A few years ago, when all was right with the world, Manchester United visited the Nou Camp stadium in Barcelona for a European Cup game. They were beaten by four goals to nil. Auguries of that humiliation were everywhere on the road to the stadium. English fans, drunken, sullen and dangerously herdminded, were corralled by mounted police on the tree-lined avenues outside the ground. Those sober enough to be allowed wander free just stood and gazed at the magnificence of the football cathedral they were about to enter. "Makes Old Trafford look like a toilet," was the most frequently-expressed statement of awe.
Manchester United have grown up a little since then, and in the same stadium last May they became European champions. Seen through the prism of the uncritical English media, it is a forgiveable misconception to believe that Manchester United are the most important soccer club in the world. However, unless money finally means more than romance, and business means more than passion, that honour is still retained by Barcelona. FC Barcelona is a century old this November. For soccer fans it is meet that this landmark should usher in the world's millenial celebrations. In terms of scale, democracy, politics and sheer football architecture, there is no club like Barca.
One hundred years on and Barca retains the essence of the beautiful game's romantic formula. Founded by a mix of British and Swiss residents, the club was originally conceived as a non-profit private association financed by the contributions of members. That ambitious structure wherein members, or socios, finance and run the club has been vital in the colonisation of the local imagination.
Barca has risen and fallen with every breath Catalonia has taken. The club was closed in 1925 by General Primo de Rivera and again in 1939 by Franco when his troops occupied Barcelona. Franco's love of Real Madrid and his execution of Barca president Josep Sunyol provided Catalonia both with a solid symbol of Spanish tyranny and it's first football martyr. The enmity of the generals copper-fastened the view within the region that Barca was the Catalan national team, a popular forum for the expression of spiky nationalist ideology.
Ironically, but perhaps inevitably in the post-Franco era, Barca have become an object lesson in being careful about what you wish for. Catalonia has gained considerable autonomy and Barcelona has bloomed into one of the worlds great cities, but the democratic ideals of its football club have withered somewhat. The socios - the 100,000 or so members of the club who are the aldermen of soccer politics - have seen their influence wane as the presidency of Josep Lluis Nunez has become more devious and more ambitious.
FC Barcelona, whose scale and rootedness once contrasted favourably with the Victorian paternalism of the ownership structure of Manchester United, has slavishly adopted the English club's business ethos. Nunez has stopped short of sullying the famous jersey with the name of a sponsor, but in all matters commercial Barca have shown the same avarice which characterises the Murdoch culture of the English premiership.
AS SUCH, the role of the socio and the role of the city has diminished. Twenty years ago, season-ticket sales covered the entire annual budget. Today that contribution amounts to just a third of the annual budget and the influence of members has dwindled accordingly. A grassroots lobby organisation, L'Elefant Blau (Blue Elephant), has grown up within the club's membership and in March 1997, on the day of a home game against Real Madrid, managed to get 15,000 members to vote in censure of Nunez.
The club president defeated the motion with 25,000 votes of his own, but the scale of the debate and its occupation of the city's imagination made a serious point. Nunez shelved plans for a massive theme park designed to surround the Nou Camp stadium and to empty the pockets of an estimated seven million visitors a year.
Seven years ago, when studies of Barcelona's civic regeneration amounted to a fullblown academic fad, the bullish Australian art critic Robert Hughes attempted an urban history of the city. For all his rigorous brilliance, Hughes managed to mention soccer just once in passing.
Jimmy Burns has written a different urban history, one that will be more recognisable to citizens of the great enchantress. The story of Barca is one which reflects the voices, passions and ambitions of Catalonia more perfectly than Joan Miro or Antoni Gaudi.
No serious anatomy of the city can ignore that chamber of the heart that is the Nou Camp. Burns has read Hughes. Hughes and anyone who really wants to know Barcelona should read Burns.
Tom Humphries is an author and an Irish Times journalist