Barcelona has the best player in the world, Lionel Messi, a tiny Argentine dynamo who moved to Spain as a child after the club volunteered to pay the medical bills to treat his growth-hormone disorder, and whose talent has since expanded along such a mytho-surrealist axis that I once heard a commentator react to one of his moments of brilliance by roaring, “He’s like a little, short-legged bull, covered with eyes!” An unusually large number of Barcelona stars have been with the club since childhood: La Masia, the club’s training academy, is so good that all three current finalists for the Ballon d’Or, the prestigious European Footballer of the Year award, are graduates. (And all three, of course, play for Barcelona.) Six of the 11 players who started in the World Cup final for Spain were Barcelona players, including Andrés Iniesta, who scored the tournament-winning goal. Barcelona has won its last five league matches by a combined score of 26-1.
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