You can tell a lot about the success or decadence of a sports club from the type of facilities it uses. In terms of FC Barcelona, the club’s history can be clearly be divided into three main stages.
In the early days, the club constantly switched between different grounds. In the second stage, the club was consolidated by finding a permanent home at Les Corts. And the third stage, and the construction of the Camp Nou, reflects the expansion and grandeur of the club on a global scale.

The old Les Corts ground, inaugurated in 1922, was remodelled several times in order to find room for Barça’s constantly growing fan base. After the Spanish Civil War, the club started attracting more and more members every year, which also meant a considerably larger number of spectators at matches. This increased support was the inspiration for several expansion projects, of the south goal (1946), the north goal (1950), and the grandstand’s capacity (1944). But it was becoming patently evident that what the club really needed to do was build a completely new stadium, and therefore the board of directors combined these improvements to Les Corts with plans to make the dream of a new stadium a reality.

The need for a new stadium

From 1948, people were more and more keen on the idea of building a completely new ground, but this was not an easy thing to do, and it was necessary to convince the local authorities that a new stadium would be able to fit in with the plans at the time to develop the upper area of the Diagonal.

It is often said that what finally convinced the board that there was no other option than the construction of a new ground was the arrival of the now legendary Ladislau Kubala, one of the finest players ever to appear for FC Barcelona. And although there can be no doubting that Kubala attracted more interest than ever in the team and meant the club’s spirits hit a new high, the decision to build was inspired just as much by the two League titles won in 1947-48 and 1948-49, which was before the great Hungarian had signed for the club.
In fact, the first solid step towards a new stadium came in September 1950, fifteen days before Kubala played his first friendly match wearing his new Barça colours. It was then that the president of the time, Agustí Montal y Galobart, signed an option to purchase a site in the area known as La Maternidad, an option that was to be taken up just two months later.

What followed was a turbulent period, as the Camp Nou commission decided on February 9, 1951 to change the location of the future stadium to the area at the top of the Diagonal, and this led to a series of sterile negotiations with the Authorities that did not seem to be getting anywhere. The matter seemed to have been shelved for good when Francesc Miró-Sans won the FC Barcelona presidential elections on November 14, 1953. The new president was a fervent supporter of the idea of building a new stadium as soon as possible and one of the first things he did after coming into office on February 18, 1954 was to locate the future stadium on the site purchased in 1950, rather than at the top end of the Diagonal. And so, on March 28, before a crowd of 60,000 Barça fans, the first stone of the future Camp Nou was laid in place under the presidency of civil governor Felipe Acedo Colunga and with the blessing of the Archbishop of Barcelona, Gregorio Modrego.

The construction (1954-1957)

The architects of the new stadium were Francesc Mitjans Miró, cousin of Miró-Sans, and Josep Soteras Mauri, with the collaboration of Lorenzo García Barbón. More than a year later, on July 11, 1955, the club commissioned the construction work to the INGAR SA company, who estimated the project at 66,620,000 pesetas, claiming it would take 18 months to complete. However, the stadium would eventually cost an awful lot more than the original estimate, eventually totalling around 288 million pesetas, an amount that would need to be covered by successive issues of mortgage obligations ((100 million pesetas) and short term bonds (60 million pesetas). This measure meant the construction of the stadium could be financed, but would leave the club in heavy debt for many years after.

The inauguration

The date on which the stadium was to be inaugurated was September 24, 1957. A special commission was organised whose task was to organise the kind of opening ceremony that the occasion warranted, with two people in charge of the operation: Aleix Buxeres (public relations) and Nicolau Casaus (organisation). In the Barcelona City Council’s Salón de las Crónicas, on Saturday September 21, José María de Cossío, a member of the Real Academia Española, solemnly declared the celebrations of the inauguration of the new stadium open. That same September weekend, a series of international matches were played at Les Corts and the Palacio Municipal de Deportes involving the club’s different sports teams. Those days will go down in club history, and were set to words by the great poet Josep M. de Sagarra in his sonnet titled 'Azul Grana', while an anthem was written in honour of the new FC Barcelona stadium, with Josep Badia putting the words to Adolf Cabané’s music.

On the day of the 1957 Mercè Festival, the city was decked out in the FC Barcelona colours. The celebrations continued with the holding of a solemn mass and the blessing of the stadium by the Archbishop of Barcelona, Gregorio Modrego. The Orfeón Graciense choir then performed Händel’s ‘Hallelujah’ while the image of the Virgin of Montserrat was exalted. The president’s box was packed with the most important personages of the sporting and political worlds of the period, including club president Francesc Miró-Sans; José Solís Ruiz, general secretary for Movement, which was the equivalent of the ministry of sport at the time; José Antonio Elola Olaso, head of the National Delegation of Sportspeople; Felipe Acedo, civil governor of Barcelona, and Josep M. de Porcioles, Mayor of Barcelona.

Although work on the stadium was not yet complete, more than 90,000 spectators were able to witness the event, which continued with representatives of all the major football clubs in Catalonia parading on the pitch, as well as members of the club’s other sports teams and the supporters clubs. The new Stadium Anthem was then performed and the first game to be played at the Camp Nou kicked off at half past four in the afternoon. FC Barcelona played a friendly against Polish side Warsaw. The first Barça line-up ever to appear at the Camp Nou featured: Ramallets, Olivella, Brugué, Segarra, Vergés, Gensana, Basora, Villaverde, Martínez, Kubala and Tejada. A different eleven took to the field in the second half: Ramallets, Segarra, Brugué, Gràcia, Flotados, Bosch, Hermes, Ribelles, Tejada, Sampedro and Evaristo. Barça won the match 4-2 with goals from Eulogio Martínez (whose 11th minute strike was the first goal ever at the Camp Nou), Tejada, Sampedro and Evaristo. At half time, 1,500 members of the Agrupación Cultural Folclórica de Barcelona danced a huge sardana and freed 10,000 doves. And so it was that a brand new period in the history of FC Barcelona had begun.

Source: fcbarcelona.cat

In Eamon Dunphy's wonderful book 'Only a Game?' he narrates, in semi-diary style, the events of a season in the old English Second Division, warts and all. Loadsawarts. It's a carbuncular book. It was the first of its kind, but it remains the best, and it spawned a whole genre of inferior imitators.

At one point late in the book, Dunphy's career with Millwall is going down the tubes, because he's getting older and a younger midfielder is being preferred to him - among other reasons. Left out of the squad for the first time in years for a Saturday match, he stays at home and mopes on his sofa, switching on the old BBC sports programme Grandstand to watch the final scores. Millwall have lost at home, and he is exultant. He shakes his fist with glee in front of the TV, as if his team-mates' defeat were an endorsement of his own feeling that he is not finished yet, that he shouldn't have been dropped. And yet as an intelligent man he feels guilty. He knows he is supposed to ring them and sympathise - but he doesn't.

When I first read this book back in the 1980s, I was stunned by its brutal honesty. I couldn't put it down. It seemed as though the whole lid had been lifted on how pro footballers behaved and thought, as if up to that moment we had preferred to believe that they were really super-human beings, existing on a different level to us, with distinct emotions and a different mindset. And then Dunphy recounts how he celebrated his own team's defeat, and of course we could all identify with the dirty reality of his confession.

Playing team sport is both wonderful and painful. It's wonderful because of the companionship it provides, and the occasional moments of euphoria it yields, but it's painful in the constant pressure it exerts, and the fear of failure it induces. The moment you realise that the manager doesn't rate you - it can be a word or a glance, or the fact that he's stopped berating you in training (he doesn't care anymore), it's a terrible thing. And that kid who joined in the summer, whom you recognise in your heart of hearts to be better than you - he's taking over. You're on the way out, you're losing your mates, you're getting older.

They are not the only ones in Europe, but the Spanish press likes to see a bit of internecine warfare on the training ground or even better, out on the pitch. The recent nonsense about the sadness of Cristiano Ronaldo has been smoothed and massaged by the pro-Madrid elements of the Spanish press to such a remarkable extent as to almost take Spain back to the days of the documentary news programme 'El Nodo', used by Franco to keep the folks thinking that everything was just fine, and that Real Madrid really were super-humans.

And of course, the unexpected dropping of Sergio Ramos against Manchester City only fuelled these flames. Perhaps Ramos had spoken out of turn (wouldn't be the first time), or played badly in Seville (he played well, I thought). Again, the Madrid press were quick to print the 'Aqui no hay conflictos' headlines (here there are no conflicts), printing photos of a smiling Ramos on the training ground, and then, on Saturday, after Barcelona had struggled to a late 2-0 win over Granada in the Camp Nou, the papers and the Sunday highlight programmes were all focusing on a tiff between David Villa and Leo Messi, in which Messi appears to criticise his team-mate for not playing the ball back to him with a first-time pass. 'A la primera!' he scowls, prompting Villa to shout back that he was trying to do just that.

The intention is obvious here - an attempt to divert attention to Barcelona, to try to nurture a petri-dish of conflict where it doesn't really exist. Surely, players berate each other all the time? That certain programmes chose to suggest that Messi was really a bad-tempered little fellow (he shouted at Tello last season against Milan for not looking up and centring the ball to him) is clearly absurd.

Messi does appear to be a fairly calm chap most of the time, and it might be news if he gets cross, but when I played football, I loved it when there was a guy in the team who would shout and complain, just so long as he was fair, and just as long as he was good enough himself. It kept you on your toes. The best teams have always had a shouty guy, one to whom the rest deferred. Football is a canine world - it's very hierarchical. There's a certain way of behaving in a dressing-room, a certain way of talking, depending on where you are in the pecking order. If you ignore this, as some over-confident young players sometimes do, they are soon put in their place.

Indeed, Tito Vilanova shrugged off the inevitable questions in the post-Granada press conference, claiming that it was a healthy sign, and that top professionals will always demand the maximum from their team-mates. It was a good answer. Also, Barcelona weren't playing very well, Xavi was on the bench, Andres Iniesta was in the stands, and there was a little bit of tension floating about. Sounds fairly normal to me. It will take more than a little spat to destabilise Barca this season, you suspect. They aren't stuffing teams like last season, either on the domestic or the international front, but they are continuing to win. Glass half empty or half full? Your answer will be conditioned by your preferences, and possibly by where you live.

It is true, however, that factions can exist among large squads of players, and that this can affect on-field performances, with players convinced that others never pass to them, because they only play ball with their mates. Kevin Keegan famously remarked that when he joined Hamburg, none of the players passed to him for the first month, making his baptism intolerable. Then he did a press conference, and tried to do it in German. So impressed were his team-mates that they gave him the ball next game, and he never looked back. All these dumb little tensions are an integral part of the game (as Dunphy was trying to say in his book), and to overcome them is part of the secret of success.

Spanish players are, in general, much more publicly critical of each others' play than say, the English. In England, I was always taught to encourage my team-mates, even when they messed up. In Spain, on the basis of the few games I played when I first came here, it's open-season on feelings. Make a mistake and you know about it. There's much less verbal diplomacy here, which is why I find the recent stuff about tensions-at-the-top rather amusing.

It filters right down to junior level and to the relationship between players' parents. My son Harry has re-joined Antiguoko here in the north of Spain after his season in the States, and at this pre-professional level - and with this club especially - the stakes are high. Parents gather at the training sessions and banter amicably, but cliques form and people are wary of saying the wrong things, although they often do.

The father of the kid who plays in my son's position clearly feels threatened by his sudden re-appearance on the scene, and tries to avoid me in the evenings, up at the ground. When the team lost a rare game last Saturday, with my son on the bench, I was dying to point out to the gathering, when they were discussing it a few nights later, that two of the goals were clearly the fault of the central midfielder, but I guessed that they would know why I was saying this. His father kept looking at me, quietly murderous, as if he knew what I was thinking. He knows his son's days in the comfort-zone are numbered. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and it teaches you loads of stuff.