Henry wants to play in the US one day

Asked about the rumours linking him with a move to the Major League Soccer (read more here), Barcelona forward and French international Thierry Henry (31) has said in an interview with American newspaper The New York Times that he hopes it will be possible in the future:

"The other day, playing in the Rose Bowl, that was outstanding. The crowd responded so well. It was just brilliant. I'm a Barcelona player now. Whenever I talk about it, people think the next day I'll be coming to play here. That's not really the case. It's a wish, and I hope that one day it can be done. But I'm enjoying my time in Barcelona, I absolutely love it, but I wish that one day, it can be possible."

read the full interview report in The New York Times here


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Laporta: "They sign names, we have a team"

Barcelona gave an interview to American newspaper The New York Times.





Real has now spent over $150 million on two of the top players in the world in Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká. Does it worry you to see them bulk up their squad, and are you concerned about inflated transfer fees?
These are not the market prices. The reason they are doing this is that they have emergencies, so they have to take risks. Barcelona is their rival, and we won everything last season and that made them anxious. Looking to next season, you know that they need to motivate their supporters. They are buying names with great talent, but to join the players to be a team will not be easy for them.

It will be a very interesting season: we have two different models. One model is you build a team with checks and money. And another model is the one we have, where we have a trajectory, where we are mature, and identified with our culture. Of the players we have in our first team, more than 50 percent come from our youth teams. We think that it makes our club sustainable.

Now do you feel there is pressure on you to go out and sign a big name, or do you look at your staff and figure that you already have the best player in the world in Lionel Messi?
That’s right, we already have the best player in the world, Messi. But the most important thing that we have is a team that works. Like I told you, they sign names, and we have a team.

But you could argue that your club has done the same in the past. Barca made a big push for David Beckham in 2003 and, when it didn’t work, you went out and signed Ronaldinho.
It was different. At the beginning of our mandate, we signed Ronaldinho. But we also incorporated Rafa Marquez for 5 million and the second season, in 2004, we incorporated Deco, Eto’o, Giuly, Edmilson, Belletti. We were creating a team. And the difference is that we create FIFA World Players and Ballons D’Or, and the other model buys FIFA World Players and Ballons D’Or. Ronaldinho was not any of those things yet when he came to Barcelona. We created a team for him to be the best.

You said that they have to take risks now by bringing in big names. But last season you took a risk in the other direction last season by hiring Pep Guardiola, who had never managed at the top level.
At the time, we were sure that this coach had a lot of experience at our club. Pep was a player. He was a reference. He was captain. He knew our club very well. At the same time, he was very talented and very intelligent about football. And he was brave. We knew him as a coach of our second team and we followed him for a season. So from our point of view, it was not as risky as people said.

When you first took over in 2003, you said you wanted to create a revolution in football. Now, entering your final year as president, can you look back and say you’ve done that?
We wanted to create a philosophy of attacking, attractive football — the origin is the Johan Cruyff philosophy. It’s a mix between Catalan and Dutch football, with some touches of Brazilian and Argentine. And we have made this is our philosophy about football.

You’re a club with a global reach, but you’re also very proud of your Catalan roots. Historically, the club has even been an emblem for Catalan separatists and, under Franco, it was the last bastion of Catalan culture. And you’ve made it a point of your tenure to remind people that the club is a fundamentally local symbol.
Of course, it’s the flag of our country. We are Catalans. This is our identity. When we say we are more than a club, it’s because it’s a club tied to our culture. And we’ve been global being Barca, the authentic Barca, with our language, with our players.

read the complete interview here


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Barcelona Is Winning With Style

author: Braden Phillips
source: New York Times
date: 24 December 2008
editing: fcbtransfers.blogspot.com





For some, watching FC Barcelona play soccer these days is akin to reading a book that is hard to put down. So much is working well that many fans do not want the season to finish and yet cannot wait to see what will happen in the end.

At the heart of the plot is coach Josep Guardiola i Sala, who is often called Pep and whose only experience guiding a team was one season with Barcelona’s third division squad. When he was chosen to replace the Dutchman Frank Rijkaard, making him the Spanish Primera Liga’s youngest head coach at 37, many were hard pressed to see the rationale.

The question gained urgency after the team scored only one goal in Guardiola’s first two games in charge — a loss and a tie. But then, his cure for the team’s ailments seemed to kick in: Barcelona won 15 of its next 16 league games, scoring 48 goals. The team enters the winter break with 41 points, its most ever at this stage, leaving second-place Sevilla 10 points behind.

"This team has the possibility of being one of the best in Barca history, ranking with the best of Cruyff, if it can sustain it," said Carles Rexach, a retired coach and a former assistant to Johan Cruyff. Cruyff led Barcelona from 1988 to 1996, when along with four league titles, it won its first European Cup and erased Barcelona’s stigma as second fiddle to Real Madrid.

Considering that Barcelona finished 18 points off the lead last season, the team’s turnaround has been resounding. Even Joan Laporta, club president and staunch supporter of Guardiola’s promotion, expressed his surprise. "We had all the confidence in Guardiola, but it was hard to expect that things would go quite this well," he said.

"I’m going to try to seduce my players because I believe in the power of the word," Guardiola said in June at a news conference. "They’ll have to learn that they’re not worth much alone, that talent and inspiration can only become great when they are at the service of the team."

He has taken on less-heralded players, like the Brazilian international Dani Alves and Mali’s Seydou Keita from Sevilla, and the former Barcelona youth team player Gerard Piqué from Manchester United. He brought in 20-year-old Sergi Busquets, who played for Guardiola in the third division, demonstrating the vitality of the team’s farm system.

But a majority of Barcelona’s starting 11 are the same players the team fielded last season. The veterans Eto’o and Henry both attribute their resurgence to Guardiola. "Giving Pep the credit is not an exaggeration," said Henry, who scored the winning goal last weekend against Villarreal, the team’s most recent victim. "We needed discipline and his style of football, the Barcelona way."

Guardiola grew up less than 40 miles from Barcelona, attended its youth academy, La Masia, and played for Barcelona for 11 years, six under Cruyff, who gave him his debut in 1990 at age 19. Until Cruyff, Barcelona had no distinguishable style, but since then the team has melded its identity with his philosophy.

No one represents this more than Guardiola, "the first great player to come out of the Barcelona system with the Cruyff philosophy wired into his boots," said Martí Perarnau, a sports columnist for El Periódico de Catalunya, a Barcelona-based newspaper. Guardiola’s success is not so much a revolution as a return to the team’s roots. As coach, his rigorous training sessions emphasize passing, possession and pressure.

"If the ball is in the opposite side of the field, I’m relaxed; if it’s in ours, I’m not," Guardiola said, according to the Spanish newspaper El País. Barcelona controls the ball for more than 60 percent of the game, well above every other team in the league — not merely controlling it but relentlessly and methodically pushing toward the opponent’s goal.

The team’s slogan, més que un club — more than a club — has various interpretations. Once a symbol of democracy and Catalan identity during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Barcelona is still a source of regional pride. As part of a five-year charitable commitment started in 2006, it donates more than $2 million a year to Unicef, whose name is emblazoned across the front of the team’s jersey, instead of selling the space to a high-paying corporate sponsor.

In the end, however, the sheer pleasure of its style of play is one of the reasons Barcelona has the most paying members, about 160,000, of any soccer club in the world, and more than 1,800 team associations around the world.

They and countless other fans are riveted by the sight of Barcelona’s intricate attacks, with passes caroming from one player to the next. Or by the sight of Messi charging to the goal with the ball, not so much running as skimming over the field like a water bug, luring defenders and leaving a streaking teammate open for the perfect pass. Style is the name of the game at Barcelona, and that, more than anything, is what makes it més que un club.

read the full and original article here


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FCB Miami: Obstacles for Barcelona's MLS bid

author: Jack Bell
source: New York Times
date: 11 December 2008
editing: fcbtransfers.blogspot.com





It is better than even money that Barcelona’s joint bid for an MLS expansion team in Miami will win approval in March, but the Spanish club might want to consider some potential pitfalls of such a move.

Barcelona’s bid, in concert with the Bolivian businessman Marcelo Claure, is widely believed to be among the favorites for one of the two teams that are scheduled to begin play in 2011. Barcelona officials, however, have made it known that they would be prepared to jump in a year earlier if the opportunity arose. Earlier this year the club signed a strategic partnership with MLS, which may bring the club to the United States this summer and could provide other benefits.

There have been some questions about Barcelona’s motivation for entering a team in MLS. And there are two things peculiar to the American league that might give pause to Barcelona and its partner.

First, there is a widely held notion that Barcelona and other European clubs are “interested” in the United States market only to sell jerseys. There is some truth to that, but in Barcelona’s case, officials have made clear that any new team in Miami would not, in fact could not, wear the club’s famous blue and red jerseys; not to mention its many other permutations.

The blue and red jersey worn by the club in Spain, in Europe and around the world, is under contract to Nike, and MLS is a few years into an exclusive deal with Adidas. Would the new club even be able to sell the Spanish team’s jersey at its stadium on the campus of Florida International University?

Second, Barcelona’s chief executive Joan Laporta said the day the bid was announced that the new club would be able to benefit by using players at Barcelona academies in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico; hoping to showcase the young talent and possibly sell players on to European clubs. But how would the club get around the single-entity system where MLS owns all player contracts?

Changes may be made to the league’s structure, salary budget and perhaps the designated player rule when MLS and the union that represents its players negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement at the end of 2009. There is no telling how long it will take or what changes would be made.

read the full and original article here


Read more:
Interview with Barcelona partner Claure
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Barcelona's home-field advantage explained

American newspaper The New York Times had yesterday an interesting analysis of he home-field advantage in European football.

Unshakable Home-Field Advantage in Soccer World

Daniel Altman - New York Times

It is a busy time in the soccer world. The top teams in Europe and South America are playing multiple tournaments, Major League Soccer is heading for the playoffs, and hundreds of players are participating in qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup. With their squads stretched thin, clubs are looking for any kind of edge. The biggest edge of all could be playing at home — but why?

The home-field advantage is more entrenched in soccer than in perhaps any other sport. To lose at home is viewed as an unacceptable result by fans; inferior teams must be beaten, and good teams must at least be tied. According to the statistics, those expectations are more realistic than one might think.

In the last seven seasons of the English Premier League, the average goal difference a game among teams playing at home was a positive number, 0.39. Those extra goals translated into more points in the standings, too. With 3 points for a win and 1 for a tie, teams garnered an average of 0.57 points more a game at home than on the road.

The home-field advantage is uniform across Europe’s top leagues. In La Liga in Spain, the edge was 0.37 goals and 0.58 points over the past seven years. In Serie A in Italy, it was 0.40 goals and 0.61 points.

Inside the individual leagues, however, there are some stark differences. Of the teams that played all seven seasons in the Premier League, four had by far the biggest home-field advantages: Fulham, Newcastle United, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton. For each of those teams, playing at home was worth almost an entire extra goal, and 0.71 to 0.85 additional points.

It may not be too surprising that the top teams, like Manchester United and Chelsea, do not appear in this list. If a team wins all the time, on the road or at home, it has no home-field advantage. But Barcelona, the second-winningest club in Spain, holds one of the widest margins in La Liga — 0.70 additional points — at its legendary Camp Nou.

Indeed, some stadiums can create an intimidating atmosphere. Newcastle is known for its loyal supporters, thousands of whom wear their short-sleeved, black-and-white jerseys to matches even in the biting cold of the northern English winter. And perhaps most feared are fans of the Turkish team Galatasaray, with their tradition of hanging banners that read Welcome to Hell for the benefit of visitors to Ali Sami Yen Stadium.

You don’t need a big, intimidating stadium to have a big home advantage, however. Fulham’s Craven Cottage, in stylish southwest London, seats just 26,000 people — and the team spent two of the last seven seasons playing at Queens Park Rangers’ smaller Loftus Road ground while the Cottage was being expanded. Villarreal’s El Madrigal stadium, which at 0.74 points harbors the biggest home advantage in La Liga, has just 25,000 seats — more than half the population of the town of Villarreal. Compare that with 52,387 seats in Newcastle or 98,772 in Barcelona.

Read the full article here

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