponsor.
You’ve spoken with many Barça players for your book. Do they identify with the “more than a club” ethos?
There are two things: one, the Catalan identity of Barça works for the club members. A lot of them identify strongly with Catalanism, and so do Catalan players like Piqué or Sergi Roberto. However, most of the players are not Catalan speakers, often they come from abroad. The changing room language at Barcelona has always been Spanish. Messi and his family, in fact, found it irritating that they could not understand people because they spoke Catalan. They had zero interest in or sympathy for the whole Catalan thing. And that’s true for most of the players who come. Keep in mind that Barcelona has 250 million followers on social media and these people are based around the world, not just in Spain or Catalonia. They often don’t even know what Catalonia is.
What did matter to all players in the great years was Barça’s idea of beautiful, perfect football. When Neymar was leaving the Brazilian club of Santos in 2013, every club in Europe wanted him. Bayern was there, Real Madrid was there. Yet Barcelona had this advantage because they knew Neymar wanted to join Barça because of the quality of their football. In the end they got him for less than other clubs were offering because he was personally committed to joining Barça, not because of Catalanism but because of the brand of football. Similarly, the Uruguayan player Luis Suarez always had a career plan to join. In Barça’s good years it was easy to get the best players. Now if you’re a great player you look at Manchester City, you look at Paris St. Germain or Bayern Munich.
“In the history of football, nobody stayed at the top for very long.”
Indeed, Barça used to be the epitome of greatness but has crumbled in the past few years, both on and off the pitch, hitting rock bottom, it seems, with the departure of Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest footballer ever, to Paris St. Germain. What happened? It was such a dramatic fall from grace.
It’s very hard to stay number one in any business because everybody else is trying to copy you. And everyone copied what Barcelona was doing, and now the Germans and the English, who were never good at producing good footballers, are producing more Barcelona-style players. In football, a lot is imitation. Players, coaches, and managers learn from each other every week. If Real Madrid lose to Chelsea, Real Madrid go back home and think, what are they doing that we’re not?
Also, when you’re number one, you get lazy. For about a decade everyone was praising Barcelona. They played beautiful football with homegrown players, it was all wonderful. And so they stopped thinking, they stopped trying to learn from others. Meanwhile, Bayern Munich was sending people to study Barcelona. The whole operation. Barcelona, however, was not sending people to Munich in return. For my book I interviewed people who worked on the inside, and I never once heard anyone say, ‘oh, I’ve just been to England or France to learn.’ What they said was, ‘I spoke at a conference about how Barcelona does things.’ So all the learning was one way.
So to some degree the demise was inevitable. In the history of football nobody stayed at the top for very long.
Let’s talk about the worst-case scenario, Lionel Messi leaving the club. Reportedly it was due to financial regulations imposed by the Spanish league. Do you think it really just came down to finances?
It happened for money. And Messi probably would have stayed for much less money but the financial situation last summer was dramatic. Barça’s salary bill was much higher than it was permitted to be because of the regulations, because their revenues had collapsed during the pandemic, so they thought, well, we’ll halve Messi’s salary, which by the end was over 150 million euros. It had tripled in the five years before the pandemic. So Messi said, ‘okay, half my salary is fine.’ He wanted to stay, mostly because his family—his wife, his three kids—wanted to be in Barcelona. They cried in 2020 when he told them he wanted to leave.
I think the people at the top, Barça president Joan Laporta and then-CEO Ferran Reverter, just thought: ‘okay, if we pay him, you know, 75 million euros, we still can’t afford that, that still just blows up the whole system, the Liga will not accept this.’ And so just to cut out the headaches they said to him, ‘you know what Leo? We can’t do this.’
At that point he was 34. Even Messi comes to the end; you see in his performances now with Paris St. Germain that he’s less brilliant than before. Of course what they should have done was sell him in 2020, when they could have gotten 150 million euros and cut a 150 million euro salary. It would have gotten them 300 million to build a new team. They let him go a year too late.
Do you think he’ll come back eventually?
The history of Barcelona is made by great foreigners who come and never leave. Barça's Swiss founder Joan Gamper, the great players of the 1950s, the Hungarian [László] Kubala, the Dutchman Johan Cruyff—the man who made the modern club. They’re all buried in Catalonia, so I think that’s where Messi is going to spend the rest of his life. He’s already talked about becoming sporting director of Barça one day. They’ll give him some kind of function. Will he play a swan song season or two? It’s possible.
Messi was part of the immensely successful Pep Guardiola-era team, one of Barça's many “Dream Teams,” with the original one spearheaded by the Dutch player Johan Cruyff in the 1990s. What makes a dream team a Dream Team? Do you think it’s simply a label created by fans and media?
The Dream Team label came from the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona when the U.S. basketball team was dubbed the Dream Team. That was the time when Johan Cruyff was building that beautiful Barcelona team. So to be a dream team you have to win but also play beautiful football. And what is beautiful football in the modern era? It’s this fast-passing, high-pressure, constant-movement, overlapping-players, switching-positions game that Cruyff and Rinus Michels invented in Amsterdam in the 1960s. And it’s now played by all the best teams in the world, by Bayern, by Italy, by Manchester City. You also have a couple great individuals who can change situations through dribbles, such as Romario in the early 1990s, or Leo Messi later on. Because if you’re facing a packed defense you need somebody who can eliminate a defender by getting past him alone, so those two elements—great passing and one or two great dribblers—that’s what Barcelona had. That is a dream team.
“In business, the horrible truth is that success is often just about showing up every day.”
Let’s talk about performance on the pitch. Every weekend is different, you lose, you win, you win, you lose. It’s a hysterical media and fan environment that you operate in as a player, as a coach, and as a manager of a club. What makes a club consistently successful over the long haul?
Barça player and later coach Pep Guardiola said it best: “Football is evolution.” The football of 2022 will be better than the football of 2021. The main things that evolve are the physical and tactical levels of players. You can never stand still, you have to always be upgrading, always on the lookout for players who are losing interest. The people who succeed at the top level are the ones with constant motivation.
It’s a very different industry than most. Because in business the horrible truth is that success is often just about showing up every day. Most people in business, whatever the rhetoric of CEOs, are not brilliant. You just have to follow the processes and do the right things. And that will mostly work if the business model is good. In football you need to be brilliant to beat Real Madrid. So who are the people who can be brilliant consistently?
Another comparison is music. If you’re a band and you had one or two great hits 10 years ago, you just keep playing those hits and you make money off them. With football you have to have a hit every week. The people who can maintain that motivation, they erase the past, erase what happened last week. They say, ‘I don’t care, it doesn’t mean anything.’ Setbacks, disappointments, failures, they’re motivational.
I spoke to Barça psychologists about that for the book and I find it fascinating. They said everyone feels fear. You have to feel fear before the performance because if you’re not anxious, you’re not sufficiently motivated to succeed. They said the difference between kids who go on to make it and kids who don’t make it is that kids who don’t make it think: ‘This is horrible. I hate this feeling. I want to fail so I can get out of here. I don’t want to be in this high-pressure environment.’ The best players feel great fear. Even Messi vomits in the changing room before matches. These players are anxious but they think: ‘this is a challenge I’m going to rise to meet.’ It’s not that they’re morally better, it’s just how they function. And the fact that they met the challenge last week, it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Imagine if you’re performing live in public and millions of people around the world are saying he’s bad today. That is absolutely terrifying.”
It’s so fascinating to me that highly-paid footballers still find a way to motivate themselves. If I made millions of dollars a year, maybe I wouldn’t give it 100 percent every Saturday.
It’s partly intrinsic. Ronaldinho became the best player in the world around 2006, then he lost interest. He wanted to do other things, he wanted to party, he just wasn’t as interested in football. But motivation is also extrinsic. People talk about money all the time, but money in football teams is a way to gauge status. For example, when Bayern bought the French full-back Lucas Hernandez, they paid him a very high salar. Older players like Thomas Müller and Manuel Neuer were outraged, they said, ‘look, we’ve proven our greatness year in, year out. And this guy who happened to win a World Cup as a left-back in a very strong team, you’re giving him a higher salary than us.’ And that blows up the changing room relationships. It’s not because they’re greedy, or they need the extra money, it’s that money is status in a changing room.
The extrinsic motivation isn’t about money, it comes from being judged every week by millions of people. You or I do our work mostly in private. I then publish, and I’m judged by a few people. But imagine if you’re performing live in public, and millions of people around the world are saying, he’s bad today. That is absolutely terrifying. But if you have a high-performance mindset, it’s very motivational.
You mentioned Guardiola’s statement, “football is evolution.” Right now Barça is yet again at a point of reinvention, with former player Xavi as their new coach relying on talent from the club’s youth academy, La Masia. What do you foresee for Barcelona’s near and midterm future?
Well, Xavi has a couple advantages. There is a group of great young players coming out of La Masia for the first time in over a decade—Gavi, Nico, Ansu Fati, these are very exciting talents. And they bought Pedri for just 5 million euros from the Canary Islands. So there is a young team, which could become very high level. But all those who imagined it would be Messi, Xavi, Iniesta all over again, that’s not going to happen, that was a one-off.
The other advantage is that they seem to be finding new sources of money. They have Goldman Sachs inside the club as their chief provider of loans, so they’re less cash-strapped than they were a few months ago. And you see that in the transfer window. For example, they were able to bring back Adama Traoré. They’re not going for the biggest names in football, but still, they have more ability to pay than a few months ago, so Xavi has those advantages.
Though I think there’s a lot of hype around the fact that he was a great player. Stefan Szymanski and I showed in our book Soccernomics that there’s no correlation between having been a great player and being a great coach—just like a great horse doesn’t make a great jockey. So I don’t have this kind of mystical faith in Xavi.
We also show in Soccernomics that the manager doesn’t matter that much. Football performance is very much determined by the quality of the players, which you can see in their salary bill. Barcelona is not going to have one of the highest salary bills in football for the next decade so they will likely not be one of the top clubs. My betting is that they’re going to be a kind of number-three-in-Spain sort of club for a while.
“There’s very little in life that lasts throughout your life, but these clubs do.”
As someone who’s written extensively about soccer, how do you manage to not become cynical? Can you still enjoy football as a beautiful game in a romantic way? Or do you just know too much?
It’s a bit of both. The best football is just glorious to watch. I’ve interviewed a lot of players, and mostly, I think, they’re nice people. People speak about them like heroes and devils but, for example, I interviewed Mbappé and Neymar, and they seem very pleasant. Their lives of course are crazy, but it doesn’t mean they’re bad people. I don’t have any animus against footballers, and I would probably be a lot weirder if somebody were paying me 10 million euros a year when I was 21-years-old.
Many fans like to believe the player is a fan of the club. But the player’s relationship to the club is actually quite distant. He’s not even an employee, he’s more like a contractor. He contracts his services to the club for about two or three hours a day, and then he lives inside his entourage. Because the players are so rich, they have their own personal trainer, their own psychologist, their own physio, their own social media director. Vinícius at Real Madrid, for example, has 12 full-time employees and 25 part-time employees.
It’s even hard for the club to speak to its players. If Barcelona wants to chastise a player, the player will say talk to my agent, talk to my father. And so the club’s relationship with the players has become very distant, the people who run the club are afraid of the players. I know there’s this fantasy among fans that some players will sweat for the shirt and this kind of thing. I just don’t believe that. The players play for themselves, they play for their careers, listen to the words they use: “career,” “professional.” That’s how they think. They love football, but they’re in it as a one-man enterprise.
But aside from that, football still has this tremendous cultural power to bring people together, and you wrote a book that describes this quality, Football Against the Enemy. Can you point to some examples that illustrate the beautiful nature of the beautiful game?
There are 92 professional clubs in England. Almost all of them existed a century ago. Most of them play terrible football, never win anything. In Germany it’s similar. And people still go every week to watch small teams like Hartlepool, Accrington, and Wrexham knowing the football will be bad, knowing that in their lifetimes, these clubs will never be champions. It’s because they have a connection, the football club exemplifies the town, the region, your origins, the memories of going with your parents when you were five-years-old, the football club connects your childhood with your old age. There’s very little in life that lasts throughout your life, but these clubs do. They don’t need to become Manchester United. So when people talk about the inequality of football, I don’t see that as a problem. If you’re a Wrexham fan, you care about Wrexham, you don’t worry about not winning the Champions League. I think there’s something very beautiful about that connection that a lot of people have.
And then there’s Messi. I’m not Argentinian, I’m not from Spain, but I love watching Messi. It’s a glimpse of genius, a glimpse of beauty. I don’t understand the genius of Einstein but I understand, and appreciate, every week, the genius of Messi. That’s not the same as being a fan of Wrexham, but it’s beautiful, too.