Head vs Heart

Fans, have absolutely no right to have any say in the terms and conditions of players.

—Marvin Miller

When Marvin Miller died in late November, I was prompted to begin a blogpost about my attempts to be a rational sports fan. Sports, and sports fandom, is inherently irrational. We root for laundry and hate any reminders that players are mercenaries. At the same time, it’s becoming increasingly obvious how important market forces are to the sports landscape and smart fans have to be aware of their team’s budget situation when it comes to maintaining the roster as well as the needs of the players.

We tend to forget—and hate being reminded—that the players are people and playing sports is their job.Instead, we hold them to unreasonable standards based on what we want. When it comes to my expectations from players, it takes my best efforts to balance my heart with my head.

Whenever a player approaches the end of his contract things always get weird. If the player is important to the team, things get really weird. If the player is approaching retirement, things get extremely weird.

Is the player still invested in the team if he doesn’t have a new contract?* Is the team going to overpay him to stay?** Is he holding the for ransom?*** Is the reason I want him to stay more sentimental than reasonable?****

*Yes. As long as he’s not flying all over to negotiate.

**Overpay in this case refers to what portion of the team’s income is being spent on this player. This is not a reflection of what the player could get on the open market. If a team overpays a player, it means that it’s allocated too large a portion of its resources to that player.

***Essentially trying to be overpaid.

****Especially players approaching retirement.

I’ve been sitting on this post though because I haven’t felt much like finishing it. Thanks to Victor Valdés, I feel like I have to. The reactions to his announcement that he doesn’t intend to renew his contract have baffled me and provide a perfect case study for the kind of irrational behavior fans fall into.

Victor has given notice that he doesn’t intend to sign another contract for Barcelona once his current one expires in 2014. The reactions from a number of Barça fans has been to treat this as a betrayal which hurts the team and indicates that he should be sold today.

I don’t get it.

The only way announcing his plans early hurts the team is that it supposedly means other teams can try and extract higher transfer fees since they know we have to buy a keeper. And that assumes that there aren’t multiple keepers who we’re going after.

Oh, and it also means that we lose out on any transfer fee when we sell him. If we sell him. And if there’s only one team interested in him (or one location where he wants to go).

I’m going to categorically dismiss any claims that he’s unsettling the team or no longer committed. He is a professional. He’ll do his job as long as he’s under contract.

The Valdés situation is an example of how irrational and impossible the situation is for players. Fans want him to stay. Anything else is unacceptable. If he’s decided to leave, is he supposed to lie for the next year and a half?* Is he supposed to string the team along and not tell them what the plan is?** Is having a discussion about “Is he or isn’t he?” every press conference somehow less disruptive?***

* I can understand the outrage if fans feel like they’ve been lied to. That sucks indeed. But in to kill someone for telling the truth? 

**As if that wouldn’t unsettle the team. Uncertainty is always more unsettling than certainty.

***Also much more likely to unsettle players is having to be reminded of things which aren’t related to the games they’re playing.

I applaud him for telling the truth and not making trying to extort the team for too much money. And I thank him for making it perfectly clear what situation any new keeper Barça signs is going to be entering.

I also don’t begrudge him, or any other player, seeking the biggest possible payday. Though I tend to believe that the largest paydays are often indications that an organization isn’t run well and so, should be treated with some suspicion. Likewise, I don’t blame any player for refusing to renegotiate his contract down in order to make up for a club’s stupid business decision.

The flip side of this is that I find myself becoming somewhat cold blooded when it comes to aging players. Aging players are typically overpaid in that their skills are in decline and they can’t be expected to maintain, let alone increase, their levels for future seasons. It makes no sense to pay them as much or sign them to long-term deals. Yet they’re typically the ones which get the largest, and longest-term deals.

If an aging player also happens to be a fixture/icon of the team? Look out. Heartbreak dead ahead. It’s true with baseball and it’s true with any other sport. There is an age at which everyone is expected to get worse. What do we do with those players? Do we sell an icon of the team a year early? Do we keep him a year too long and let him embarrass himself? Is the break up amicable? Are we paying him too much? Could he get one last big payday somewhere else? Lots of questions. No good answers.

I tend to fall into the sell early and give him an option for one last big payday somewhere else camp. Yes, this means that I would be willing to sell Xavi or Puyol right now. But that’s my head talking. My heart will root for the team no matter what.

Winning

It’s been a couple weeks now since the Giants won the World Series and I’ve been thinking about the difference in my reaction to the Giants’ continued success than  the way I react to Spain’s or Barcelona’s.* With the Giants, I’m still in the afterglow of the 2010 victory and treating 2012 as a bonus. With Spain and Barça, I find myself wanting continued success and being disappointed in any hiccups.

*Since my last post, I’ve watched Spain win Euro2012 and the Giants win the World Series.

I’m tempted to chalk these differences up to a baseball vs soccer thing but they’re not. I enjoy both sports as much for the down time as the exciting moments. Soccer is perhaps a bit more passionate but not enough to really explain the way I feel.

A large part of this is the expectations game. I still don’t expect the Giants to win. Every year I hope for the best and expect the worst. But Spain and Barça begin each competition as THE favorite now where the expectation is winning. I won’t reach the point where I start rooting against them because of the expectation. But I can admit that while the past six years have been extraordinarily special, they have taken some of the shine off winning.

Another part is the nature of the teams themselves. Baseball teams have a lot of turnover now. The Giants are no exception. There are only a few important players on this year’s team who were also important in 2010. While I root for laundry, the connection to the players is still important. And continuity is key here. The Giants are in the position to start a great thing. We’ll see how long Posey, Cain, and company can maintain the core of the team and forge a connection with the fanbase.

This hasn’t been Barça or Spain’s problem. The core of those teams has been constant for longer than they’ve had success. And it’s my connection with those players which drives a lot of my desire for continued success. I want to see them do well and I dislike it when they play poorly. As a result, I find myself caring a lot more about their games.

It could also be that it’s the amount of my life I’ve invested in each team. I’ve invested twice as much time in the Giants as I have in Barça. And while Barça was always good, the Giants have been all over the map. Maybe the longer you watch a team not win a championship corresponds to a longer afterglow when that win finally arrives.

House money

I’ve been a San Francisco Giants fan for over twenty five years. In many ways, I was incredibly lucky to start following the team when they finally became decent again after over a decade in the wilderness. At the same time, I instead got to grow up with a team which managed to break my heart frequently.

1987—Still hurts. And I still dislike St. Louis because of it.
1989—Never had a chance but a special year nonetheless.
1993—Who knew that a 100-win season could hurt like that?
1997—A hell of a ride in the regular season. And a hell of a let down in the playoffs.
2000—Nothing like rallying in the 9th to tie a game only to lose it later.
2002—Game 6. Six outs away. Closest I ever expected to get.
2003—A blur. Still reeling from 2002.

By the time 2010 came around, I had pretty much given up on ever seeing the Giants win the World Series. I watched that post season hoping for the best while expecting the worst. I was ecstatic when we finally won and experienced a sense of relief/satisfaction at seeing something that I could honestly say I had been waiting my entire life to see.

I went out and spoiled myself with a jersey.* I had always wanted one as a kid and had semi-seriously filed it away as something I’ll get when we win the World Series. Those things are expensive.

*There is an interesting series of posts ranting on that experience. If you don’t make it past part one, at least keep in mind that it all ends well and that I don’t harbor any resentment against the official MLB online shop. 

The best outcome from 2010 though is that it was sort of a rebirth in my fandom. I had started to check out after 2002 due to a number of factors* and it took the 2010 team to pull me back in and remind me of how much I used to care. While I’m still much more of a casual fan than I used to be, I’m much more up-to-date with the team than I’ve been for the last decade.

*Family, job, and the interminable Barry Bonds circus where the only news worth reporting on Giants games was how Barry did. For a few years, the headline/lede for every Giants game was only about Bonds and often didn’t mention who won.

Which takes me to this season. It’s a novel experience for me to be rooting and caring for a team while also feeling somewhat zen about whether or not they actually win. I’m still coasting on the high from 2010 and know that nothing will replace that feeling of seeing something I never expected to see. I’ve seen the Giants win it all. I’ve been pulled back into baseball. The reminder in the pit of my stomach that it ain’t over ’til it’s over is still there but it’s no longer an impending sense of doom.

As a result, I’ve been able to truly enjoy this year a lot more than I ever expected to and the World Series victory was true surprise. It’s extremely fun to win something when you haven’t invested anything. 2010 was after an investment of 2o+ years. 2012 was still the bonus round.

Nostalgia Again

I’m done with the Olympics. Not tired. Done. It’s not just that I’ve stopped really caring, it’s that I’m now questioning the entire reality of sports as a result of the Olympics. I’m hoping that this is just a function of how my views on sports have changed as I’ve aged.*

*And that watching sports with my sons will rekindle some of my former feelings. I’ve covered this before but I’ve been pushed even further down this path now.

I fear however that it’s sports which have changed to the point where I barely recognize them anymore.* And that the world has changed to the point where the old approach is no longer sustainable.

*In some ways, best summarized by the baseball card market and how it imploded on itself by forgetting the point of the product.

We know too much now and something as innocent* as sports is anachronistic when it doesn’t evolve.** Yet it’s no longer recognizable when it does.

*Ideally.

**E.G. The Masters. The fact that it hasn’t evolved is what makes it both great and horrible. It’s a remnant of the past and a reminder of how sports used to be covered.

This isn’t just the evolution of sports into becoming more and more like business. It’s the erosion of our sense of idealism.

In the past, it was possible to watch the Olympics each night with family, talk about it the next morning with friends, and experience the events as an introduction to semi-obscure sports and to the rest of the world. The competitors were amateurs and the competition was intended to be a celebration.

Tape delay didn’t matter. Nor did the relentless focus on American athletes. And the event was unquestionably the most important event of the sport.

Now? It’s a stunt more than anything else. These athletes see and compete against each other all the time.* Any surprises are because of people peaking at the  right time rather than a lack of knowledge about a country. The events are never show live so there is no sense of community with the rest of the world.** Results are known in advance.*** And, in many cases, the competition truly isn’t the most important event for the sport anymore.

*One of the nice things about the World Cup is that it represents a reorganization of the existing professional teams in a way which is still taken seriously. This reorganization of teams isn’t possible with individual sports.

**Watching Twitter, or even Facebook, while a live event occurs is a fantastic way of being plugged into the pulse of the event.

***It’s been this way for a dozen years now. Impossible to stay away from “spoilers” and, really, why would you?

If it’s not broadcast live, it’s no longer a sport.

The Olympics is now a sports-like product which encourages all the things which are ruining sports.

It’s not just fanaticism, it’s nationalism. This tales the irrationality to an extreme. Not only does a rational point of view become potentially “not a real fan,” it’s now unpatriotic to criticize your team. Oh, and you can’t choose your team at all now.

The packaging of individual stars as products. While this is annoying in sports which I care about, it’s even worse with sports which no one cares about. Especially when a medal favorite “fails” despite the hype. Winning is hard and should never be taken for granted yet the Olympics coverage is all about expecting wins.

Advertising and commercial sponsorship. Good lord. At least the Super Bowl ads are funny. These ones are all trading off of stars or patriotism. And they all reflect corporate buy-in in a way which tends to exclude any local businesses from being involved in the games. Every Olympics is the same old sponsors. Why are there never any local companies involved?

The extortion of public money for private benefit. This one galls me the most. Private owners of sports clubs expect the general public to fund stadiums and other infrastructure. For baseball (80 games a year) this makes some sense. For football (8 weekends a year) it does not. For the Olympics (2 weeks. Period.) it really does not. Especially since all the commercial sponsorship money does not make it back to the funders of the infrastructure.*

*The Bay Area 2012 Olympics proposal involved already-existing stadiums and just upgrading the infrastructure. It never made the cut because it was “too cheap.”

The amateur-professional issue. The Olympics, correctly, does not treat athletes as amateurs anymore. This, however, screws anyone still in college since the NCAA still clings to an unworkable definition of amateur. And it points out both the problems and issues we have with rationalizing the professional world with our ideals of what sporting competition should be.

As someone who roots for comeuppance, the only lingering hope I have for the Olympics is that they’ll blown themselves up in their own hype. While I’ll only get to see it on tape delay, the good news is that I’ll know to tune in ahead of time.

Sports Photography

With all my thinking about functional photography, I couldn’t help but think about sports photography and whether or not it could ever be art. Sports photography, almost more than any other form of photography, is tied to specific events and is tied down by the requirement that it be true. We look to photographs to settle on-field controversies and stop motion so that we can see the detail of the action.

There’s a reason why the only sports photographs I’ve ever seen in an art museum are large-scale Gursky prints which, while they show action, aren’t about the action on the field.

EM Arena, Amsterdam I, by Andreas Gursky

While I wouldn’t call Gursky’s soccer shots functional, they do demonstrate my previous conclusion about how functional photography has to lose enough details so we can fill in our own. It doesn’t matter what game the photo is of,* as a fan’s-eye view, we can fill in our own experiences.

*Though I do remember studying and identifying the players—yes, the big bald Dutch center back is Jaap Stam.

Besides the Gursky photos, I can’t think of any sports action photo which would be considered art. Heck, even non-action non-portrait is tough. Nat Fein’s Babe Bows Out which won the 1949 Pulitzer is close since it requires almost no supporting text or context for most Americans to understand and, while not technically* a portrait, it’s pretty close to being one.

*For many people, portraits are strictly posed photos of people’s faces. These people have never seen Avedon’s portrait of Andy Warhol.

Now, I have seen plenty of artsy* sports photos. I tend to notice them more during the Olympics where photographers of the more obscure events often end up favoring more graphic compositions or exposure experiments** which don’t tell a story but serve more as examples of what makes these other sports interesting. I’m not sure why I haven’t seen these kind of photos become art yet. Maybe it’s because the sports are so obscure that most of us can’t fill in the missing details. Or maybe it’s just bias against functional photography.

*Artsy in this case meaning that the photo is taken for aesthetic reasons and not to tell a story. 

**Longer exposures, deliberate over/under exposure, or anything else which is technically wrong for sports.

As with government documents, I suspect that the correct edit could result in a fantastic exhibition of sports photography as art where, instead of reading stories about specific events, we experience a different trip through the athletic world.

Nostalgia

I’ve lived through an interesting period of time when it comes to sports and how we cover and perceive them. I’ve tended to consider most of my changing perceptions on sport to be related to my own maturation. A twelve-year-old kid will think about sports very differently than a 30-year-old adult. But there’s more going on as I’m finding that I’m not the only one with these feelings.

For example, I’m finding international competition to be increasingly meaningless. The Olympics, for starters, is now endless, prepackaged, tape-delayed coverage. So much so that I find myself just not caring about the events anymore. Plus, since all the athletes are professionals in constant competition against each other anyway, I no longer understand what makes the Olympic games unique.

At least with team sports, international competition is still appealing. Reorganizing teams every couple years for a summer tournament provides a nice change of pace and different way to see things. While the quality of play may not be as good as the best professional teams are capable of,* because many fans still pick their rooting interests based on where their compatriots play, it’s nice to have them all on the same team every once in a while.

*though the massive overlap between Spain and Barcelona comes pretty close.

It’s not clear how long international competition will remain appealing. The world is getting smaller and it’s increasingly likely that people will migrate toward following club sports—or at least the international superstar players—instead of international teams. I’m not ready to throw in the towel regarding all international competition* but I do agree with the concept that there is something inherently nostalgic about it. And that it’s sort of the last bastion of the concept of pure amateur sport.

*If you subscribe to The Classical, there’s a great post on this.

Which is what scares me. Once we start trying to preserve a sense of what sport should be, or used to be, we run the risk of screwing it up the way we’ve screwed up college sports. It’s not enough to say “be careful of what you wish for” since we also have to think about how to maintain that wish. Holding on to concepts like “amateur” long after it’s stopped describing anyone is not useful. “International” is soon to be the same type of term. Players won’t always play for their passports. Many don’t already. And it’s increasingly obvious that many of the best players are not playing for the best national teams (right now).

We know too much now. We know all the dirty laundry behind the scenes. We talk to the players on Twitter. They talk to us. We know everything is for sale. Sports is global. The audience is global. It’s no longer about how my local team is doing—assuming I even follow my local team…

But there’s hope. Look at a lot of what Major League Baseball’s doing for example. Retro is in. As it should be. Classic uniforms. Classic ballparks. After a couple decades of multipurpose doughnut stadiums and attempts to modernize the look, Baseball has realized that it’s really about embracing the past.* For Americans, Baseball is about nostalgia. Heck, it’s a game which is still best experienced on the radio.

*I wish it would go further and roll back interleague play, the wild card, and the DH but I doubt that will ever happen now.

International sports should take a page from the same book. Embrace the past and find ways of evoking it. Become unabashedly retro and make us remember what we liked about it all when we were kids.

The ease of being a local

When people ask me whether I’m a Warriors fan, I tend to shrug and say “when they let me.” With the 49ers over the past dozen years, my answer has been “it’s been tough.”* I haven’t followed the Giants with any real passion for almost a decade.** I half keep an eye on the Sharks. I don’t follow Stanford as much as I used to. And I don’t follow the Earthquakes at all.***

*Easier recently.

**Stupid Barry Bonds coverage was so bad that Giants news stories were only concerned with how Bonds did and rarely mentioned anything else about the team.

***I probably would care more if their jersey sponsor was anyone but Amway.

Yet if asked about most of these teams, I will self-identify as a fan. I’ll always have a general sense how they’re doing. And who the key players are. And I’m familiar with the team history and legacy in the area. I’ve had decades to soak all this up so it’s part of who I am. When things pick up and the Warriors make an improbable playoff run or the Giants actually win the World Series, it doesn’t take much to get me back into die-hard mode.

Especially with the Giants since I knew everything about them for about 10 years of my life.

It’s all very easy compared to how hard I worked to become a Barça fan. I couldn’t keep in touch with how things were going by paying attention to the local news or office chitchat. I had to read game reports in Spanish and research the history of the team the best I could. I took what I learned in design classes and art history classes and became interested in Barcelona the city. I don’t claim to be a local but I’ve had to steep myself in many things Catalán.

It’s a lot of work but it’s what makes me a fan.

And it puts into perspective how easy it is to be a local. When the Giants won the World Series, I was thrilled. But I also felt like celebrating it was sort of cheating. I’m used to being either the hardcore Barça fan who follows everything because he has to, or the hardcore Giants fan I used to be when I was 16. I don’t have to be either of those now.

As a result, despite it meaning more to me when the Giants won the Series than anytime Barça has won anything, I felt that I was somehow bandwagoning onto my own team. That there were other fans who had committed more and deserved to celebrate more. And I was just a local who had sort of coasted along. Just because it’s easy to follow the team doesn’t make me less of a fan. But it should make me realize how lucky I am that it can be that easy.

Mercenaries

“You know why kids love athletes?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause they screw lingerie models?”

“No, that’s why we love athletes. Kids love athletes because they follow their dreams.”

Since I just watched Up in the Air this weekend,* this segment of dialog was still stuck in my brain when I read Jake Meador’s blog post defending soccer mercenaries today. I readily agree with the basic premise that it’s much easier to be liked as a soccer player if you are lucky enough and good enough to become a loyal player to a big club. The thought-provoking question is really about how to think of great players who weren’t lucky enough to come up through the youth ranks of a big club.

*I completely agree with everyone who calls it today’s The Apartment. It’s funny but it’s not a comedy. Not really.

The theory I’ve developed is that when it comes to athletes, all of us fans still react to them as we did when we were kids. We don’t think of athletes as employees or workers, we think of them as having followed their dreams—our dreams. The longer an athlete maintains that illusion, the more fans will relate. But if an athlete breaks that illusion, watch out. We react poorly when our dreams are shattered.

This, admittedly, is an impossible task for most athletes. At least, in the US, free agency has a certain fairness to it. When a player’s contract runs out, he can sign any deal he can get. Young stars* seeking their first big payday will tend to sign for the most money in order to make up for being underpaid in their earlier career. Older stars seeking a last shot at glory before retirement may take a pay cut to be a role player on a contending team. It always sucks to be a fan of the team which a star leaves but we all understand that if he’s not under contract, he no longer plays for us. And it’s not like this is a surprise, the contract terms were signed years ago.

*Only stars can be mercenaries. Everyday players are journeymen.

Yet despite all that, every year a star player leaves for a bigger/richer/more promising club, there’s grumbling about him selling out or taking the easy path.

In international soccer, it’s even tougher. The transfer system there means that players often have to force their way out of clubs. To the fans, this makes the players seem like the bad guys unless they appear to be forced out of their clubs. And the more the transfer appears to be about money, the more fans dislike the move. This is why the big clubs sell themselves with the myths of their history and why there is so much antipathy toward the nouveau riche among the soccer traditionalists.

The only solution for a player is to try to reëstablish the narrative. Make it not about the money or even the explicit titles. It’s about childhood dreams and recapturing a club’s past glory or wanting to make history with the current squad. And back up the talk with the walk. Be a loyal player. Realize the club is bigger than you are. While it helps to win, losing heroically is also okay.

Make us dream. We don’t want to be reminded that sports is business. We watch sports to escape from all that crap.

Gloryhunting

One of the most interesting things about being a sports fan involves the reactions from other people when I’m wearing the team colors.* For most of my life, the reactions have tended to be pretty mild. My teams haven’t been particularly successful or popular and the reactions have been the friendly recognition of a fellow fan** or the friendly joshing from a rival.***

*My usual attire does not warrant any extra attention and I typically do not stay aware of either what I’m wearing or how people around me are reacting to it.

**Either a fellow fan of the team or fellow fan of the sport.

***Most notably when Barry Bonds was still playing for the Giants.

Things have been changing, especially over the past year. I’m in the weird position now where a lot of my sports apparel is for teams which have a certain amount of bandwagon appeal.

With my Giants gear, this isn’t a problem. It’s my local team and completely expected that anyone remotely interested in the team would be celebrating a World Series win. I do kind of feel like a poser since baseball has been gradually losing relevance to me but I know I paid my dues many times over as a child.

It’s my Barcelona and Spain gear where I’m really noticing a change. Both teams are extremely in right now—to the point where I see Barça or España jerseys randomly around almost every weekend.

This is both cool and weird. When I first started wearing soccer jerseys, I was typically asked to explain what team it was and why I was wearing it. Now, no need to explain. Instead I get to deal with haters* or people enthusiastically telling how much they love the team but never mentioning anything specific. Likewise, people wearing the jerseys are no longer people who I can count on knowing the current news. They may not even know soccer.

*The more a team wins, the more people come out of the woodwork to hate it.

As a result, I find myself preferring my older jerseys to my newer ones and falling into those hipster clichés about liking things before they became cool. I normally make fun of people who try to make those kinds of claims but sports is different. Supporting a sports team is an almost irrevocable choice. Pick a team, become a fan, and you’re a fan for life. None of this flitting from team to team business. No rooting for multiple teams (unless they never compete against each other). And definitely no gloryhunting.

I know I’m stuck with Barça no matter what happens. My annoyance at the gloryhunters is partially because I don’t like them no matter who they root for, but it’s mainly because I know they will tarnish the perception of all us fans and then bail as soon as things get tough.

And the fact that every once in a while, I catch myself looking forward to when they bail…

On Youth

Soccer’s silly season officially opens July 1 and, in the absence of any real competitive games, fans and the media are spending all their time discussing transfers and ways to improve their teams for next season. As a Barça fan, this discussion is increasingly about balancing prospects from La Masia with big-name signings.

I generally prefer a “trust the youth” approach. This is especially true when (like this year), the team has no real holes in the starting lineup and so the primary “need” is squad depth. It’s also financially prudent given the current economics of the game.

But that’s not how soccer appears to work. Soccer consists of selling clubs and buying clubs. Selling clubs develop talent and then sell that talent to buying clubs.* Despite Barça’s success with La Masia, most buying clubs (including Barça) spend the transfer window chasing the same hot prospects from the selling clubs.

*In general. Though in South America, the local buying clubs are the international selling clubs.

The concept that teams are replenished each year by a few big signings has always struck me as being somewhat odd. I find it much more interesting to pay attention to the cantera and think about the prospects we have coming up.

When I read the Pitchers and Poets article about Baseball in the Age of Potential, it started to make sense.

It used to be that the team on the major league field was a fan’s primary concern. Twenty-five players and a few coaches made for plenty to talk about and pore over, not to mention every other team’s twenty-five. The arduous, tedious process of raising another one hundred ducklings in the farm leagues, the five-year planning, developing, and drafting were not considered a part of the entertainment.

I grew up as a baseball fan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I followed college ball and got autographs from the best players who came through town. I followed minor league ball and got what autographs I could get there too. I paid attention to see how those players did and whether they ever made it to the big leagues. Some did. A few of those had a couple good seasons and decent careers. Only one (Mike Mussina) turned out to be great.

I developed the habit.

Doing the same thing with Barça, I’ve watched players like Puyol, Valdes, Xavi, Iniesta, Messi, Pedro, and Busquets grow up as prospects and become stars for the club. And I’ve watched others like Assulin and Dos Santos* fail to live up to their potential.

*Gio. Though his brother’s off-field partying issues are a cause for concern.

In this silly season, while all the rumors and news concern multi-million Euro transfers, I’m more interested in who from the youth team is to be promoted and whether we’re going to keep faith with still-young players like Bojan and Jeffren—two players who are examples of youth being promoted too quickly with the wrong expectations. It’s always a dicey issue. On one hand, you have to give youth the opportunity to succeed. On the other, you need to shield them from too much pressure.

We’ll see how thing play out over the summer.