Gerard Pique only made 2 fouls during game against Getafe. For each one, he got a yellow card.
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Pedro is the only Barcelona player to have scored in the 3 competitions this season: Liga, Copa and CL
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ისე სუპერთასზეც მაგისი დარტყმით გაიხსნა ანგარიში სევილიასთან, ავტო გოლი რო გაიტანეს....
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Accounting Battle Distracts From Barcelona’s SuccessBARCELONA — Johan Cruyff, the Dutchman who both played for and coached F.C. Barcelona, once noted that, in soccer, “it doesn’t matter how many goals they score, as long as you score one more.”
Winning, however, has not been the only thing that has mattered recently at Cruyff’s former club. Instead, one of Barcelona’s most successful presidents, Joan Laporta, found himself last month on the receiving end of a lawsuit initiated by his successor, Sandro Rosell, alleging unlawful accounting.
During Laporta’s seven-year tenure, which ended earlier this year, Barcelona enjoyed some of its finest moments on the field. The club not only won domestic and European trophies but also nurtured a group of players who formed the backbone of the Spanish national team that triumphed this year at the World Cup. The club also gained commercial clout — annual revenues rose from €127 million when Laporta took over to €415 million by the time he left. Furthermore, nobody is accusing Laporta of stealing money from the club.
However, the achievements have not been enough to eclipse allegations that, under Laporta, the club slipped into a culture of extravagant and unchecked spending, whose consequences were then brushed under the carpet by Laporta, rather being exposed in the club’s accounts.
The result was that Barcelona lost €79 million instead of making the €11 million profit that Laporta claimed for his last season in charge, according to the revised accounts presented by Rosell and approved last month by the club’s general assembly, which represents the interests of about 175,000 fee-paying fans who own Barcelona.
That in itself is a serious accusation. But the feuding has also transcended bookkeeping arguments because the club’s executives, past and present, insist Barcelona must remain a flag bearer for the Catalan people and live up to its longstanding slogan of being “more than a club.”
“Winning matches is not in itself sufficient to survive as president of this club,” Javier Faus, Barcelona’s vice president and the person in charge of its finances and strategy, said in an interview. While happy with the results under Laporta, Faust argued, the fans wanted more professionalism and “a change in the institutional way of doing things here, which has not been right for the last decade.”
The new management sounds determined to stop the feuding and let the courts decide whether Laporta and some of his executives are liable for unaccounted losses. This dispute is “already behind us and the only opinion that will still matter is that of the judge who will rule on the case,” Faus said.
However, Laporta, who is a lawyer, said in a separate interview that he would fight “all the way” to show that in fact his successor had used “indecent accounting maneuvers” to sully his name. Laporta is also accusing Rosell of spearheading a campaign to torpedo his political ambitions. Laporta recently started a party that seeks the establishment of an independent state and will compete in Catalonia’s regional elections Nov. 28.
“These people are managing to cast doubt on my reputation, but they are also hurting Barça’s image,” Laporta said. “They are also the tools of powerful political, media and economic groups who don’t want to see my political project flourish, which is to turn Catalonia into a European state.”
Laporta’s new party is not a front runner in the elections, pundits noted, but at the same time “you simply cannot separate this club from the wider canvas of Catalan politics and from the fact that we’re heading to key and divisive elections,” said Jimmy Burns, author of a book on the club.
Marc Ingla, a former club executive who tried unsuccessfully to succeed Laporta, said that, had he been elected president, he would also have questioned Laporta’s accounting but would have stopped short of legal action, to guarantee “institutional peace.” He added: “We’re stronger united, but now we’re unfortunately very divided.”
Burns said the legal battle was “potentially hugely damaging.” He added: “Barça is by its very nature a social, cultural and political family, and one unwritten rule was always that, however visceral you were in your attacks while campaigning for the presidency, you never then brought the most unsavory aspects of the previous administration out for public scrutiny.”
The club’s new management, however, is arguing that it is precisely this culture of opacity and impunity that needed changing, both as an obligation to the fans who are Barcelona’s owners and to set a higher standard.
“What’s important for me is to set an example that will last for 30 years or more so that once and for all whoever comes to preside this club knows that it has to be run like any other of the major European companies,” Faus said. “It’s about removing the mentality that anything goes in football, which is sadly the feeling that this sport generates at the moment.”
Barcelona’s lawsuit comes as allegations of dodgy practices have reached soccer’s top echelons. FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, recently had to open an investigation into whether members of its executive committee had accepted bribes from nations hoping to be hosts to forthcoming World Cups.
Laporta took the helm of Barcelona in 2003, with Rosell as a right-hand man. But the two then had a major fallout, which led to Rosell’s departure and which Laporta attributes exclusively to a disagreement over whether to keep Barcelona’s then-coach, Frank Rijkaard.
The accounting dispute also jars Barcelona’s image as a club that managed to avoid most of soccer’s financial pitfalls, which have pushed several other European clubs to the brink of bankruptcy — including clubs in Spain. Underlining these financial strains, Spain’s Parliament adopted in September a motion to press the country’s top-flight clubs to pay an estimated and combined €632 million in back taxes.
Barcelona, meanwhile, remains a rarity in world soccer in not allowing any commercial sponsorship on the front of its team shirt, offering instead that premium advertising space to Unicef, in line with the club’s charitable education program. Barcelona’s activities also cover several other unprofitable sports, including basketball, for which the club is planning to build a new arena.
When it comes to soccer, however, Rosell seems determined to root out the excesses of the past. One recent decision was to shelve a Laporta-era plan to have Norman Foster, the British architect, revamp the Camp Nou stadium, because the €300 million project was deemed too expensive. More austerity has also been coupled with a lower-profile managerial approach that contrasts with Laporta’s ebullient and imperial manner, to the point that Rosell surprisingly decided to cast a blank vote last month when the general assembly narrowly approved beginning legal proceedings against Laporta.
Meanwhile, the club insists the legal battle has done nothing to dent support from sponsors and Barcelona’s growth potential. Rosell is aiming to double annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to €120 million, by adding sponsorship contracts while maintaining sporting expenditure flat over the four years of his term.
Others, meanwhile, are setting their hopes on their favorite players’ winning more trophies and thereby reducing the prospect of further boardroom upheaval. “I’m not in a position to say who is responsible or not but what has been happening is a disaster for the club,” said Narcís Serra, a former mayor of the city and a fan for the past 55 years. “This should never have been allowed to happen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/sports/s..._r=2&ref=soccer 
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Football Club Barcelona, Més Que Un Club
