The corporate tentacles of Barcelona support the idea that Real Madrid is sabotaging Barça's transfer policy. The origin of this half truth is the signing of Arda Güler, the Turkish prodigy who already reinforces the Madrid squad. It is stated that when Barça detects talent in some corner of the planet and begins to negotiate, Madrid interferes to raise the price of the operation and, above all, to reward the representative with a good bonus. The theory has enough precedents to be defended in court, but it has a problem: that is exactly what Barça did to sign Neymar.
The signing of Güler once again highlights the ease with which new figures emerge, backed by summaries of amazing plays. They are acts of faith that take us back to a few acts of bad faith from the past. Marketing inertia is devastating. As much as the soccer expectation, or that the poor experts in international soccer, who are fed up with preparing lists of possible talents, discover that they did not know the most on fire names on the market.
Now that Barça has been able to sign Vitor Roque (for figures that go against the financial health of the club), we can choose two hypotheses. First: that Roque wanted to come and put his desire before any other consideration. Second: that we have been able to sign him because Madrid did not want him. Interpreting market motivations is just as foolhardy as trying to make lists of possible leaps of faith. What we do have the right to do is exploit the pride of sympathizing with players who, despite the club's situation, choose to come to Barça. We can also relativize this interest and attribute it to the charm of the city (watch out for the clock, Gündogan!).
But I like that there are still players with a history who prefer to be faithful to a childhood fantasy than limit themselves to counting the money from Arabia. Until relatively recently, the merit of these loyalties was relative because Barça paid well above the market average. Most of the club's ills come from this extra cost. The other evils have to do with emergencies that continue to move in a territory of uncertainty and opaque transparency in which the communication of the directive has been installed. The most recent case of alarming news has to do with the demand for seats at the Estadi Lluís Companys. They will not reach 17,000, and those of us who believed that when the offer was opened to non-subscriber members the demand would skyrocket have been wrong again. Surely the 17,000 will know how to create a dignified and contagious animation environment. In fact, at the Camp Nou for years this must be the real proportion of active entertainers. The atmosphere has changed because the contagion does not occur between culés with a bloody pedigree but through outsourced culés who take advantage of their status as tourists to satisfy the long-awaited desire of visiting the Camp Nou. In the end, everything ends up depending on a rare symbiosis between soccer players (from home or abroad) who want to come and militant fans who aspire not to be treated as customers squeezed to the last drop of their credit card.
