The Barcelona Inheritance

November 1, 2018
Few soccer teams in the modern era have amassed such an astonishing collection of on-field talent as Spain's FC Barcelona, and possibly no team has had more influence in changing the way today's game is played. Here, the prolific and authoritative Wilson connects the dots between the total football of 1970s club team Ajax and the Dutch national side; the revolutionary genius of Dutch icon Johan Cruyff; and the astonishing collection of managerial talent that flowed through Barcelona to other top European clubs, most notably Cruyff, Pep Guardiola, Jos� Mourinho, and Louis van Gaal. Offering a delightful sense of the managers' personalities and invoking even Miltonic imagery in depicting the Guardiola-Mourinho rivalry (Mourinho is the raging, fallen angel, natch), Wilson offers broad historical perspective to bolster his claim that For a long time the best Dutch football has been played in Spain. As with his remarkable history of soccer tactics, Inverting the Pyramid? (2013), this latest will appeal primarily to wonky fans who see the game behind the game?but for them, it's a winner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)