The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making–and Unmaking–of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club

Financial Times reporter Kuper (Soccernomics) translates his decades of coverage of the world’s highest-grossing sports club into a fascinating record of its legacy. FC Barcelona, popularly known as Barca, was founded in 1899 by a Swiss immigrant accountant and became an essential fixture of Catalan society. At present, Kuper notes, there are about 150,000 dues-paying club members who elect Barca’s directors and who view their seat assignments as treasured status symbols. Kuper describes how Barca went from a humble local team to an international phenomenon with “five times as many followers” on social-media as the L.A. Lakers after opening offices in Hong Kong and New York in the 2010s; he also reveals a dark side to the story, detailing how directors have crossed ethical lines by signing underage players, and how, in 2020, they hired a communications company to create fake online media accounts to defend the club’s president. The team’s triumphs are framed by the career of superstar player Lionel Messi, the “single most powerful person inside the club” and whose $80 million-a-year salary is the club’s biggest financial charge. Though some information verges on too granular—such as Kuper’s painstaking parsing of the team’s nutritional regimen—the end result brilliantly captures the business of sports. This is likely to be the definitive account of the business side of the famous club. (Aug.)