Village Idiot

How much are season tickets in Spain usually? TBH I have as much problem with clubs charging high for day trippers and single games if STs are kept affordable. I can only speak for Barça, which I think are reasonable compared to what I have seen quoted for other clubs around here. Most expensive is around €1000, and you can get as low as €150. Also, club members without an ST (like me) have decent discounts on single tickets (10% or so)

He shouldn't even be playing in the PL, Liga Adelante/C'ship player at best.

Marca have put up this pretty great graph with the ticket prices of all clubs in the 4 big European leagues. The top of the bar signals the price of the most expensive ticket, while the bottom points the cheapest. http://www.marca.com/2012/03/02/multimedia/graficos/1330720526.html Both Milan clubs have the highest average price, then both Madrid clubs and then us. First English club is Arsenal on sixth place.

Courtois, man, Chelsea can screw Czech.

Rakitic really hasn't gone to be the player I expected him to be for Sevilla. Pity, it seemed a tremendous signing at the time.

1-1 Babá. Nice quick counter by Sevilla.

It wasn't the case today, since Cesc was already subbed, but Xavi says that with Cesc on the pitch he swaps positions with him quite often, finding himself inside the box more often than he did. The idea is that we often play with 3 creative CMs, which frees one of them for roaming. Is this swapping not potentially detrimental to the team? See my edit, we often play with 3 CMs which enables one of them to go forward.

It wasn't the case today, since Cesc was already subbed, but Xavi says that with Cesc on the pitch he swaps positions with him quite often, finding himself inside the box more often than he did. The idea is that we often play with 3 creative CMs, which frees one of them for roaming.

And now onwards to Sevilla - Atlético. This should be sweet.

Belhanda and Giroud have been absent. John Utaka has been the saviour in their absence. Scored vital goals to win them points in the last two matches against PSG and Bordeaux. It looks a two team battle now as Lille have thrown away more points today. Lyon and Marseille have probably thrown away any chance of the CL, too. Not watching, but I would hazard a guess that this did not change against ten men. Defeatist mentality. Apart from their goal, I don't recall Sporting having a shot on goal in the entire second half. Javier Clemente is like that, he makes Big Sam look like Arséne Wenger.

Justice.

Heh, it wasn't even a foul. Well, 1-1 and one men down. Good times.

Iniesta 1-0, get in. Sporting have been 11 behind ball all game.

They looked like the third best team in the world just a few months ago.

Rayo - Racing, what a game this has been. Racing went 0-2 up despite being down to ten men since min 2, and Rayo ended up winning 4-2. Massively entertaining.

Wasn't the score 7-6? Is this the second leg?

Whose twitter is that?

Heh, they won a trophy last week and they are already arguing with each other? That's squad spirit.

Yeah, Pep would probably love to manage England, although not this summer. Dunno about Mou.

What happened to those crazy plans to build a new offshore stadium? Or did I make that up? That was a hoax.

According to the report, they are looking for a site in the same general area (all our stadia have always been in that neighborhood, which is where the club was founded). One hypotesis is that they would build it in some of the unused ground that the Barcelona University owns further north of the current location. To be frank, it's a great place for a football stadium, much better connected. But yeah, if it really comes to pass it will be a piece of our history gone. But we tore down a 40-year old stadium to build the Camp Nou back in the 1950s, we shouldn't sacralize the past if a new stadium really would be best for the club. Just DON'T sell the name rights.

One of the reasons, yup. If you have been in there, it's very cramped inside. The talk was that there would be a major revamp to gain interior space for restaurants, corporate lodgings, etc... and modernize the structure, but the costs are so high they are thinking wether it wouldn't be just better to build a new one from scratch.

Malouda has had a couple of boss seasons for them too.

"Mundo Deportivo" (Barcelona sports rag), running a report claiming that Barça has started looking at the feasibleness of building a new stadium. There's been a lot of talk over this the past years, the Camp Nou does really show its age and can't be expanded much more, with little parking or public transportation in the immediate neighborhood. There was to be a major renovation in the upcoming years, but apparently the board is now thinking a new stadium would be better in the long term. Can we afford it? Not sure, unless our new home becomes QatarFoundation@CampNou...

Thank God, I always thought it made absolutely no sense to consider that "intellectual property", it's like copyrighting the train schedules or the winning numbers of the lottery FFS.