As president of Barça and a culé, I am very proud that today eight players from our team, Cubarsí, Pedri, Olmo, Lamine Yamal, Gavi, Èric Garcia, Ferran Torres, and Joan Garcia, can be crowned world champions. And also that many players from the national team…
An unprecedented final will decide the world champion today. Argentina and Spain face off, two nations passionate about football that speak the same language and have maintained for decades a system of interconnected vessels unparalleled in the international scene. The mastery Di…
Today Spain plays its final to win the Football World Cup. Beyond technical criteria, for years there have been several studies attempting to establish some correlation between sport and the economy. In their famous 2004 research on the Olympic Games, Who wins the Olympic Games, economists Andrew B. Bernard and Meghan R. Busse demonstrated that a nation’s total GDP — which combines the size of its population with its per capita wealth — is the best predictor of sporting success. The thesis is that money buys infrastructure, technology, and coaches, while the population provides the critical mass necessary for natural sporting talent to emerge. What do the data from this World Cup say?
How to start writing once again if four years ago in Qatar we thought that Leo Messi, finally pocketing his World Cup, would send everything to hell to retire and rest with his beloved family. Here we all are again, including him, in another final at 39 years old, exhausting the vocabulary of journalists, who repeat ourselves more than garlic trying to be original without succeeding. If only it were that he keeps playing… That’s not the point. The words would be different if he had failed, if he dragged himself as his birth date would suggest. How sharp the pens and voices would be then, always more clever for criticism than for praise. But no. Eight goals and four assists signed in seven matches. Again the best, GOAT, the greatest. Where does this guy come from? Why does he keep playing? It’s not for money. He already has enough to buy all of Rosario and Castelldefels. It must be because he enjoys it.
This is just football, but enough because football is everything. It is politics, sociology, and economics. It explains a society, the anesthesia, it unites and divides us, it drives us to put our arms in the trash and find the witch’s mirror, the one that tells us we are the most handsome, stupid, and generous, but, at the same time, that there are others just as handsome, stupid, and generous. And also, when the case arises, racist, irresponsible, and cruel. Belonging to a club, to a national team, these days defines us, integrates us, prevents us from answering unanswerable questions, places us in rituals and calendars tied to curiosity, to the amazement of the game as a life lesson, its spectacularization.
The Barça Masia football factory had a day of glory to remember in its history: January 10, 2011. That day, Leo Messi won a new Ballon d’Or and the two players who preceded him in the voting were Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández. The three…
France ended up swallowed by a whirlwind. Germany didn’t even come close to competing. Brazil is no longer Brazil. Italy didn’t even travel. The World Cup waits for no one. Only the best. This is how the most anticipated final has been shaped, and judging by what has been seen over the past month in the stands of the stadiums spread across Canada, the United States, and Mexico, the duel between the two biggest crowd favorites. Spain and Argentina. Challenger and champion. De la Fuente and Scaloni. Lamine Yamal and Leo Messi – long live La Masia –. All, with the Manhattan skyline in the background. What a final.
Spain is still immersed in one of the worst summers in terms of forest fires. Three times the area has already burned compared to the same dates last year. If last week the fire took the lives of 13 people and burned 7,000 hectares in Los Gallardos (Almería), these days the worst affected area is Aragón. In Los Gallardos there are still 20 firefighter teams working on extinguishing the fire, while in Orés (Zaragoza) 450 personnel are fighting a fire that, since Wednesday, has already burned 15,400 hectares and 1,000 people have been evacuated.
A marriage proposal ended up like a complete disaster in the Sant Roc neighborhood of Badalona. Four people were injured after a fight between two clans escalated into a new shooting. Two people suffered gunshot wounds, one was injured with a knife, and a fourth received a blow to the head. None of their lives are feared to be in danger.
Paying $100,000 every month to know in advance Donald Trump’s messages on social media can provide investors with very valuable information about how the markets will evolve in the moments afterward. Regarding this mechanism, which borders on a dubious practice of insider information access, the President of the United States aims to monetize his presidential position even more.
