125 years, 20 anecdotes
125 years are a lot. In that time, all kinds of things have happened at FC Barcelona. And not just big wins, trophy celebrations, amazing goals and some disappointing defeats too. There have also been plenty of oddities, and to celebrate the club's anniversary, here are 20 that you may not even know about.
1. Before announcers
For years, football fans learned of the confirmed lineups of both teams when the stadium's public address system echoed with the announcer’s voice listing the starting elevens. What seems like a long-standing tradition bears little resemblance to the early days of FC Barcelona. Back then, with startling simplicity, the federation's delegate would step onto the pitch and shout, "Who’s missing?" to which the respective captains would respond, "No one!" And as for the spectators, they had to figure out for themselves who was playing for their team. As for the opposing players, we assume they didn’t pay too much attention, except in the case of very special matches.
2. Altruism
In early 1902, FC Barcelona's monthly income was little more than one hundred pesetas. That was how many members there were, each contributing a fee of one peseta per person. The club’s financial struggles were eased by the personal contributions of its more generous members, who often remained anonymous. Everyone gave what they could, and it was not uncommon to find a bar of soap in the locker rooms at the Carretera de Horta pitch, left by an unknown benefactor to support the team’s hygiene. In another example of that altruistic era, Ernest Witty, a player and co-owner of a sports equipment business in Barcelona, modestly recounted that the total value of the footballs he had gifted to the club could have been enough to buy a car. There was no need for precise calculations; they were selflessly devoted to the cause they loved.
3. The lost eye
George Meyer was a Swiss player during the club’s early days, between 1901 and 1904. He had a glass eye, a fact unknown to his opponents. Once, during a match against Català, he collided with Viñas, the player marking him. His eye popped out, fell to the ground, and the unfazed Meyer casually picked it up, smiling as he told Viñas, “Don’t worry. I’ve still got another one!” From that moment, everyone in the football world learned that the Swiss player was one-eyed.
4. No ball
A weird incident occurred during the match between Barça and Internacional on 21 February 1904, at the Carretera de Horta field. In the Catalonian Championship of the time, the home team was required to provide two balls, while the visiting team had to bring one as a backup. During the first half, both of Barça’s balls burst, and when they asked Internacional to supply theirs, it turned out the visitors had come empty-handed. The solution? A volunteer ran to the neighbouring field to borrow a ball from the team called FC X.
Although the situation did not affect the outcome, Barça filed a formal protest against their opponent’s negligence, likely spurred by their 2-1 defeat. The complaint was dismissed, but it’s hard not to imagine the expression on the FC X groundskeeper’s face when a man came running along to say: “Hello, I’m from the FC Barcelona field. You wouldn’t happen to have a ball to lend us, would you? We’re out of them and can’t continue the game…”
5. Sloping fields
On 17 June 1906, in game in the Copa Salut organized by the club of the same name at their field, Barça and FC X faced off with only nine players per side, and Barça's Romà Solà (goalkeeper) and Enric Barraquer (forward) played in their regular street clothes. To make matters worse, the Salut FC field wasn’t level but sloped, a significant challenge that complicated matters somewhat. As Los Deportes humorously noted, “It’s true that goals are easier to score up the slope, but with the slope in your favor, you dominate the game more.” And they left it at that, everyone apparently satisfied.
In the end, FC X won 4–2, thanks in part to a poor performance by Solà (“any ball that came into his territory ended up in the net”). But he was playing in normal clothes and was more concerned with staying clean than defending his goal, often stepping away from the net when it was under attack. Barraquer, on the other hand, cleverly used his attire to his advantage. A hapless FC X defender mistook him for the referee and let him pass, allowing him to score. At the time, referees didn’t wear uniforms either, which undoubtedly caused some chaos.
6. Sandwiches, lemons and bouquets
Children who went to games at Carrer Industria (1909–22) were given a ham sandwich for their afternoon snack. The doormen and ushers were responsible for handing them out at the entrance. Heartwarming images from a long-gone era, comparable to that of member Narcís Deop, who would go onto the pitch at halftime carrying a tray full of lemons to distribute among the players of both teams. To complete the picturesque scene of some long-forgotten traditions, the Barça players would deliver bouquets of flowers to the female spectators at every end-of-season match.
7. Labour needs
On 29 July 1915, Barça had a training match between the 22 members of the first team at the unreasonably early hour of 6am. The club gave each player one and a half pesetas so they could have breakfast at the bar near the Carrer Industria ground. In fact, during that era of absolute amateurism, it was common for players to train from 6 to 8 am so they could then make it to their respective workplaces. The breakfast for these hard-working athletes consisted of an egg, bread, and a glass of milk with cocoa. It was all very frugal, with no coffee, which would have seemed more fitting to wake up the early-rising athletes.
8. Hiding place
It was 23 June 1925, just twenty-four hours before the club was closed for six months due to the booing of the Spanish national anthem at the Les Corts stadium. The day before, an anonymous employee, acting on his own initiative, took it upon himself to secure everything he deemed most important, just in case. In boxes purchased from the tobacco shop next to the clubhouse in Plaça Teatre, he stashed two typewriters, a membership card printing machine, several trophies, pennants, and logs of minutes and membership records. All of it was moved to the main floor of no. 21 Carrer Aribau, the club's former offices from 1919 to 1921, and hidden in a dark room where a greengrocer stored her goods. Six months later, after the club was able to resume activity, everything was returned to its place. Not a single board member noticed what had happened. Such foresight! The man clearly guessed that things were about to go sour, given how the club was behaving and what the dictatorship was up to.
9. Ref and player meet on the train
On 18 February 1934, Barça were playing a league match away to Racing Santander. At the last minute, with the team already in the Cantabrian city, forward Luis Miranda was injured, and coach Plattkó had no choice but to urgently call on Mario Cabanes, a 20-year-old player. Cabanes quickly boarded a train for Bilbao, where he caught another for Santander. However, the train was significantly delayed, and the young man was getting more and more nervous. He got talking to the man sat beside him, who quickly reassured him by saying: "Don’t worry, kid. There won’t be a match until I get there. I’m the referee." His name was Mr. Steimborn, and he was indeed the appointed official, who was also running late. The match eventually began with all the key players and the ref, but Barça ended up losing 3-1.
10. Unusual tactics board
Almost unintentionally, one day, the ever-mischievous Gustavo Biosca wanted to prove that the role of the coach might not be as important as we tend to believe. On the eve of the Barça v Real Sociedad match on 12 December 1954, he entered the locker room to listen to Sandro Puppo’s usual pre-game talk and spotted the tactics board covered with arrows, as was customary. There was no one else around, so Biosca quickly grabbed the chalk and added three or four more arrows pointing in different directions. He assumed Puppo would notice his mischief and make a fuss, but to his surprise, the Italian carried on with the briefing as if nothing had happened.When Puppo finally found out about the prank, he was not a happy man... But Barça went on to win the match 4-1, and Biosca would always joke that it was thanks to his arrows.
11. Bowling derby
During the 1954-55 season Barça had a bowling team, thanks to the efforts of the members of the ‘Bolopin’s’ club who provisionally brought the popular sport to the club. Almost at the same time, Espanyol started their own team and on 18 February 1955 the ‘Bolopin’s’ HQ, the home for FC Barcelona, was the venue for an exciting bowling derby as part of the ‘Torneo Ciudad Condal’ day. The site was packed and fans witnessed victories for Barça in both the men’s and women’s events, given that the bowling section catered for both sexes during its brief existence.
12. Boxing as training
In 1955 Ferenc Plattkó returned to the club for a second spell as Barça coach. The Hungarian had made a name for himself as goalkeeper at the club in the 1920s and enjoyed a season as coach in 1934-35. Plattkó was a well-built, robust individual and he wanted his players to be a bit more like him. When he went into the dressing room and found a lean, wiry 20-year-old from Galicia called Luis Suárez, he made the midfielder take part in a boxing session for half an hour after each training session at the Les Corts pitch. The situation lasted a week before the future Ballon d’Or winner marched into the coach’s office to tell him: “Look, I’m not doing this anymore because I have come here to play football and not box.” Given Luis Suárez’s performances for Barça from this point on, we cannot say he was wrong.
13. Architects against contractors
If we want to be pedantic, we could say that the first ever football match at Spotify Camp Nou took place on 10 August 1956, a month before the official opening, when the stadium was still being built. It was a game between a team or architects and a collection of contractors, won 2-1 by the former. The architect Francesc Mitjans played in goal and the first goal was scored by one Hernández. Remember the name.
14. Cinema trips
One of the quirks of the ineffable Helenio Herrera, coach between 1958 and 1960, was that he would sometime take the players to the cinema to take their minds off of football. The coach would ask his squad which type of film they would like to see, gangster, love story, comedy...However, the players’ opinion mattered not as Herrera would have already bought the tickets for the screening. Furthermore, due to his desire to control everything, Herrera would have already watched the film in question himself to make sure that it was suitable for his team.
15. Foncho and Kubala fight over the window...
Alfonso Rodríguez, known as Foncho, was a defender from the Canary Islands who came to Barça in 1960 and who was in the team for the infamous European Cup Final in Berne in 1961. At the hotel in the Swiss capital before the big game, Foncho was sharing a room with star player Ladislau Kubala, still an imposing presence at 34 years of age. In the spring of 1961 the cold weather of winter had not abated in Switzerland and on the morning of the game Foncho was still in bed covered with a thick duvet when he saw a half-naked Kubala open the window and take a deep breath: “Fonchito, pure oxygen, pure air, good for the game.” The man from the Canary Islands shouted for his roommate to close the window before he caught pneumonia. An anecdote that illustrates perfectly Kubala’s character – a pure athlete and a fearless one at that.
16. ...Stolen books
We go back to Foncho and Kubala. The Canary Island defender told another anecdote from his time with Kubala as coach at the start of the 1960s. “All my life I have been a great reader, and my favourite time is just before going to sleep. When I was at Barcelona, Kubala knew this and he used to take away my book every night that we were together as a squad. He wanted me to go to sleep early but the only thing that happened was that I couldn’t sleep a wink. For that reason, I came up with a trick to always have two books. When Kubala took one away then I could read the other in peace,” explained Foncho.
17. 200 phone calls
September 1966 and a spelling mistake caused the club to publish an erroneous telephone number in the local press that supposedly belonged to the new offices situated a La Masia. In reality, the number belonged to an individual who had nothing to do with Barça. Stoically, the man put up with some 200 phone calls destined for the club until a solution was found. Later the local press revealed that the man was, fortunately, a big Barça fan.
18. Cruyff, a nervous debut
On 28 October 1973, the day of Johan Cruyff’s official debut for Barça, there was a feeling of panic amongst blaugrana fans ahead of the game against Granada. Not about the Dutchman’s undoubted footballing qualities, rather about the notoriously tough Granada defence populated by figures such as the Argentine Aguirre Suárez, the Paraguayan Fernández and the Uruguayan Montero Castillo, three tough customers. Such was the fear in the Barça camp of the Andalusian back four that former Barça player Rodri went to the Granada hotel to talk to Fernández, who had been at Barça for a season in 1968-69. The request was to go easy on Cruyff as he had “cost a lot of money”. The Paraguayan defender, intractable throughout his career, paid no notice and later would admit that he was tough on opposing players to take advantage of the fact that few games at the time were televised. The day of the game, inevitably, Fernández was booked for a kick at the Dutch striker. Cruyff was lucky that the fearsome Aguirre Suárez was suspended and the new blaugrana’s lasting memory of the game was: “There was a foul and I went into the box to shoot but Asensi told me not to - ‘You, don’t go in otherwise you’ll never make it out! With how much you cost, the last thing we need is you to get injured in the first game.”
19. Johan Neeskens, forever loved
In December of 1977, journalist Jaum Boix interviewed Johan Neeskens at the Clínica Sagrada Família where the Dutchman was recovering from a knee operation. Boix remembers that, to get to his room, he had to cross an entire floor of the hospital decorated with flowers all along the corridor. The journalist confessed to never having seen anything like it. It comes as no surprise now as it is well known that ‘Nes’ was an idol for Barça fans, the story confirming the special bond between fans and players prepared to sweat blood in a Barça shirt. Neeskens was certainly one of those.
20. Dogs at Camp Nou
In the 1994-95 season Barça ‘contracted’ four special security guards for match days at Camp Nou. The renovation work in the summer of 1994 had removed the moat that separated the fans from the pitch at the stadium. For that reason, security staff were needed to prevent pitch invasions. At the time, the four new members of staff performed their duties admirably as they were Rottweiler dogs, strong and muscular, calm until provoked.
Given the well-behaved nature of the crowds at Camp Nou, five years on the Rottweiler staff was reduced to two, Trotsky and Demon.