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Sam Marsden, Barcelona correspondent
On Friday at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, just off La Rambla in Barcelona, there will be a big birthday party. The occasion? FC Barcelona’s 125th anniversary.
Barça will mark the day with a special gala at one of the city’s iconic venues. Around 2,000 people have been invited to the event, many with links to the club’s storied past.
There is quite a lot to celebrate and remember, and not just the combined total of 36 LaLiga and Liga F titles and eight UEFA Champions League crowns won by the men’s and women’s teams. The last 125 years have been filled with ups, downs, trophies, transfer sagas and some of the best players to ever play the game.
Let’s revisit the most significant moments that have played a part in Barça becoming one of the most recognisable sports teams on the globe, and see which of the club’s greatest-ever players fit into our all-time XIs.
1. The ad that started it all
On Oct. 22, 1899, an announcement appeared in a Barcelona newspaper looking for people interested in forming a football club. It was credited to a Mr. Kans Kamper. His name was misspelled.
The ad was placed by the Swiss-born Hans Gamper, now known as Joan Gamper — the founder of FC Barcelona. The club was officially founded on Nov. 29, 1899 during a meeting at a gymnasium in the city. The meeting was attended by Gamper, his compatriot Walter Wild and 10 other men.
The club’s famous blaugrana colours — blue mixed with a claret shade of red — followed later. They were introduced by the Witty brothers, two of the club’s first players. The theory, supported by Barça, is that they brought them from Merchant Taylors’ School in Crosby, a coastal town near Liverpool in England.
2. The English influence
Despite being founded by a Swiss man and based in Catalonia, the English influence on Barça’s early years extended beyond the Witty brothers. Many of the club’s early managers were from England, including Jack Greenwell, who remains the club’s longest-serving coach to this day. He won 10 trophies with a team spearheaded by the Filipino-born Paulino Alcántara during an initial 10-year spell — including three Copa del Reys in an era before LaLiga was launched in 1929.
Slightly more recently, Vic Buckingham, Terry Venables and Bobby Robson have all sat in the Camp Nou hot seat, too, while an Irishman also played a role at a key juncture in the club’s history. As coach, Patrick O’Connell remained loyal to the club during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and led a tour of Mexico and the United States which some say saved the club financially. A book, “The man who saved FC Barcelona” and a documentary, “Don Patricio” tell the story of his legend.
3. Stars are born: César, Kubala, Suárez
Barça won the inaugural LaLiga title in 1929, but it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that they enjoyed sustained success. They won the league seven times across the two post-war decades and had a team packed with stars.
César Rodríguez was a striker who remained Barça’s all-time top scorer until Lionel Messi came around. Luis Suárez (not that one) came next, the only Spanish man to win the Ballon d’Or until Rodri picked it up this year. But at the centre of that era, and playing alongside first César and later Suárez, was László Kubala.
The Hungarian fled his homeland and was the subject of a transfer battle between Barça and Real Madrid. He helped Barça win five trophies in 1951-52 — the season remembered as “Kubala and the five cups” — and several more titles during a decade with the club, although the European Cup eluded him. His story is told in the film “The Stars Search for Peace” and he is immortalised with a statue outside Camp Nou.
4. Di Stefano transfer saga fuels Clásico rivalry
Kubala may have helped Barça win a European Cup if it had not been for Madrid and Alfredo Di Stefano. As with Kubala, both Barça and Madrid wanted to sign the Argentina-born forward. For many, it is the saga which laid the foundations for the intensity of the Clásico rivalry which exists between the two teams to this day.
Going back to 1953, River Plate had been the last team to hold Di Stefano’s FIFA-affiliated rights, but the Argentine was contracted to Colombian side Millonarios. Barça negotiated a deal with River Plate; Madrid with Millonarios. Amid the confusion, intermediaries ruled that Di Stefano would play two seasons with Madrid and then two with Barça. The decision was accepted initially but soon led to problems at Barça, with board members resigning and the club eventually transferring their half-share.
“I have come to Spain to play for Barcelona,” Di Stefano had said in July 1953. Just over a decade later, he’d helped Madrid win eight LaLiga titles and the first five European Cups back-to-back. Barça were left wondering what could have been.
5. Move to Camp Nou
If Barça are “Més que un club” (“More than a club”), as the club’s motto states, then Camp Nou is more than a stadium. It’s a focal point of the city, a meeting spot for thousands of Catalans and has provided a stage for the game’s best players.
The stadium opened in 1957 and has been Barça’s home ever since, although they bring up their 125th anniversary playing at the Olympic Stadium in another part of the city while Camp Nou is being redeveloped. The plan had been to return to mark the occasion. That won’t happen, but the revamp continues apace at Europe’s biggest ground. The capacity will increase from 99,000 to 105,000, and the club say their rebuilt headquarters will be “at the avant-garde of technology.” Club president Joan Laporta boasts it will be “the best stadium in the world.”
6. The opening of La Masía
In 1979, the first batch of young footballers moved into La Masía, a farmhouse-like building next to Camp Nou which served as a residence for the club’s academy players. Few would have expected it to become the symbol it has for both Barça and the football world. The Catalan club are now synonymous with in-house talent production.
La Masía is now the catch-all term for the club’s academy, with players no longer living in the original farmhouse. The operation has been moved to the club’s training ground, with a new building housing many more youngsters. The history remains, though, and Barça’s best moments are all linked to the academy. Johan Cruyff is largely credited for the playing style which is practiced throughout every age-level at the club, through to the first team, and has been continued and tweaked since by the likes of Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique.
As for the players that have emerged, the list is endless, but the image of three La Masía-developed players on the Ballon d’Or podium in 2010 (Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández) may never be seen again. That said, the new generation, led by Pau Cubarsí, Gavi and Lamine Yamal aren’t bad.
7. Cruyff and the Dream Team
Cruyff first endeared himself to Barça supporters as a player in the 1970s under his fellow Dutchman Rinus Michels, the coach who is generally credited with the introduction of Total Football.
However, it was as a coach that Cruyff really transformed the club. Between 1929 and 1990, Barça won 10 LaLigas. Including Cruyff’s first league title in 1991, they have won 17 since. Under the three-time Ballon d’Or winner — whose influence on football extends beyond Barça, with many modern-day coaches building on his ideas — Barça also won their first-ever European Cup. Ronald Koeman’s strike won them the trophy against Sampdoria in 1992 after they had ended runners-up in 1961 and 1986. Since then, they have won it four more times.
That Barça side, nicknamed the Dream Team, also won four consecutive titles with players like Michael Laudrup, Hristo Stoichkov and Romário complementing homegrown and domestic talent.
8. Pep appointment brings unprecedented success
Barça’s success varied after Cruyff left in 1996, but the appointment of Laporta as president, the hiring of former player Frank Rijkaard as coach and the signing of Ronaldinho in 2003 set the club back on an upward trajectory.
A second Champions League followed in 2006, but it was in 2008, with the promotion of coach Guardiola from the B team, that things really moved to the next level. Guardiola, who had played in Cruyff’s Dream Team, quickly made big decisions, letting Ronaldinho and Deco leave and preferring to build around players from La Masía: Carles Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Sergio Busquets, Messi, Pedro Rodríguez, et al.
The results were astounding. Four seasons of unprecedented success in the club’s history followed, including three league titles, two Champions Leagues, one treble and all six trophies available to them in 2009. It was not just what they won, either, but how they won. Many, including members of the Manchester United side that lost Champions League finals against them in 2009 and 2011, consider Guardiola’s Barça the best to have ever played the game.
9. The Messi era
The glory years under Guardiola were underpinned by the emergence of Messi as one of the game’s greatest players. The Argentine, who had arrived at La Masía as a 13-year-old, took goal scoring to new levels (ending 2012 with 91 goals in that calendar year) and set the bar at the club impossibly high. He broke the club’s record for appearances (767) and goals (672) and was part of teams that won four Champions Leagues, 10 LaLigas and seven Copa del Reys.
“With time, you will see how difficult it is to win LaLiga,” he said in 2019 when league titles were not always enough to quench the thirst of supporters who were forced to watch Madrid rack up European honours. Having made his debut in 2004, Messi left in tears in 2021, the club unable to afford to register his new contract with LaLiga, and his comments have resonated ever since. Barça have won just one league title in the last five years.
There is finally hope again, though, as another generation of youngsters, headlined by 17-year-old Yamal, remarkably seems to have appeared in the club’s hour of need.
10. Barça’s women become European power
The blueprint which led to glory for the men’s team under Cruyff and Guardiola has been transferred to the women’s team. In recent years, Barça Femení have surfaced as one of the best sides in the game, practicing the same playing style to the men and, when possible, building the team around academy players.
In the last five seasons, they have won five Liga F titles and three Champions Leagues, broken the attendance record in women’s football on two occasions and produced the best players in the world. Between them, Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmatí have won the last four Ballon d’Ors.
Last season, the women’s team — who moved into the 6,000-capacity Estadi Johan Cruyff in 2019 — were the only team at the club to turn a profit. Barça’s success has been Spain’s, too. When Spain’s men won the World Cup in 2010, six starters in the final came from Barça. When Spain’s women won it in 2023, that number increased to seven.
The best Barcelona XIs of all time
The list of former Barça players is staggeringly good, especially in attack. It makes picking an all-time XI nigh on impossible. The following team was picked following a heated debate among ESPN’s Barcelona-based correspondents, prioritising player performance while with the club as opposed to throughout their whole career. It is also, obviously, very forward-heavy.
Some of the biggest discussions focused on whether to go with Diego Maradona or Ronaldinho, with 1999 Ballon d’Or winner Rivaldo among those edged out. You could make worthy arguments for tons of other players, too, but there are only 11 places on the team.
There is also a strong bias towards the post-Cruyff years, although that is to be expected given the club’s biggest successes have occurred since 1990.
Barcelona men’s all-time XI (3-4-3 diamond)
GK: Victor Valdes
DF: Dani Alves, Ronald Koeman, Carles Puyol
MF: Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Luis Suárez (Spain), Johan Cruyff
FW: Lionel Messi, László Kubala, Ronaldinho
Barça Femení became an official part of the club in 2002. Given its relative infancy, the women’s XI was easier to select.
Barcelona women’s all-time XI (3-4-3 diamond)
GK: Sandra Paños
DF: Marta Torrejón, Mapi Leon, Melanie Serrano
MF: Patricia Guijarro, Vicky Losada, Aitana Bonmatí, Alèxia Putellas
FW: Caroline Graham Hansen, Sonia Bermúdez, Jenni Hermoso
