I am sad to see that you’ve decided to start your article with these gruesome images that have nothing to do football. Our president, Laporta and Barcelona Execs had absolutely nothing to do with this dictator’s horrible acts, if he indeed perpetrated them. So, your attempt to mask your real objective, by adding the link to this article about a football match is very amateurish and simply lame; it almost borders intellectual dishonesty.

TO YOU MAN U AND EPL FANS:

I have a lot of respect for your team and its historied past but you are very wrong in qualify the type of football, we at Barcelona play, as boring.
Your sense of entitlement seriously rubs me the wrong way and I just wish that we could talk about the game and the way it is played for better or for worse.

First, we all have to agree that football is defined differently in England than it is in Spain or any other country. British football is simply an extension of the British male’s model of world:rough, unsophisticated (they do not find it necessary,having a stiff upper lip in British society is a GREAT virtue), resilient, goal or mission driven.Indeed, the ultimate goal in British football is to WIN. Henceforth, form matters very little to you in this endeavor.One can hardly argue this point nowadays because of the foreign presence in the league but the basic understanding of the game persisted and still remains. This fact is very obvious when you watch the EPL. Play is almost always vertical and that explains the long balls from either L/R backs and Centerbacks into the opponent’s central defense. Play is, therefore, shortened and form is somewhat lost because patterns are senseless during this exercise.

On the other hand,If you look at Holland, Spain,France,Brazil,Mexico and even Germany, you find different patterns of movement from players than you would find in England. Wenger’s Arsenal is the only team I can see attempt to play football the way the rest of the world does.

Now, is it a bad thing to be different? no! but I refuse to have anyone from Manchester United tell me that I am wrong for wanting to see football with all its intricacies: completed cycles of play both horizontally and vertically. The EPL sells itself short by mostly relying on force and speed to score goals rather than technical superiority,which is what Barcelona is all about.It is rare to see goals in the EPL that are team goals,you will find a few exceptions,but not enough!

Furthermore, just to emphasize the point, I remember, just this season, Real Madrid taking a lot of flack from their “own” newspaper, MARCA, for winning without sparkle after a fantastic streak of wins. It just goes to show how important that aspect of the game is to true football fanatics because those are the things we remember long after the game is over, long after players retire and long after trophies are placed in museums.

I remember Jean Amadou Tigana because he was elegant in the way he looked for either Platini, Giresse or Papin or Fernandez; I remember Roger Mendy because he showed the way forward in his team’s offensive effort; I remember Fernando Redondo because he was elegant within the context of his team’s architectural scheme, I remember Battistuta because he fit within his team and was in charge of completing Argentina’s offensive cycle of play…All these players and teams are remembered because they belonged to teams or simply agreed to follow the process of building, troubleshooting, moving for and with, and proding play. This aspect of the game is why I, like the majority of football fans watch the game, not the EPL’s “kick it upfield, bump into one another, and you might get a goal philosophy”. If I really wanted to just see this somewhat brute and almost “animal” athleticism then I could have simply chosen American football or rugby!!!

We are not weak for wanting something different from what the EPL has to offer, we are simply smarter about our football.