Is the Champions League final going to be the last hurrah for Barcelona, soccer's greatest team?
By Brian Phillips
For the past three years, soccer has been dominated, utterly and ruthlessly, by a reign of Spanish prettiness. Spain's national team won Euro 2008 with a rapturous mix of intricate passing and outrageous goal-scoring, then repeated the feat, albeit less dazzlingly, at the 2010 World Cup. Meanwhile, F.C. Barcelona took many of the same Spanish players—plus Lionel Messi, the Argentine superstar who's lived in Spain since boyhood—on a fey romp through worldwide club soccer. In the three years, the Barcelona players have won three Spanish league titles, three domestic cups, a Champions League title, a UEFA Super Cup, and a FIFA Club World Cup. They routinely embarrassed their archrivals at Real Madrid—6-2 in 2009, 5-0 earlier this season. And they did all this while perfecting a style, based on ceaseless motion and hypnotic ball movement, that seemed implausibly gorgeous for something so devastating. Infinitely patient until the moment when they weren't, Barcelona's stars murdered their opponents with the slow grace of leaves falling in a forest...[continued]
