Barça in the New Millennium: The Other Barcelona Model

Abstract

We conclude here our pursuit of the transformations in the conceptualization of Barcelona, by exploring the impact of Barça’s colossal sporting success in its local and global fandom’s sense of the self, in so doing producing a fuller picture of the ways in which a neoliberal paradigm of subjectivity permeates the global image and reality of the Barcelona brand. It is our contention here that the club’s accomplishments at one and the same time launch from, and project back to, Barcelona and Catalonia as a model of behavior that modifies, validates, and empowers local subject positions vis-à-vis a global audience. This feedback process, we assert, has had consequences that go far beyond the strictly sporting arena. We are especially interested in looking at the role played in this process by some of the club’s players, coaches, and executives, and how they have come to be perceived as the kinds of ethical models of subjective and collective behavior that simultaneously and without contradiction confirm national stereotypes, and are the most coveted ones in a contemporary world where all human relations are considered to be at their best when framed by competition. In a process that is analogous to the one we analyzed in relation to the Barcelona citizen, our argument will be that the political, the critical, and the resistant are the media through which, by mastering their discourses and adapting them to its goals, the FCB neoliberal project achieves supremacy.