United’s rematch with Barca already a smash hit as football thrills USA

By Jeremiah Tittle

In Washington

29 July 2011

If evidence were needed that America is turning on to soccer like never before – and that good quality teams can attract massive live audiences – then look no further this weekend than the Champions League final rematch between Barcelona against Manchester United at FedEx Field just outside Washington DC.

The home of the Redskins will be packed to capacity and it won’t be the only huge crowd of the summer.

Note some of the other gates at matches in the World Football Challenge – which serves as a cakewalk pre-season for European clubs taking on, among others, considerably inferior Major League Soccer clubs in the middle of their season in which they should be in top form. (An explanation of the WFC is here and the official home page is here.)

You’ll see New England Revolution drew more than 50,000 as they lost 4-1 to United earlier this month, while LA Galaxy attracted more than 56,000 as they lost by the same score to Real Madrid. There have been other crowds in the 50 and 60 thousands.

Of course there have been some smaller gates for smaller names but the interest is there – and real, and growing. And the Big One this weekend is the cherry on the top.

It’s the rematch. Barca v United is truly the most marketable redux.

The growth in popularity of these two clubs and of the sport in America is evident when examining the increase in viewership of the 2011 UEFA Champions League Final – 4.2m viewers tuned in on 28 May to see this power packed matchup, a 91 per cent increase over last year. It was 86 per cent up on the same pairing in the fixture in the final in 2009!

Furthermore, Washington, DC carried the highest TV rating (3.3) ahead of local markets Seattle (2.9), New York/Providence (2.8), and Los Angeles (2.7).

FOX Deportes’ Spanish-language coverage on the 2011 final was the highest-rating Champions League match ever on a Spanish-language sports network, up 206 per cent on the 2010 final.

This rematch is a tale of two cities, two gigantic brands. United were recently named the most valuable sports franchise in the world by Forbes magazine at $1.86bn (£1.15bn). They are the reigning champions of the world’s most lucrative league having claimed their 19th championship breaking the tie with Liverpool for the most league titles.

Barcelona are ranked only fifth on the Forbes list, valued at $975m (£599m). Yet as sportingintelligence’s most recent salary report showed, Barcelona players earn the highest salaries in all of football, 15 spots above Manchester United’s average player pay.

Barca players raked in £95,081 per week (£4.9m per year) in the period reviewed while Manchester United pay two-thirds that amount per player, or £61,373 per week (£3,2m per year). Lionel Messi and Wayne Rooney are the best paid players at their respective clubs with large six-figure weekly pay packets. Arsene Wenger scoffs at such excess.

Can it be said without incredulity that Barcelona are a microcosm of Spain since both team and nation appear to have spent themselves into deep debt? Perhaps, but one wouldn’t want to generalise about Barcelona representing all of Spain in any other area.

Catalan is spoken with fervor in only the eastern territory of the Iberian peninsula, and over the years of this football club’s existence – a publicly owned institution similar to the Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin Stateside – the club’s identity has been woven into the fabric of this flavorful culture wrapped in appropriately colorful kits. (Note: Barca and ‘the Pack’ each won their respective world championships in 2011).

The people own the team, and the people are willing to spend to win. But winning isn’t everything, is it?

Try telling that to Sir Alex Ferguson. Surely only one thought will cross the minds of the Red Devils on Saturday wearing their fresh blue and black away kits: revenge.

To the organizers of the World Football Challenge, this dream rematch means something altogether different: Ker-ching!

No Messi? No Chicharito? No problem.

In this game – the world’s game – it’s a winning argument to say that a truly marketable rivalry has developed between Barcelona and Manchester United, the clear number one and number two football clubs in the globe.

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Jeremiah Tittle is manager of sports programming for Sirius XM Satellite Radio overseeing production on The Football Show with Giorgio Chinaglia and Charlie Stillitano and Basketball & Beyond hosted by USA Olympic head coach Mike Krzyzewski. He also serves as an adjunct professor at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Follow Jeremiah on Twitter at @wwwjt.

Safer in the City? Back to Basics in Iraqi Football

Post-surge sporting events in Baghdad are about as secure as Super Bowl XVIII these days. How then is it possible that an hour south of the capital in Hillal a Buhairat striker one-on-one with the goalie in the final minute of play poised to tie the 0-1 match be fatally shot in the head by an opposing fan from the stands? And only a couple of days later, an off-duty police officer celebrating the win of his Sinjar club’s 2-1 victory by firing his gun into the air, lost control of his weapon fatally shooting the 18-year-old winning goalie, Mohammed Amin, according to the New York Times. What do these recent examples tell us about life in Iraq?

The passion of sport in Iraqi society offers a profound lens by which one may analyze what it’s like to be Iraqi. From the outside looking in, it may appear that the violence in Iraq is so pervasive that one becomes complacent. But what of the inside looking out? How would one detail the evolution of the Iraqi identity through dictatorial oppression, war, and whatever one would call the current status of existence?

Prior to the unnecessary US invasion of Iraq, playing football for the National Team wasn’t exactly the ultimate honor that one might expect. Under the direction of Uday Hussein, football players of the highest caliber were tortured for poor play. According to Eamonn Brennan of Bay Area NBC News, “He caned their feat, forced them to kick a concrete ball, and kept scorecards of how many times a player should be beaten depending on how poor the player's performance was.” The sport’s tremendous popularity would cause a prodigious athlete to strive for success, but being named to the National Team would undoubtedly be a bittersweet accomplishment with pending physical anguish never mind the mental stress to perform at the highest level.

It’s this sort of dual existence with competing motives that won’t allow the Iraqi citizen to lead a fulfilling life. This feeling of knowing yourself and striving to be better, yet being all too aware of what outside forces are lurking and might sink your progress which is quite debilitating. It’s analogous to W.E.B. Du Bois’ description of the double-consciousness experienced by the post-slavery American Negro in his essay ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’ in The Souls of Black Folk.

“Born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this…world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the evolution of the other world…One ever feels his two-ness…two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

As Iraqi security forces and civilian deaths have decreased to a consistent but more manageable lull, the threat on general safety has not disappeared, and 18 months from Obama’s promised US Troop deployment, a sovereign nation will find security no less tricky. The same football stadium in Baghdad in which US Troops discovered buried weapons today is relatively safe. But outside of the capital, there is a feeling of increased risk of peril at sporting events.

The parents of Mohammed Amin, the late high school senior, know the reality of this risk all too well. Enraged, they have demanded “so-called blood money” from the 28-year-old officer Jawad Kadham who is currently in custody, charged with recklessly discharging an official weapon and with negligent homicide. He will have his day in court and so will the spectator determined to govern the outcome of the amateur match in Hillal by firing his weapon on the field. How do these instances of violence shape the collective psyche when parents can not trust their children to compete in the nation’s most popular sport without fearing for the lives of their young?

Brooklyn-born psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps evaluate the fundamental roadblocks prohibiting Iraqi citizens from experiencing fulfillment.

Maslow contends that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder keep an individual from ascending to the next level. In other words, someone dying of thirst quickly forgets their thirst when they have no oxygen. Therefore, if the ‘Security Need’ just above the need for food and water is not satisfied, how can Iraqi families build the next generation’s quality of life to the point of realizing self-actualization? How can community be formed toward a purpose of bettering the culture as a whole? The answer is it won’t. It can’t.

Not until the safety of its citizens is ensured and justice is served to those who strike with violence can the Iraqi culture grow up and set their sights on achieving new heights. On the field of play, each player should feel a single consciousness, a uniform purpose seeking success without trepidation, striving to raise the trophy without fear of upsetting the balance of life and death, but of losing the match.

Maybe today it’s not the reality of life in Iraq as the culture has not had the luxury of progressing beyond satisfying the basic needs of human life. As Iraq regains control of its own governance, one can only hope for the culture’s sake that fears of civil war subside and peace remains. For the next generation of Iraqis, a hope exists for one purpose for which to strive embodied in wins and losses rather than life and death on the football field.