More Than a Club: SI's Wahl Looks at FC Barcelona

Yesterday's post referred to an article in the New York Times about US Soccer adopting an academy model similar to that in Europe.  Along those lines is an article by super soccer writer Grant Wahl in Sports Illustrated about a team many consider the greatest of all time, FC Barcelona.

Wahl's comprehensive piece explores the history of Barca, as it's called, and examines the roots of the current success, including its own academy program, which takes boys as young as 8, including 12-year old American, Ben Lederman from Los Angeles, and trains them to be soccer players.  They must be doing something right.  As Wahl notes, "In Barca's Champions League game against Spartak Moscow on Sept. 19, eight of the team's 11 starters-including Lionel Messi, the world's preeminent player-were products of the club's youth academy."  Messi, now 25, joined the club at age 12.

"The FC Barcelona motto - Mes que un club, Catalan for 'More than a club' - is deliberately open-ended. In one sense it refers to Barca's social mission as a 113-year-old organization with 118,000 dues-paying members who vote in elections for the club's leaders. For years Barca was the only major soccer team that refused to sell space on its jersey to a corporate sponsor, before making the novel decision in 2006 to donate about $2 million a year and put UNICEF's logo there."

The subhead under the article's title declares that FC Barcelona is "more than a club, more than a champion, more than Messi.  It is the embodiment of a sporting ideal that has made it beloved across the globe." Imagine someone writing that about the Yankees or the Green Bay Packers or just about any other American professional team.

 Another version of the story is available at SI's website.