Quotes About Barcelona

For me, Barcelona are the biggest club in the world, and naturally, I wanted to come here.

To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne.

I like a lot of sports. Especially football - it's my favourite sport. My uncle played football in Barcelona for nine years and played for Spain in three World Cups.

My agent spoke to me about a loan interest from Barcelona. The club wanted a striker with La Liga experience and someone who understands Spanish football.

In Spain you fight, of course, against Real Madrid and Barcelona, and they almost never lose because they have the biggest squads, and they are two of the biggest clubs in the world. So it's really difficult.

It is clear that for any player of Barcelona's youth squad their dream is to play for the club's first team.

I know British stadiums from my time with Barcelona and Villarreal. The atmosphere is phenomenal, and my first match at Anfield will be very emotional.

During my time away from football I was with Milan and Barcelona during training. The most impressive thing about Barcelona was how humble they all are. The humility of the players and staff was fantastic.

It was lucky I came from City; I'd say their philosophy is quite similar. Barcelona are a lot more advanced because they are the ones who created it, but they have a history of members of staff at Manchester City who worked here.

When you stay with Barcelona and are only 15 or 16, the people show you a lot of time, and you are in the newspaper every day. This sometimes is good, but sometimes this is bad.

I love Barcelona for the same reasons I love Arsenal. It is as if they do not even think of the result, they just want to play and score and if they lose, OK, then they will go out and do it again and win next time.

There is absolutely no chance of me going back to Barcelona. They don't want me to, and I don't want to, either.

above all else, they had to learn to win. Instilling a fiercely competitive, winning spirit into a team, an academy already blessed with an abundance of talent, represented something of a watershed for grass-roots football at FC Barcelona.

Guardiola has taken certain areas to another level – such as pressing the ball – and Barcelona's disciplined style of play and work ethic have become a trademark of all his teams.

Guardiola would ring him to express his doubts to him, whether they be about the use of space by his players or the behaviour of those off the ball. Rodolf Borrell, now at Liverpool FC, was a coach with one of the Barcelona youth teams at the time, and each week Guardiola went to his defensive training sessions to observe and learn.

He was given one more chance, invited back for a third day. The coach moved him into central midfield where, suddenly, Pep was a magnet for the ball, directing the forward play and dictating tempo. He'd done enough. Barcelona decided they wanted him to join them.

Discover constantly where the free man is and through passing, passing, passing, work the ball into forward positions.' The high technical quality of Barcelona's players enabled them to make passes that other teams simply could not even attempt; Xavi, Iniesta, Messi could receive the ball and pass or move out of the tightest of corners.

Abidal explains that before he arrived at Barcelona, every time he was called into action on the pitch, as a defender he'd been taught to focus on winning the ball. As soon as he arrived at Barcelona, he was taught to think one step ahead about what he could do with it once he'd got hold of it.

Rijkaard was aware of the stars' behaviour, but indulged them, ever the optimist that the players were mature and responsible enough to know when to draw the line. It was a mistake. And, by the middle of the 2006–07 season that started poorly in Monaco, it was a trend far too late to reverse as Barcelona's results and their performances reflected the breakdown in discipline.

When United play at home, they get some advantage that other teams don't get. I think when you go to United, Madrid, Barcelona, or Milan, when the referees referee these kind of games, it's always difficult to go against these kind of teams.

I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.

I went to Spain with my brother when I was about 17. We stayed near Barcelona and it was terrible. There were floods and I ended up missing my flight home.

When I left Barcelona, staying in Spain was an important factor in my decision to join Madrid. I did not have to change country or learn a new language, adopt a different sort of lifestyle, and so on.

Sometimes there's too much noise about what's happening, but this is Barcelona - it is a big club. Sometimes people make more of things than they have to. We need to try to close the team away from all that noise outside.