Thursday's Champions League group stage draw yielded one matchup no football fan in the world will want to miss: Pep Guardiola's new club, Manchester City, versus his formative one, Barcelona. It won't be Guardiola's first return to his old stomping grounds. During the 2014-15 Champions League semi-finals, Guardiola's Bayern Munich came up against Barca.
Pep Guardiola doesn't coach Barcelona anymore (he'll stop by the Camp Nou for a visit with Manchester City in the UCL group stage), but the Blaugrana can still tiki-taka teams to death.
During last season's UCL group stage, they did their whole "death by 1,000 paper cuts" routine on Roma and it won UEFA's Goal of the Season award. Messi, the finisher, is technically the recipient, but we think the whole damn team should get a trophy for that move.
Ronaldo confirmed his status as the best young player in the world after scoring 54 goals in 57 games across all competitions for PSV Eindhoven. “The Phenomenon” wasn’t even 20 years old yet when Barcelona became interested in signing the Brazilian.
Barcelona finally landed Ronaldo by paying a then world record fee of $19.5 million, with the striker set to join the side for the 1996-97 season.
There are no easy matches in the Champions League — or are there? According to Barcelona’s Gerard Pique, Real Madrid got the rub of the green with regards to Champions League draws last season.
Real Madrid’s route to the final included victories over clubs that were, at the time, hardly at the top of their domestic leagues. So, when a fan asked Pique via Twitter what he’d like to see from Thursday’s group stage draw, Pique couldn’t resist a very obvious dig at Real:
In the deliriousness following Brazil's Olympic win, Neymar has apparently gone a bit overboard and dyed his hair blonde. Apparently the entire team did this, which means that must have been some party.
Neymar with his blonde hair pic.twitter.com/ZaM3fAfPnF
— njrstats (@njrstats) August 21, 2016
Earlier this week at Barcelona practice, new signing Andre Gomes crashed his team-issued Audi SUV into the back of Luis Suarez's team-issued SUV. This doesn't strike a good way to endear yourself to your new teammates, but Europe is a weird place. Maybe Gomes was just looking for attention.
In July of 2014, FiveThirtyEight published an article entitled “Lionel Messi Is Impossible” which attempted to evaluate Messi’s goal-scoring abilities through the use of statistics and data.
One of the most ridiculous findings from all the number crunching was how much better Messi was than everybody else at shooting from distance. In fact, Messi’s efficiency from outside the box was almost as good as most other players inside of it.
Well, that’s that then. Barcelona have eliminated Arsenal in the 2016-17 UEFA Champions League round of 16, taken it to Paris Saint-Germain in the quarters and will finally receive their first stern test in the semi-finals.
Try as Arsenal might in their all-too familiar opening day loss to Liverpool, the Gunners were simply unable to overcome Barcelona, the Catalan giants throttling Sevilla 5-0 on aggregate in the Supercopa Espana.
The Barcelona squad put on their own mini Olympic games over preseason, trying out the different sports of the Rio Games. The one that came most naturally to them was a repurposed form of tennis, the one played with the head.
It’s not an official Olympic sport (yet) but watching the skill Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez possess means its only a matter of time.
Can you imagine an Argentina vs. Uruguay gold medal match featuring Messi and Suarez? Let's get a petition going.
These guys are out of control.
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Barcelona midfielder Arda Turan drew the ire of Blaugrana supporters by liking and retweeting photos celebrating Real Madrid’s 11 European Cup wins. The Turkish international then clarified that his “account was hacked for a brief period”, resulting in this outpouring of love for all things Los Blancos.
Two days ago my account was hacked for a brief period. During that period 1 RT was made and 2 photos were "liked" without my knowledge.