Identity.
Culers hear that word so much that we think we know what it means, when it has so many different meanings that nobody, often even the people who are using it, know what it means.
“Barça has to get its identity back, then it will win,” is what we hear often. So what’s identity? A way of playing isn’t an identity. That’s a tactic. Guardiola employed a particular tactic to maximixe the qualities of the players he had at his disposal, just as Cruijff did. And Valverde did. And Koeman … well, let’s not go there, shall we?
Identity, in the context of FC Barcelona, is in so many ways some of the hoariest bullshit foisted onto a fanbase that this grump has seen in quite some time. People say, and even believe, stuff like, “I would rather lose playing the right way.” Pfft.
And if identity isn’t a way of playing, what is it, then? A neighbor of “mes que” ness, perhaps? Possibly? But even “mes que un club” means different things to different people. The club’s identity as something more than a sporting endeavor? Purity? An aspirational ideal to which an entity aspires? The official website spouts a lot of highfalutin’ claptrap when you look up what “mes que un club” means.
Smearing the camera lens is the mud that remains from the club heading off on a table dance in Saudi Arabia for money, under the helm of a man who described Qatar as a lovely place, even as you can stack the bodies of dead migrant workers into a pile almost high enough to make a wall of one of the soccer stadia being erected there.
And we’re back where we started, with identity. Maybe it’s about players, right? Great players who embody so much of a club. Nah. A player is only as great as the context in which they live. Is Pique as great a centerback if he doesn’t have a midfield and forward press that reduced much of his work to cleaning up loose balls? Is Puyol a legend without Abidal running up and back, side to sideline? Put Xavi in this clunky, false-starting Barça team and what is he then? What does he become?
What if, in this day and age of mega-money clubs, corruption and moral necessity, football is just … football. Clubs aren’t pure, neither are motives. Identity is marketing that people lap up and use as a brickbat upside the heads of the impure. It’s boring. So completely, insufferably boring, even as people fall for it, and we shouldn’t.
What is the Barça identity? Well, it hasn’t had one for quite some time. You could even argue that the passing of Fascism took some of the club’s identity away. Lots of things have. Playing a match behind closed doors while Catalans were outside feeling the pounding of truncheons might be one thing. Selling the shirt another. “We had to, so that we could afford to keep pace with the bigger clubs.” If that makes you go, cool. Meanwhile, talk to a supporter of Athletic Club about notions of identity.
We support a multinational based in Catalunya, a poorly run business with all the stability of a local butcher who’s overly fond of nice things and lives beyond his means. Is Barça still a Catalan club, a Catalan institution? Even that is up for debate, as a notion I have been sideeyeing for years now, even as Joan Laporta reassumes his rightful throne, bristling with Catalanisme.
FC Barcelona is a football club, a massive, moneymaking entity too big to fail, even as people were running around reporting and Tweeting breathlessly about the joint being on the verge of bankruptcy. A couple of big loans and it’s back to spending 60m in the winter window for an attacker. How short is the life span of austerity.
Maybe, just maybe, identity is a thing that makes us feel better, that assuages any qualms we have about being just another supporter of just another big club, one that joined forces in trying to wreck football as we know it for a bigger payday. A would-be “superclub.” Identity gives us something to parse things with, a template that lets us talk about ways of playing, “Barça DNA” and the like. It lets us feel superior to supporters of lesser clubs, assemblages without an identity.
It isn’t formations, it isn’t players. How can it be when a biting, kicking, scratching hellion like Gavi is a part of the same identity as Pedri the Accountant? It sure as hell isn’t purity. It’s almost a religion, the golden calf of Football the Right Way. But even that doesn’t have a clear identity as Xavi rolled in and as soon as Dembele was healthy, made him the playmaker, the catalyst. It’s almost something resembling modern football, even.
Identity is malleable, ultimately. It is whatever anyone wants it to be, from a vision of purity so complete it almost hurts your eyes to look at, to an empty boondoggle that sells shirts and grabs social media followers, the clarion call of a marketing huckster. There’s no shame in falling for that bugle’s cry. Because identity is also what bonds a tribe against the enemy, in this, one of the most tribal of sports.
Regarding the fascism line...Barcelona aren't the martyrs anymore, except in their own head. And we international fans? Who are Americans, at that? We never were, and yet we still tell ourselves these stories. Maybe that's the real identity.