Willy Wonka

Ferran Adriá

Barça have announced that they have retained the services of Ferran Adriá to design the menu at la Masia, their youth academy, in an effort to "foster healthy eating and exercise."

This move, which brings together the team with the world's most famous genius of cuisine, is a daring and lovely flourish on the body of their Catalan love's labour. The brilliant Adriá has been the most followed and beguiling chef in the world from the out of the way mecca he created at his restaurant in Catalunya, El Bulli.

Now Adriá has closed his mecca and moved on to different projects; one of them being the feeding of the young athletes at the school of the world champions. On the current first team the youth academy alumni are Messi, Cesc, Xavi, Iniesta, Thiago, Piqué, Puyol, Pedro, Busquets, Valdés, and the mister, Pep.

As that line-up could probably count it's estimated worth at or near a billion dollars, the interest the club has in giving their little brothers the best food in the world is clear.

As I started gravitating toward football a while ago, one of the reasons that I became particularly interested in FC Barcelona was the fact that they represent a place that also had the world's "best" restaurant. In addition, the architectural tradition of Gaudi's mind-bending and outside status within the bounds of their own country seemed to mark the team as something larger than what they ostensibly were.

Football teams are a dime a dozen. Cheaper, even.

But when something you are looking at becomes transformative to more, somehow.

When the game is no longer simply something that is played, but elevated to a medium for the most wild of possibilities to be made real.

That is the key to enlightenment through any endeavor.

A cherry on a plate or ball on a field.


Great minds...

No Shirt, No Service

either way...

On the 24th of September, the Barça club members will have a vote to potentially abort the vastly lucrative €150 million deal their president recently signed with the Qatar Foundation. The agreement, which saw the team put a corporate sponsor on the front of their kit for the first time in the 111 year history of the club, has been widely reviled by the more 'romantic' supporters of the team.

Johann Cruyff himself came out as calling it "vulgar," and the decision to put the chest real estate for sale has shaken the confidence of many--myself included--who took the crest of being 'more than a club' as symbolic also of a moral high-ground that the little giants held in the world of sport beyond their athletic achievement.

Barça had paid UNICEF nearly €1.5 million a year for the privilege of bearing the organization's mark on their chest. It was a clear reminder of the persecution that the team had faced during the Franco-era and their commitment to human rights in it's wake. UNICEF is still on the kit, but as a tramp-stamp along the bottom of the back.

For their parts, Pep Guardiola and club pres. Sandro Roselli have been vocal in their support of the Qatari sponsorship, but with the ballooning club debt and increasingly astronomical operating costs of the world's greatest team clearly at the forefront of club logistics, it seems like they are simply trying to put the best face on an unsavory situation.


Alexis seems to have a problem with the shirt

A few weeks back, during the 5-0 routing of Villa Real, new signee (and €26 million brick in the wall) Alexis Sanchez scored in his first Liga appearance for the squad. Hot with excitement from his victory, the Chilean forward pulled off his jersey during his celebration like a regular mook.

The bench looked furious; the players looked annoyed. The team huddled around him, partially to cover him from the ref's view in a vain attempt at avoiding a yellow card, and partially to talk some sense into him. You could see Iniesta delivering some words.

Even with the Qatar Foundation corporate mark on the jersey, it still means something.

Wear it with pride.

Avocados

"...So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados..."
-Aristotle by Billy Collins

In Mexico, the price of avocado is climbing ever-higher and putting the squeeze on people who often eat only a select amount of vegetables to begin with. The Mexican parliament has officially re-designated many vegetables as 'meat' in order to get people to eat more of them. People are pissed.

Here's something I did not know before today:
Aguacate, Spanish for Avocado, is derived from a Nahuatl word for nut. Like testicle-nut. Not like a brazil-nut. Like, a ball. Thank you BBC.

In Spain the focus of the shitstorm of la Liga politics has returned to the owner's hands after resolving the player's strike--a strike which delayed the season a week. Currently on the bitching block are tv broadcast rights and revenues.

Madrid and Barça split almost half of all revenues (though they get 3X the viewership of all other teams) and the other teams say that the additional money helps them reinforce their choke-hold at the top of the table. This issue isn't a threat to play, though.

On the field,the season is sputtering into gear and focus as the Champions league tournament is set to start. Barça will play AC Milan in their group's first round. They last played them in the Gamper cup right before last season. It was not a game as much as an embrace between Ronalidnho and Barça two seasons after his leaving for Italy, and a kick in the backside to Ibrá, sending him back to Milan after a mal-tempered, though mostly successful season. His last game at the Nou Camp.

Tomorrow there will be no Ronaldinho, having gone back to Brasil to teach Neymar how to play, and even Ibra has pulled out citing a practice injury. It seems a little auspicious since Ibra was traded away from Barça after costing a net loss to the team of around €40 million. It's poor form then to go and play against them in their home.

The Italian league, Serie A, just started this past weekend after being--you guessed it--on strike. Serie A and by extension AC Milan should be out of form for a while. Barça would have been presumably in good shape to win, but they drew 2-2 at Real Sociedad on Saturday.

Up in the Basque country games usually are pretty spirited. The history of Spanish football has always had a very strong corner in the northeast. Though Athletic Bilbao is more decorated, Sociedad have shown that they can bring heat to Barcelona and after capitalizing on two weak defensive plays to equalize in the second half, they managed to hold the stunned champions of europe to the draw.

Barça, two games into la Liga, are in fourth place behind Madird, Valencia, and Real Betis. I'm happy for Betis. they were elevated from the second division recently. Enjoy third place while it lasts.

Another cost of the game was Alexis Sanchez tearing a thigh muscle and now being out for about two months. Inversely, Carles Puyol, our team captain, is looking set to play after being almost entirely out of commission since January.

So many players, so many people are pressed into the middle of a struggle between opportunity and time. People are aware of their decay, and fear the deadlock of inactivity while their sell by date comes running to them.

Squeezed under a mountain of avocados,
that nobody can afford.


Ronaldinho vs Neymar, summer 2011