I think looking at the connection between the players and their respective clubs is the wrong way to look at it. Real Madrid are ran properly, Barca are not. And that’s not me talking, that’s the champions league trophies, La liga titles, and financial situation of the two clubs. For me, both players had teams built around them that suited them, the Real Madrid teams that won however many champions leagues were constructed by good business and highest standards in club football. The Barca teams that won their couple of UCLs and a few other trophies had almost by coincidence raised a batch of academy products that fit perfectly into a new pep model that no one had yet figured out how to deal with. For instance, the prime tiki taka Barca doesn’t rely on Messi, it relies on the immaculately balanced midfield. Messi’s production is a by-product of that midfield and style that was untouchable for a period of time. Of course Messi is a great player, but as soon as those midfields fall off his production is not the same. Exactly the same thing happens with Argentina. The Argentina midfield are extremely good and balanced, setting the table for Messi to be productive (fifa helping out aside). Certainly in comnebol, those Argentina copa Americas come from simply having the most efficient and balance midfield in the competition. In Qatar’s it certainly didn’t hurt Argentina to have a few calls go their way. Anyway, look at Cristiano. Completely different game, a goal scorer, a phenomenal athlete, and in a system at Real Madrid that allowed physicality and quality to dominate. So the two played in different team contexts, ultimately, it makes the whole conversation an apples and oranges debate. If you value athleticism and well organized club management you probably appreciate cr7 more. If you like sheer footballing quality and chaos in club management you probably appreciate Barca more. I’ve never met a Messi fan that was a pure athlete. And the reason maradona is the goat and not Messi is because despite his frame, maradona was as disproportionately athletic as cr7, and disproportionately technical as Messi. He was literally both. His problem was that he was disproportionately problematic
The Problem With Thomas Tuchel
All due respect to Tommy T, he had some relative success at Dortmund, he couldn't manage the egos at PSG, he put a very well constructed but wrongly used Chelsea squad into a wide and compact 343 (3421) and new how to neutralize Pep's personnel (not system, mind, personnel) and got a gift of pep over think that played directly into Chelsea's hands. Then he started believing that he was some sort of patron saint of the club shop and what everyone in the Chelsea club shop was saying. Then Abramovich left, and he fell out players with which he had just won the champions league, he fell out with his new owner at Chelsea, he fell out with his then current wife, and he moved to Munich to hover in waiting for the Bayern Munich shot callers to get skittish on young Nagelsman, which they did. Directly got knocked out of the pokal with ideas the Bayern players clearly didn't believe in, fell backward onto the Bundesliga title when BVB completely laid an egg on the last day of the season, he fell out with the entire club leadership AND squad in about 3 months at Bayern and literally spent half of his tenure antagonising club executive and first team players and lost the Bundesliga title for Bayern in the first time in more than a decade.
Basically I disagree with the methods.
GENESIS 1 — the socio-evolutionary origins
Ancient hunter gatherer peoples worked together to bring about the strengths of one another in order to survive. Standing in the middle of a frozen plain, looking at a pack of mastadons, there is naught but scarcity for your average upright standing homosabien. Therefore the idea of unity became imperative almost as soon as they could grasp the idea of it. Now they could organise, they could talk amongst themselves and they could come up with a plan or a kind of coordinated structure that could isolate one of the mastadons, and get the thing outnumbered and harvest it. and then it would be happy times, they could bring the mastadon carcass back to their little gang of frozen plain hunter/gatherers and they could use every last inch of the thing the had conquered. We are a species that love a cooperative effort.
When one tribe would come up against another tribe out on the contested terriorty, between the unarticulated spaces between the two groups, it was only reasonable that they would use the same principles that brought success in the mastadon hunt; organize yourselves, put yourself in places that you can get the advantage and take what was up for grabs. If one group was better at contesting for the spaces and territories, they got them. If the two groups found themselves to be essentially equal, there would be an approximate middle ground and the space could be reasonably and respecitvely shared.
This idea of contesting between two groups was so effective and existed so early that we’ve probably been holding some version of these contests for hundreds of thousands of years. In development of the contest, it becomes impractical to erradicate all possible opponents, both on a logistical level and and broader, more macro level. The groups needed some stablility of agreement between themselves in order to hold the territory they stood. The known, but stalemated enemy is always safer than the unknown, unforeseen predator. So why repeatedly march your best warriors, or hunters, or tribes into slaughter when you can establish rules of engagement and have a mutual agreement of what the spoils will be for a victor in not war, not a hunt, but a competition. Instead of having everyone bring their own martial weapons what if there was just one weapon alloted for the entire group? A single weapon contested for possesion by both sides. A game within the game. And for good measure, why don’t we make the point of having the weapon to be able to charge down the proverbial mastadon the other side is simultaneously attempting to protect? Now we are stacking multiple layers of strategy and motive on top of each other while we’re doing one single thing; competing for a multifaceted claim to superiority, within the framework of the rules of engagement. It’s a lot more logistically stable for your tribe, and the other tribes, and it still allows for a very helpful output of structuring a macro level social hierarchy in your tribe, and amongst all the other tribes in this competition. Now instead of bloodshed and annihilation we have strategy and sustainability over time. It is now no longer literally life or death but we can still treat it as such, that slakes the thirst of our inner hunter/warrior but without the costs to the greater tribe and the entire population of the frozen plain.
There are those who don’t understand where the passion and dedication comes from. Why people are so excitable and so caught up in a game that can bring out the worst in ourselves. There are moments that transcend rationale and are so evocative and so overwelming that they are only experienced as slipstream unadulterated unintellible emotion. This game, for better or worse, goes right down into the roots of human beings. Deep down in to the parts of our brain that have been around for as long as we have been able to walk as a species, perhaps longer.
When you can overlay the evolutionary perspective over the mundane and even toxic landscape of the beautiful game, you can begin to understand why these strange, wonderful, agonizing, glorious, heart-wrenching moments mean so much to the people that expereience them in real time. You can begin to understand why we love this game.
Inception Point — Boogeyman FC
THE BOOGEYMAN — the abstract idea of an entity that brings into reality unforeseen chaos. The personification of the absolutely uncertain. The ultimate outsider and therefore existential threat to the status quo. The name given to all potential negative connotations and outcomes.
Boogeyman FC is a platform to think, explore, and question both abstract ideas and actual, real-world interaction with the game of football. As an intuitive introvert, my brain never really stops processing data, as a adorer of the Beautiful Game, Liverpool FC, central defensive midfielders, and all things pertaining to the culture of the game of association football, BFC is where I can set down thoughts, test out, question my own perceptions, as well as document what to me is essential a Tao-ist lifestyle; a ‘living practice of football’.