


The Catalan kings

The management secrets of Barcelona Football Club

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John 3:16

The last paragraph sums it up. I'm not buying into the notion that Barca have found the holy grail and will continue to dominate football till the end of time with "home" grown players. Granted, they are by far the best team in the world right now, and one of the greatest of all time. But, three or four years from now someone else will take over. La Masia has been there for a long time (since cryuff was a player) and has produced its fair share of flops. This is just a case of all the pieces falling together at the same time (which doesnt happen often), just like the Man Utd. class of 92 and the Ajax team of 95.

Patryk Bhutan wrote:

"Barca is a well-organized TEAM, there are no room for disputes, minsunderstanding, hostility, angry or discontent. It is a team based on strong and solid phillars of self-confidence, strength, motivation, committment of each member, proud and solidarity."

Maybe you haven't watched Manchester United under Alex Ferguson for the last 20 years but these characteristics could just as easily be applied to United as Barca. Also, regarding what club is the best managed in the world over the last 20 years there is no question whatsoever that this is in Manchester. The consistency of results and phenomenal development speaks for itself and the debt only came about as a result of the American takeover.


I wonder whether this is a tip of iceburg of Spanish extravagance. Importing all the most expensive players of the world contributed to the Spain's current account deficits and thus external debts. I assume this kind of excess is everywhere in Spainish society. No wonder why Spain is part of PIIGS!


A curious article. Schumpeter opens his analysis by asking some straightforward (and very footbally) questions over the possibility that the current Barca team is the best ever and then links the success of the club to some management theory debates about growing one's own or buying in outsiders. He then offers some plausible arguments that the club's success might be down to things like using local players, team spirit, identity, values and the voting power of the club's members. The problem is, Barca's success is probably indistinguishable from its using of its oligopoly powers, and luck.

As Schumpeter rightly points out, Barca and Real Madrid receive the lion's share of the money from La Liga's TV contracts. They also have the most fans. As you might expect, the two teams display behaviour that one could see in any mildly manipulated competition: they share victories. The two clubs may profess to hate each other but they actually act like big brothers: since La Liga was suspended for the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939 it has only been won 23 times by a team that is not Barca or Real. WIth a little bit more investigation it would be reasonable to expect that one would discover implicit agreements between the teams over future contract negotiations and rules that regulate the league. It seems that the two also have political influence, given Real's recent use of loans from Spanish banks that would seem not to have been given on completely competitive terms.

Again as one might expect, Barca's oligopolistic position actually allows them a lot of mistakes. Whatever the arguments between one club president and another it's pretty clear that the team has spent far too much money on transfers and player wages, thus meaning it has struggled to pay the latter (all football clubs spend more than they receive because their profits are expressed in trophies, but few actually risk the cardinal sin of not being able to pay their staff). The buying and selling of Zlatan Ibrahimovic was a lesson in incompetent management. Finally, if one extends the period of analysis beyond the 2000s it would seem that Barcelona have long engaged in spending too much particularly through purchasing expensive foreigners who go on to play terribly. Finally, one might actually think that Barca, given its position, is actually not that successful. Given its experience of playing in the European Cup/Champion's League, its record of six finals and three wins is quite poor.

But what does explain the team's current international success? It's not possible to say that all the factors that Schumpeter mentions have no effect whatsoever, but there are other things in the story that are just as important and much less impressive. The final element is luck. After the Johan Cruyff period of the 1990s Barcelona embarked upon a strategy of developing the players they have now - ones that are highly mobile, very good at maintaining possession, and play to a system. This is all fine, but it seems to work best under the current offside rules rather than the old ones. In 2005 FIFA began to allow players to stand in what used to be offside positions as long as they were not affecting play. The result of this has been for defenders to stand further back (i.e. closer to their own goal) and thus create a more open and stretched playing field. Football is now played by teams in four lines rather than three. This makes it harder to get close to the player on the ball, thus giving teams that play with a strategy that relies on complete domination of the ball an advantage. Since the rule change Barca have won the Champion's League twice and the Spain national team (which has a lot of Barca players) have dominated international football. In short, a development strategy that was probably failing hit on a great spot of luck, thus suggesting that it probably wasn't the best strategy in the first place. If you want to learn more about the rule change, then this Jonathan Wilson article for the Guardian is worth reading:

Football clubs are intriguing things. The big ones command lots of power and respect, generate lots of revenue, spend lots of money, and their staff and customers seems to have a great time doing what they do. The problem is, unlike the sport itself, from which one can infer general lessons about fair play, trying hard, rule-breaking and suchlike, the clubs themselves don't actually offer very much insight about how to manage any organisation that is not a football club. The environment, the rules and the history of so many clubs and the leagues they play in are just too unusual to offer very much general insight.

Patryk Olszanowski

Barca is a well-organized TEAM, there are no room for disputes, minsunderstanding, hostility, angry or discontent. It is a team based on strong and solid phillars of self-confidence, strenght, motivation, committment of each member, proud and solidarity. Is is the most crucial key for success of Barca. Take a look on others eauropean team. Can you show another team similar to this one. I can't... Real Madrit, ManU, Bayern M etc have its own flaws and dissatisfaction or resignation are commonplace among players.
What is more, Barca has own strong-positioned couch who hold the horizont of dreams of each players and hasn't let anybody to cross this bound. This solidaity adn attachement to couch can be bulit due to longg-term common working. For this reason real couln't overcome the Barca coz the palyers ddin't bew able to build the soild relationship with Mourinio even on terms of several months.
In addition, break between couch adn playerw in France was a reason of dynamic failures of team and make its less respectable team worldwide. The colossus of football has evalueted and it takes many years to return on everyone's lips.

main streamer

"...the best club soccer team the world has ever seen". What? According to the IFFHS, Real Madrid was the best team of the whole 20th century and 9 Champions Leagues (vs. 3 of Barcelona so far) is the definitive proof.
Hala Madrid!


Not knowing the first thing about football, I cannot refrain from praising this excellent article.

Not that I know now a little more about football, but I got a couple ideas clearer on good management.


I'm not sure Schumpeter watches much football. Manchester United is the world's richest club according to Forbes. It has hardly any local players (except ageing Giggs and Scholes in particular), in the first team and has a fair record against Barcelona of recent years, and is the most consistently successful club in the Champions League history.

The management (20 years for the current manager unlike typical chop-and-change Barcelona) and business model is highly successful at developing its stadium, attracting the best players (as opposed to emphasising home grown ones), and attracting increasing overseas popularity even in the world's most successful domestic league.

In short, this current Barcelona team is unique in the way it plays its football but in management success terms it is not the team to emulate.Manchester United is.


Could Schumpeter please avoid the old, old cliché, that "Spain groaned under the fascist Franco regime"?.

Did Spain groan? Probably a lot less than did the UK under the socialist régime of Harold Wilson or the Conservative government of Ted Heath.

Agreed, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there was hasty retribution. My memories of Spain under Franco date back to 1949 when I first visited Spain as a young boy with my hispanophile father, and if there were groans I rarely heard them. Yes there was censorship of the press and radio, and later TV, but the people were freely outspoken - the best jokes always seemed to have Franco as their butt. There was also a strange degree of liberty in some ways. As a teenager, I openly bought in a village market a .22 pistol and ammunition which my father made me take straight back.

In 1963 (the year before I married here) I was able to protest against the execution of Julian Grimau, and in the sixties I bought Catalan magazines such as Serra d'Or, and danced sardanas in town squares, a fact which many of my younger Catalan friends find hard to accept, given the rewritten version of history which is now de rigueur in today's Spain.

Franco was of course a dictator (and, it is claimed, a strong supporter of Real Madrid), but the majority of Spaniards who lived through his "reign" appear to me to have accepted their life with no greater groans than one would have heard in the UK of the time.

The Economist is renowned for its fresh, crisp writing, Schumpeter, I never thought of you as a hack so tired that you need to fill your prose with worn-out clichés.


It is great when you can read things about the football club you love and it is written far from the madding noise made by spanish sport press, mostly controlled and biased by Real Madrid environment.
A small point about the illustration: the red stripes over yellow are the catalan flag, as you can see on They are four, not five.


Really enjoyed the article. Barca 'dominated by local players' though, just isn't the case.

It's common for British journalists to fawn over Barcelona’s Youth System as though rows of little Iniestas and Messis come sprouting off the astroturf there like cress off a damp tissue overnight. Messi is from Santa Fe, Argentina and Iniesta is from Albacete… just south of Madrid.

Spanish football’s romantic ideal of ‘la cantera’, fielding from your own ‘quarry’ – has long since been soiled and sullied by Barca who go about like bandits, ram-raiding every other club’s quarry and nicking all the best rocks – just like every other big club in world football. So all the gushing that goes on about that leaves me very cold. I imagine it leaves fans of proper cantera sticklers like Atletic Bilbao even colder.

Pedro’s from Tenerife for chrissakes. David Villa’s from Asturia. Jeffren is from Venezuela (but the national team is seeing to all that I think). What the Barca academy has produced locally of late, i’ll grant you, is a solid spine to build on. Ranging from the ordinary: Valdes, Puyol, Pique… to the ridiculous Biscuits. Two extraordinary players have come out of Catalunya itself in the last decade or so; one plays for Arsenal and the other is a cheat.

Considering that Catalunya and London have roughly the same population figures… and further considering the gaping abyss in quality between top and bottom of La Liga – asking a Catalunyan schoolboy who he’d rather play for; Barcelona or Espanyol – is a bit like asking a Londoner of the same age; who would you rather play for, Arsenal or Brentford? It’s easy to stand your ground at the top of the pile when you’re the only one up there.

If you look at numbers in the national teams; those born in London and those born in Barcelona, there’s probably not a lot of difference.

Just saying... not as local as you'd think.

Rant over.

…Arsenal… (in case you hadn't guessed!)

Jon Tseng

I think the balance sheet shows if you throw enough capital at a problem of course you will have results. In this respect Barca are no different from Man U, Chelsea or Real Madrid. Like the first commentator I am surprised this glossed over with a simple "no one knows how profitable Barca is, nor how indebted."

How can Barca both be a paragon of management and yet be unable to do something as simple as paying players wages?

The second commentator claims the balance sheet is overstated, but even the article they cite points out "Whichever way you look at this, what is very clear is that net debt has increased by well over €100 million in a year, which is obviously not something to be proud of."


Sir—The exageration of FCB debt belongs to the strategy followed by Mr Sandro Rossell to justify the team advertising Qatar Foundation. On the other hand, the accounts presented by Mr Xavier Faus, FCB's economic vice-president, are not consistent with UEFA's accounting practices. Following Mr Faus' numbers, Liverpool would have a debt of €578m, Real Madrid €683m and Manchester Utd €1,100m. Barça is not that endebted.


Slightly surprised that there is no mention of the 'challenges' with the accounts of FC Barcelona. The current President of FCB, Sandro Rosell, gained approval to commence legal proceedings against the previous President, Joan Laporta, in connection with the financial stewardship and the resultant losses incurred by the club under his presidency.

All of this arose over alleged discrepancies in financial reporting. While Laporta had claimed an 11 million euro profit for the 2009 – 2010 season, an audit overseen by the Rosell as new President uncovered instead a 77 million loss for the same period, and an overall debt of 430 million.


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