La Masia is a dream

Sometimes, when I'm assigned an article that keeps me up at night, it really keeps me up at night. I wake up in the middle of the night, grab the survival kit on my nightstand, a Bic pen, and a notepad, and half-asleep jot down ideas that I'll immediately discard the next day as absurd, embarrassing, both at the same time, and certainly unpublishable. But this time, Flick's Barça, about whom I have to write here, has eradicated my fear of ridicule by following him because risk is at the core of his essence. So here we go. Let's be consistent.

Half asleep, I've given Angus Young the body of what we understand as "good luck." I've imagined him running around, elusive, dressed as a schoolboy, strumming the strings of his guitar, but susceptible to being caught because, despite his last name, he's older: he's turned 70. And I catch him. Luck must be on your side as a crucial ingredient to initiate an extraordinary phenomenon, and this one is. Chance is always present behind great events. Stefan Zweig delightfully recounted it (moving from Angus Young to Zweig confirms that I'm still sleepy) in his book * Stellar Moments of Humanity* ; *Fourteen Historical Miniatures *, a compilation of events that changed the world as we knew it through a combination of circumstances, including chance as the decisive triggering factor.

This team forces us to write differently because that is what those who change us deserve.

And then, more awake, I ask myself, what the hell was Messi doing washing Lamine Yamal as a baby in a bathtub? Why has Cubarsí, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of carpenters from a tiny town called Estanyol, turned out to be such a good footballer? What did Xavi see in Fermín if, when you're sent on loan to Linares, it's never to return, the closest thing to a sporting scaffold? What intuitive material does Joan Laporta use to get it right with Rijkaard, Guardiola, and now, unexpectedly, Hansi Flick?

Here is the epiphany of a Barça characterized by work, effort, insolence, commitment, and the conscious embrace of a revolutionary change in international football, but which we cannot separate from magic and fortune, not as uncontrollable factors that detract from its merit, but rather the opposite, as they act as a multiplying factor of the fascination generated by its way of expressing itself and playing. The inexplicability of what is happening seduces us all the more because, let's face it, we didn't have high expectations.

There's more. They form a gang. They're insultingly young, uninhibited, fearless, and friendly. Unwitting bearers of a message exploding in the faces of emerging movements that deny diversity. This Barça has it all. Lamine Yamal's North African grandmother, who speaks Catalan while listening to the rap verses of the bad boy Morad mixed with the Oques Grasses gang , who lean more toward Cubarsí; Balde's African-Caribbean vindication; Fermín with a Catalan accent from his deep Andalusianism. That must not please the Catalan Alliance and Vox (the team led by Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams won the European Championship, what a cross, two black people), whose members would change sides if they saw them all coming, prejudiced transmitters of fear of the other, when they themselves are the homogeneous and dangerous ones.

This hybrid, transversal, united team, forged at La Masia, is linked to the great Barça players who experienced their birth in the youth system and saw the roots and trunk of their immense future grow there: Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Valdés, Piqué, Busquets, Guardiola, Messi… Once again, the circumstances are right to expand the Barcelona base, to promote a global proselytism that sells itself. They are the kings of enthusiasm. The boys and girls wear the Blaugrana shirt in the streets, their parents have reconnected, the grandparents contain their endemic defeatism, overcome by the storm and the fun. Why suffer?

Waking up the next day and realizing that Hansi Flick isn't a fictional character concocted after a rare sleepless night. Let's dream, let's be sensitive to what's happening. From time to time, it feels good, even to write without fear of making mistakes, breaking the boundaries of the pre-established in the image and likeness of this prodigious team.