Simon Kuper explores how a small regional football club became among the most admired sporting organisations in history in a new book, as the world's best player Lionel Messi (pictured) confirms he's leaving

It was the same every match. His old coach Pep Guardiola explains, ‘After five, ten minutes he has the map in his eyes and in his brain, to know exactly where is the space, and what is the panorama.'

As football evolved all over Europe in terms of speed, skill and tactical innovation, Barcelona began to be outstripped by other clubs.

A chain of poor results, excessive spending and Covid was bringing the club that was once the best in the world to its knees.

In 2021 their star player, now ageing — he was 34 and too expensive for the failing club — had to go. The foundations of this cathedral of football weakened irreparably. An era was ending. Kuper, a journalist and prolific author, has always loved Barcelona — both the place and the club — hence this book. It started out as a history of the club through its greatest years, and an exposition of its almost perfect level of skilful, brilliant, dazzling football, until Barca began to fall apart.

Kuper's skill is that you feel you are present as these momentous events begin to explode.

But this is much more than a book about a football club. It is perhaps, above all, a paean to Kuper's hero, Dutchman Johan Cruyff, acknowledged as one of the greatest players of all time.

He was also blessed with a ‘quasi pathological case of self-confidence': after one team meeting as a player, he waited for the coach to leave the room, wiped the tactics from the board and said: ‘Obviously we're going to do it completely differently.' Cruyff's influence on modern football is permanent, with his emphasis on speed, flexibility, high pressing, electric passing and mesmerising skills. Never the fastest of players, probably due to all his smoking, he had an almost supernatural ability to slow the game down until everyone was in position to do his bidding.

The great Eric Cantona, supreme footballer and now a very funny actor, put it well: ‘If he wanted he could be the best player in any position on the pitch.'

Without Cruyff there would be no modern Barcelona.

Kuper is especially good on the granular detail of life at Barcelona. And it's a good life: relaxed training, unlike the brutal regimes at Atletico Madrid or Juventus, in a great city. If you have a couple of seasons at Barcelona, you can support your family for ever: in 2019, before the pandemic, the average basic pay at Barcelona was £10.4 million (€12.2 million) a year, the highest for any sports club on earth. Everything is handled for you, which is why Messi had no idea of his own illegal tax dealings. (He and his father were given 21-month suspended jail sentences five years ago.)

Food and wine is always plentiful and excellent. Many foreign players became wine connoisseurs playing for Barca. Kuper even includes tasty recipes for Barcelona staples, including something called leche merengada, a soothing drink to help players unwind and sleep, though it's unlikely to get you a £10 million pay packet.

Details of the players' lives are eye-popping. Young footballers would set up in a mansion in Barcelona with a huge entourage: their agent, physio, a few older relatives, their current girlfriend, plus random camp followers and old friends from home who have become financially dependent.

Diego ‘Hand-of-God' Maradona, who played for Barca from 1982-84, lived with a clan of friends and relatives, a personal doctor and trainer. A journalist who went to see him one afternoon when he was recovering from hepatitis recalls: ‘Diego was in a bed in the garden. Around him were more than ten people eating and drinking . . . It was the first time I saw white powder snorted, from a corner of the ping pong table.'

Barca's then manager, Luis Menotti, who also liked his nightlife, moved the team's training schedule from the morning to 3pm to suit their habits.

One agent recalls setting up three bank accounts for a new signing at Barca: a joint account with his wife, an account for their outgoings like rent, and a third account the wife wasn't told about.

Ultimately this superb book is about far more than football — it's about Spain, about Catalan culture, about the psychology of management, about developing youngsters, and crucially about the three remarkable men who have shaped the modern game — Cruyff, Messi and Guardiola.

And the moral of the story, as we look at the mess of today's Barcelona? That no matter how brilliant, sooner or later all
s must pass.