Product Description

Founded in 1898, FC Barcelona or Barca, is the world's biggest and best-loved football club. Barca has more than 500 local fan clubs spread across the world, while its championship matches attract a global TV audience. Former players include such legendary figures as Kubala, Maradona, Cruyff, Ronaldo, Rivaldo and Lineker, and Barca has been managed by greats such as Helenio Herrera, Cesar Menotti and Bobby Robson. The club's honorary members include Pope John Paul II and opera star Jose Carreras. To unravel the background to the Barca phenomenon, Jimmy Burns has unearthed police files and long-forgotten newspaper reports. He has travelled with supporters and has talked to people intimately linked to the club, from managers and players to groundsmen and doctors, whilst also gaining access to those who have conspired to gain political and financial control.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143305 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 383 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
From the English businessmen who founded the club, through Cruyff, Maradona, Lineker, Venables, Robson and Ronaldo, FC Barcelona, European football giant and quintessential embodiment of Catalonian pride, has been built on the efforts of foreign mercenaries.

In interview and analysis, Jimmy Burns uses the experiences of these outsiders as his own passport to the heart of the Camp Nou, returning with a hugely enjoyable history of the team and it's fanatically nationalistic support.

Unique among the world's biggest clubs, Barcelona has stayed true to its origins as a quasi-democratic institution. It is effectively a private members club, made up of the 120,000 supporters whose subscriptions bankroll the team, but a sense of ownership extends across Catalonia itself.

At the heart of the book is the struggle for this unique identity to survive the commercial colonisation of the sport.

Burns is a sensitive and intelligent interpreter of what is becoming, for better and worse, a forgotten language of regional tribalism in football. It may not be many years before his study of this enigmatic club is regarded as a definitive memorial to the last great love affair of what was once a people's passion. --Alex Hankin

Review
'Excellent A densely detailed account of the history of F. C. Barcelona Coincides with Barcelona's 100th anniversary but it is not in the least pious' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Burns' examination of the club's fates and fortunes always goes well beyond the game itself Burns is a brilliant journalist Unmissable' TOTAL FOOTBALL

Manchester United
'Well-written, the book details the level of passion of a club that refuses to tarnish its shirt with a sponser and still belongs to its members.'

Customer Reviews

A history of Catalonia as much as of FC Barcelona
Jimmy Burns explains just how FC Barcelona has become the symbol of the Catalan nation. Burns takes the reader on a crash course through twentieth-century Spanish history and leaves the reader in no doubt that FC Barcelona enjoys a local status far removed from most clubs. This book is well worth a read, and will appeal to general football lovers as well as people interested in twentieth-century Spain.

A MASTERPIECE - Buy it!!
This book is NOT an 'official' history of the greatest sporting club ever to exist - its much more intresting than that! A tantalizingly comprehensive historical account spanning over 100 years of why culturally and politically Barca is the most important and unique club in the world. The shocking incidents, the profound, sometimes monstrous personalities, the storms generated by the mixture of it all make this one compelling read. From the founder Hans Gamper, a Swiss who committed suicide, to the cloak and dagger 'capture' of Ladislav Kubala, to the accession of Johan Cruyff - a far greater success as a coach at Camp Nou than as a player - the club's history is steeped in drama. Maradona, Ronaldo, Rivaldo need no introduction. You get the feeling Jimmy Burns really does have a passion for the club, but this is compromised by a meandering and sometimes confused 70 page openning to the book - which I suggest you leave until last. CONCLUSION - A excellent, superb book for all football fans alike, and anyone who an intrest for history. An enjoyable read for everyone else.

Burns's book is excellently researched but fails to fascinat
Barca: A people's passion

With a motto like "Mes que un club"("more than a club" in Catalan) it was always going to be a difficult task for Jimmy Burns when he undertook the project to charter the history of F.C Barcelona, one of, if not the biggest football club in the world. Burns previous work, the critically acclaimed Hand of God: The life of Diego Maradona, chartered the life of a great enigma and now, perhaps buoyed by this success, he has moved on to another great enigma, Barcelona.

The book is effectively sectioned into two parts; the main section where Burns takes the reader on a chronological journey from Barcelona's foundation in 1899 to the present day, and the short initial section where he recounts his travels with the "cules", the young, often fanatical element of the Barcelona fans to Madrid, Valencia and Manchester. As an opening to what is in essence a history book, this travelog gives the reader an opportunity to experience what being a Barcelona fan is all about.

Research-wise, Burns cannot be faulted, as the book features interviews with everybody from lowly bootboys and fans to the various presidents of the club, including current head José Luis Nuñez. He is thorough to the last even in his coverage of the civil war period when many club and official state records were lost; for example, who outside Spain would have known that Barcelona once had an Irish manager! (Patrick O'Connell 1935-6). F.C Barcelona is indeed "mes que un club", and if there is anything that this book does to perfection it is the emphasis of this fact. The inextricable links that the club has and had with Catalonian nationalism, the way in which the colours of Barcelona were used to express dissention at the Francoist regime, and the sheer fanaticism of the fans are all well documented here. However, where Barca lets itself down is in the feature that makes Burns's work so commendable in the first place. In his efforts to give the period of say, 1910 to 1920, equal importance and coverage as the period 1989 to 1999, Burns alienates the casual reader, for whom anything before the era of Venables, Cruyff and Robson is simply irrelevant.

Yet it is difficult to understand why Barca is not a more engaging book. It is full of little insights, small details that would normally set such a book apart from its counterparts. Maybe it is the overbearing positivity with which Burns treats all things Barcelona, and the anti-establishment, anti-Madrid sentiment which is seen on almost every page.

The blue and red melting pot of communism, fascism and socialism along with every other political leaning in the world mixed with a bit of football that is Barcelona seems unsure of what it is, and so does Burns's work. It is not a football book; it is more of a history journal interspersed with tales of great matches of the past. As such, it should be of great interest to Barcelona fans but it left me, a huge Spanish football fan, bizarrely cold, uninspired by a subject which I had thought would fascinate.

Buy this book if you question why, for Barcelona, winning everything is never enough. Buy it if you do not understand why even winning teams must contain Catalan nationals such as Pep Guardiola. However, it is heavy going, and if all you want to read about is Ronaldo and Rivaldo, books such as Bobby Robson's Year in Barcelona by Jeff King are a better bet.