Sporting conveyor belts

By Ed Smith

In the late 1990s, a tiny, pale-faced footballer, too shy to speak, showed up at a Barcelona training session. He began knocking the ball around as if it was the easiest thing in the world. The captain of the club took one look at the boy and called him to one side. His message was simple: “You’re going to push me out the door!”

The prediction proved to be partly accurate. The club captain was Pep Guardiola; the painfully shy junior was Xavi. Guardiola did move on, but promptly came back as manager, with Xavi as his heir, the team’s pivot. As a passer of the ball and reader of the game, Xavi was like Guardiola. As an athlete, he was faster, more robust. The conveyor belt of Barca number fours, which had begun with Johan Cruyff in the 1970s, gathered pace. The passing of the baton was witnessed by Boudewijn Zenden. “We said, ‘It’s the same kind of player!’” he told the writer Simon Kuper. “They had this education where you just open up a can of number fours.”