1. Yet the strangest purchase of the Bartomeu era was Matheus Fernandes. In January 2020, Barça signed the unknown 21-year-old reserve midfielder from the Brazilian club Palmeiras. The transfer fee was €7m, plus €3m in potential add-ons. Fernandes was almost a secret signing. Barça never gave him an official presentation. After a spell on loan at little Valladolid, where he played just three matches, he returned to the Camp Nou and was given the “Covid” shirt number 19, which nobody else wanted. Last season, “the Brazilian Phantom” played 17 minutes for the first team.
Nobody could work out why Barça had bought him. Palmeiras’s sporting director, Alexandre Mattos, explained later that he had somehow lured Abidal to come and see the club’s reserves train. “At that moment, they called me crazy: ‘You want to sell a player from Palmeiras reserves, who doesn’t play much, to Barcelona?’” One wonders what Messi made of Braithwaite and Fernandes.
Barcelona’s baffling collapse is the biggest football story of the week, so here’s an extract from Simon Kuper’s forthcoming book on the club, published in this weekend’s Financial Times. (€)
2. At the heart of it is Messi, that inscrutable maestro who has dominated the game’s imagination for the last 17 years or so. While he has maintained astonishing levels of excellence up to his 34th birthday in June, the club around him has crumbled. Disastrous overspending, including – but not limited to – the €160m signing of Philippe Coutinho, 21st century football’s MySpace acquisition. The rancorous reign of former president Josep Maria Bartomeu did so much damage, not least leaving Messi disenchanted and betrayed.
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Yet still nothing compares to the jaw-dropping financial mismanagement of a club that had the chance to be the game’s most compelling brand and its most successful organisation. While Barcelona publicly railed against the sale of Neymar to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017, that record fee of €222m briefly kept the club in the black. In recent months, as the darkness has truly set in, they have tried to wrangle players into 60 per cent wage cuts to finance the deal for Messi. Quite how a loyal soldier like Sergio Busquets feels about that one has to wonder. Meanwhile, there have been no takers for Coutinho, or Antoine Griezmann, or anyone else whose exit might have cut their costs.
And in the wake of Messi’s revelation, Sam Wallace of the Telegraph takes a look under the bonnet of the Barcelona clown car. (€)
3. Kenichiro Fumita was crying so hard that he could barely get the words out.
“I wanted to return my gratitude to the concerned people and volunteers who are running the Olympics during this difficult time,” Mr. Fumita, a Greco-Roman wrestler, said between sobs after finishing his final bout at the Games this week.
“I ended up with this shameful result,” he said, bobbing his head abjectly. “I’m truly sorry.”
Mr. Fumita, 25, had just won a silver medal.
In what has become a familiar — and, at times, wrenching — sight during the Tokyo Olympics, many Japanese athletes have wept through post-competition interviews, apologizing for any result short of gold. Even some who had won a medal, like Mr. Fumita, lamented that they had let down their team, their supporters, even their country.
For the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the win-at-all-costs mentality that has left Japanese Olympians apologising for winning silver medals.
4. When tragedies happen, the handy fallback is to say it puts sport into perspective. That the result of a game, Ulster final or not, doesn’t much matter when you’re lowering a 19-year-old into the ground.
But while that is true, up to a point, it doesn’t quite sit right either. If we dismiss football as being inconsequential, we diminish the role it played in making Ógie Duffy who he was. It was what he was best at, what he put the most of himself into, what gave him his greatest form of expression.
Blithely saying his death puts football in perspective ignores the fact that football itself was the perspective through which he saw his life. After all the emotion of the past fortnight, the county will feel they owe him more than that.
5. Even those of us who have reported directly from the Big Top have history here, tracking down the damaged and the heartbroken with almost cartoonish solemnity to dredge for explanations. Rio was this writer’s sixth Olympics, yet we pitched up there with much the same emotional clumsiness we’d brought to Atlanta 20 years earlier.
When a visibly distraught Sanita Puspure climbed out of her boat at the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon – denied a place in the women’s single sculls semi-finals by 0.65 of a second – we cluelessly enquired if her fractionally too late surge for the line felt like an ‘opportunity missed’.
“God, what a question?” replied Puspure, stiffening palpably with anger.
A few deep breaths later, she summoned the courtesy to chat, albeit eyes still glazed with devastation. Coverage of an Olympics throws up a small multiple of moments like that. For the athletes, it must feel like a circus opening with the tigers uncaged. Imagine subjugating yourself to a dream so little understood by so many of those chronicling the detail of your big moment?
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The baffling collapse of Barcelona and the rest of the week's best sportswriting
1. Yet the strangest purchase of the Bartomeu era was Matheus Fernandes. In January 2020, Barça signed the unknown 21-year-old reserve midfielder from the Brazilian club Palmeiras. The transfer fee was €7m, plus €3m in potential add-ons. Fernandes was almost a secret signing. Barça never gave him an official presentation. After a spell on loan at little Valladolid, where he played just three matches, he returned to the Camp Nou and was given the “Covid” shirt number 19, which nobody else wanted. Last season, “the Brazilian Phantom” played 17 minutes for the first team.
Nobody could work out why Barça had bought him. Palmeiras’s sporting director, Alexandre Mattos, explained later that he had somehow lured Abidal to come and see the club’s reserves train. “At that moment, they called me crazy: ‘You want to sell a player from Palmeiras reserves, who doesn’t play much, to Barcelona?’” One wonders what Messi made of Braithwaite and Fernandes.
Barcelona’s baffling collapse is the biggest football story of the week, so here’s an extract from Simon Kuper’s forthcoming book on the club, published in this weekend’s Financial Times. (€)
2. At the heart of it is Messi, that inscrutable maestro who has dominated the game’s imagination for the last 17 years or so. While he has maintained astonishing levels of excellence up to his 34th birthday in June, the club around him has crumbled. Disastrous overspending, including – but not limited to – the €160m signing of Philippe Coutinho, 21st century football’s MySpace acquisition. The rancorous reign of former president Josep Maria Bartomeu did so much damage, not least leaving Messi disenchanted and betrayed.
Yet still nothing compares to the jaw-dropping financial mismanagement of a club that had the chance to be the game’s most compelling brand and its most successful organisation. While Barcelona publicly railed against the sale of Neymar to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017, that record fee of €222m briefly kept the club in the black. In recent months, as the darkness has truly set in, they have tried to wrangle players into 60 per cent wage cuts to finance the deal for Messi. Quite how a loyal soldier like Sergio Busquets feels about that one has to wonder. Meanwhile, there have been no takers for Coutinho, or Antoine Griezmann, or anyone else whose exit might have cut their costs.
And in the wake of Messi’s revelation, Sam Wallace of the Telegraph takes a look under the bonnet of the Barcelona clown car. (€)
3. Kenichiro Fumita was crying so hard that he could barely get the words out.
“I wanted to return my gratitude to the concerned people and volunteers who are running the Olympics during this difficult time,” Mr. Fumita, a Greco-Roman wrestler, said between sobs after finishing his final bout at the Games this week.
“I ended up with this shameful result,” he said, bobbing his head abjectly. “I’m truly sorry.”
Mr. Fumita, 25, had just won a silver medal.
In what has become a familiar — and, at times, wrenching — sight during the Tokyo Olympics, many Japanese athletes have wept through post-competition interviews, apologizing for any result short of gold. Even some who had won a medal, like Mr. Fumita, lamented that they had let down their team, their supporters, even their country.
For the New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at the win-at-all-costs mentality that has left Japanese Olympians apologising for winning silver medals.
4. When tragedies happen, the handy fallback is to say it puts sport into perspective. That the result of a game, Ulster final or not, doesn’t much matter when you’re lowering a 19-year-old into the ground.
But while that is true, up to a point, it doesn’t quite sit right either. If we dismiss football as being inconsequential, we diminish the role it played in making Ógie Duffy who he was. It was what he was best at, what he put the most of himself into, what gave him his greatest form of expression.
Blithely saying his death puts football in perspective ignores the fact that football itself was the perspective through which he saw his life. After all the emotion of the past fortnight, the county will feel they owe him more than that.
For The Irish Times, Malachy Clerkin celebrates the all-too-short life of Brendan Óg Ó Dufaigh.
5. Even those of us who have reported directly from the Big Top have history here, tracking down the damaged and the heartbroken with almost cartoonish solemnity to dredge for explanations. Rio was this writer’s sixth Olympics, yet we pitched up there with much the same emotional clumsiness we’d brought to Atlanta 20 years earlier.
When a visibly distraught Sanita Puspure climbed out of her boat at the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon – denied a place in the women’s single sculls semi-finals by 0.65 of a second – we cluelessly enquired if her fractionally too late surge for the line felt like an ‘opportunity missed’.
“God, what a question?” replied Puspure, stiffening palpably with anger.
A few deep breaths later, she summoned the courtesy to chat, albeit eyes still glazed with devastation. Coverage of an Olympics throws up a small multiple of moments like that. For the athletes, it must feel like a circus opening with the tigers uncaged. Imagine subjugating yourself to a dream so little understood by so many of those chronicling the detail of your big moment?
And Vincent Hogan of the Irish Independent chronicles the clumsiness when the media take a day-trip to the most important day of an athlete’s lives. (€)
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