I’m referring to the Barcelona team of the past three seasons, 2009-11. Despite a few nontrivial player changes — Samuel Eto’o replaced by Zlatan Ibrahimovic in 2010 and then by David Villa in 2011, Thierry Henry replaced by Pedro Rodriguez, Yaya Toure replaced by Sergio Busquets — the squad remained largely intact over this period.

Who are their chief rivals? And on what grounds can we consider Barça superior?

National teams

Nearly everyone who isn’t a diehard partisan views Brazil’s 1970 squad the best national team ever. A recent poll of experts yielded this conclusion, with Brazil 1970 followed by the mid-1950s Hungarian national team and the Netherlands’ 1974 World Cup team. The 1970 Brazilian team featured Pelé, the widely-acknowledged best player of all time, along with several other entertaining attacking talents like Jairzinho, Tostão, and Roberto Rivelino. It played with a seldom-replicated panache and soundly defeated most of its opponents.

In a head-to-head match, the contemporary Barça team would demolish the 1970 Brazilians; fitness, strength, skill, and tactics have advanced a good bit in the past four decades. The only fair way to compare across such a long stretch of time is by assessing the teams relative to others in their own era.

I give the edge to Barça for three reasons.

First, Brazil were pretty equally matched by England in the 1970 World Cup. The two teams met in the first round. Brazil ended up winning 1-0, but it easily could have gone the other way. England played Brazil straight up and gave as much as they got.

To my knowledge, in the past three years no competitor has played Barcelona straight up and succeeded in giving them a genuine challenge. Manchester United tried in the 2009 and 2011 Champions League finals. In both matches they did well for the first ten minutes, but after that Barcelona thoroughly dominated. Real Madrid, perhaps the second best team in the world this year, tried to play Barça straight up in a league match this past fall. Barcelona won 5-0.

Barcelona are so good — so capable of keeping the ball for long stretches, creating scoring opportunities, and getting the ball back quickly when they lose it — that even the most talented attacking teams tend to feel no choice but to retreat into a defensive shell against them. The strategy is to “park the bus,” pulling most players back into the defensive third of the field, and hope for a counterattack goal or two. Three of the best attacking teams in recent memory — Chelsea in the 2009 Champions League semifinals, Arsenal in 2010 and 2011 Champions League ties, and Real Madrid in this year’s Champions League semifinals — were reduced to this approach.

Is this because these next-best teams simply aren’t very strong? On the contrary. In today’s soccer the top club teams are better than the top national teams. Globalization and the absence of a salary cap have allowed the world’s richest clubs to concentrate talent from around the world in a way that national teams can’t. This year’s Real Madrid team is one of the best we’ve seen in years. It features some of the top attacking players on the planet. Against Barcelona in the Champions League, however, Real’s coach Jose Mourinho kept several of them on the bench and played with, in effect, seven defenders. In the end it didn’t work, but it probably was their best hope of winning.

My second reason for preferring Barcelona 2009-11 over Brazil 1970 is the Brazilian team’s dodgy goalkeeper. It was a major liability. Barça has no comparable weakness.

Third, Spain won last year’s World Cup in what I think was the most dominant performance since Brazil’s in 1970. They took the game to every team they faced and won the tournament convincingly, even though a number of their victories were by small margins. Barcelona’s club team is essentially that Spanish national team plus Lionel Messi, the world’s best player and one of the ten best of all time. It’s a bit like taking Brazil’s 1970 team and adding Johan Cruyff or Franz Beckenbauer (or perhaps Gordon Banks in goal).

Club teams

Are there club teams that might rival Barcelona 2009-11 for the title of greatest team ever? One obvious candidate is Real Madrid 1956-60. Their record of five consecutive European Cup (the predecessor of the Champions League) titles likely will never be equaled. The team featured two of the premier players of the 1950s in Ferenc Puskas and Alfredo di Stefano. But that was an utterly different soccer era, before teams knew how to defend. And I’m skeptical about the quality of the competition they faced. Rightly or wrongly, I exclude them from consideration.

Here are four others.

Ajax 1971-73. This team won three consecutive European Cup titles and dominated the Dutch league until Johan Cruyff left to play for Barcelona. It also included the nucleus of the great 1974 Dutch World Cup team. But herein lies a problem. Most would consider the 1974 Netherlands team better than the Ajax team, and most also rank Netherlands 1974 below Brazil 1970.

Bayern Munich 1972-76. Bayern dominated the German Bundesliga in the early 1970s and won three successive European Cup titles following Ajax’ run. It then dropped off when Franz Beckenbauer left for the New York Cosmos in 1976. Here too, though, we have a club team-national team difficulty. The Bayern team contained the nucleus of the World Cup-winning German national team in 1974. But that World Cup squad probably was better than Bayern, and the World Cup squad is generally rated below the team they beat, the Netherlands, which in turn is ranked below Brazil 1970.

Liverpool 1977-84. Liverpool won four European Cup titles in eight years, including three in five years. They also won six English league titles during those eight years.  There was a good bit of turnover during this span — the key forward, for instance, shifted from Kevin Keegan in 1977 to Kenny Dalglish for the bulk of the period to Ian Rush by the end — so it’s a stretch to think of this as a single team. I suspect that’s why relatively few seem to include them on the list of top contenders for all-time greatest status.

AC Milan 1989-91. This was a mesmerizing squad, with Paolo Maldini and several other Italian stalwarts alongside the brilliant Dutch trio of Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit, and Frank Rijkaard. The team won the European Cup in 1989 and 1990 and went through the entire 1992 Italian league (Serie A) season undefeated.

Great teams dominate their competition. There’s a qualitative aspect to dominance, but we can also look at the numbers. I think the two key indicators are titles and goal difference.

Begin with titles. Barcelona has now won the Champions League two of the past three years. (It’s won three of the past six, but the squad that won in 2006 was sufficiently different that I’m not including it here.) This isn’t the best title run ever. But it’s no less impressive than the earlier runs by Ajax, Bayern, Liverpool, and AC Milan. Virtually all of the world’s best players now play in Europe, with many of them concentrated in just ten clubs. Barcelona therefore faces stronger competition than its predecessors.

Barça has won its domestic league (La Liga) each of the past three years. The Spanish league is less competitive than the English Premier League, but it’s quite good. And in the past two years Barça’s main domestic rival, Real Madrid, has been one of the world’s top two or three teams.

Including titles in the assessment diminishes the luster of the AC Milan team of 1989-93 somewhat. Though it won the European Cup twice in a row, Milan won the Italian league title only twice during that five-year span.

Along with titles, goal difference (goals scored minus goals allowed) is probably the best quantitative indicator of dominance. The following chart shows per-game goal difference for each of these five club teams in domestic league matches and in Champions League matches. Performance in Champions League matches is the better measure for comparison, since domestic league quality varies a good bit. Ajax stands above the other four in goal difference in domestic matches, but the Dutch league competition was likely the weakest of the five.

Barcelona looks good relative to the others in both Champions League and domestic league goal difference. Is its impressive Champions League goal difference a product of some early-round 10-0 thrashings of weak opponents? No; Barça’s largest margin in any Champions League match during its three-year run was five goals.

Lucky rather than great?

One possible knock on Barcelona is that they got a bit lucky in their Champions League seminal tie in both 2009 and 2011. In 2009 they faced Chelsea. In the first leg, in Barcelona, Chelsea parked the bus and got a 0-0 draw. In the second leg Chelsea again played counterattack, and it worked well. They generated several good scoring chances, including a couple of possible penalty kicks that the referee didn’t award. Barcelona got a very late goal to tie the match 1-1 and go through to the finals on away goals. In this year’s semifinal Barça beat Real Madrid 2-0 in the first match and drew 1-1 in the second. In the first match, several Barça players reacted theatrically to some Madrid fouls, which may have contributed to Madrid’s Pepe getting red carded early in the second half. That probably helped Barcelona, though I’m not sure Real would have stopped Messi’s second goal even with eleven (or twelve or thirteen) men.

The thing is, every successful team needs a bit of luck to get by. Brazil’s 1970 World Cup team were lucky not to have to face England in the final. In the quarterfinal match between England and West Germany, England went up 2-0. England’s coach substituted for two of the team’s best players, to rest them and safeguard against injury. The Germans pulled off a remarkable comeback to win 3-2 and England were out of the tournament. In AC Milan’s first victorious European Cup run, in 1989, they faced Red Star Belgrade in a second-round home-and-away contest. They tied in the home match in Milan and were behind 1-0 in the 65th minute of the away match when a fog rolled in, forcing cancellation of the match. The full game was replayed the next day. It ended in a draw, with Milan then winning in penalty kicks.

Over time we forget the luck and remember the brilliance. A decade from now hardly anyone will remember these details of Barcelona’s Champions League triumphs. What people will recall, rightly, is Barça’s exquisite play.

A thing to behold

Are Barça the best team of all time? There’s no way to settle the question objectively, and in the end it doesn’t much matter. What matters is the joy of watching them play. I was too young to appreciate Brazil’s 1970 squad and Cruyff’s Ajax team, and television coverage then was too limited in any case. What good fortune to live at a moment when it’s been possible to see a team as glorious as this Barcelona side work its magic on a regular basis.

What impact does the rise in the share taken by those at the top have on the incomes of those in the middle? On one view it’s bad: if the additional millions going to the “winners” had instead been spread among those in the middle, the latter would have been better off. Others suggest the impact is good: winner-take-all markets help make the pie bigger than it otherwise would have been, and a larger pie means a larger slice for the middle class in absolute terms, even if that slice has shrunk relative to the slice of those at the top.*

Pay in major league baseball is a good test case. Since the 1970s professional baseball has had the two defining characteristics of a winner-take-all market: owners’ and/or consumers’ judgment that top stars are much more valuable than the next best, and stars’ ability to exit if offered better pay elsewhere. Salaries for baseball’s top players have skyrocketed. Also helpful: unlike in pro football and basketball, baseball teams’ total pay is not limited by a salary cap.

Here are the two contending hypotheses:

1. Winner-take-all is bad for middle-pay players. Stars’ big paychecks come largely at the expense of their teams’ mid-level players.

2. Winner-take-all is good for middle-pay players. Teams that pay big money for top stars enjoy greater revenue growth via higher game attendance, richer TV deals, better jersey and hat sales, and so on. The stars collect a growing share of these teams’ total payroll, but this is more than offset by the degree to which they help boost the payroll. As a result, salaries for the middle players on these teams increase more than on other teams.

Baseball-almanac.com has data on the salaries of all major league players since the mid-1980s. I’ll examine change from 1989 to 2007, as both are business-cycle-peak years. (I exclude the four teams created after 1989. The Cincinnati Reds also are left out, due to missing 1989 salary data.)

Does paying big money for top stars enlarge the pie? On the horizontal axis of the following chart is change in the share of each team’s total pay that goes to its top three players. Consistent with what we would expect in a winner-take-all market, for most teams that share rose. For example, in 1989 the best-paid trio of players on the San Francisco Giants got 22% of the team’s total pay. In 2007 the Giants’ top three got 40% of the total pay, an increase of 18 percentage points. On the chart’s vertical axis is 1989-to-2007 change in each team’s total pay, in millions of inflation-adjusted dollars. The hypothesized positive association isn’t there. Teams that increased the portion of their pie going to their top three players haven’t gotten a faster-growing pie in return.

That points us toward hypothesis 1, which says a rising share of a team’s pay going to its top stars is bad for those in the middle. As the next chart shows, that’s indeed how things have played out. The chart plots the change in pay for each team’s middle five players from 1989 to 2007 by the change in the top three players’ share of the team’s total pay. Middle-player salaries have tended to grow less rapidly on teams in which the top three’s share has risen more.

The following set of charts elaborates a bit. It shows changes in top players’ pay and changes in middle players’ pay for four teams. The first two teams, the San Francisco Giants and Toronto Blue Jays, are on the right side of the second chart above. Pay for their top three players exploded. It rose for their middle players too, but much more modestly. The next two teams, the Baltimore Orioles and Milwaukee Brewers, are on the left side of the second chart above. Pay for their top three players rose sharply, but less than for their counterparts on the Giants and Blue Jays. Their middle players, by contrast, did better.

But that’s not the full story. To the two hypotheses listed above we should add a third:

3. Winner-take-all is bad for middle-pay players, but its harm is outweighed by other developments.

The “other” development that has mattered most is the growth in team payrolls. Total pay for the median team soared from $23 million in 1989 to $89 million in 2007. This has been the key determinant of salary growth for middle-pay major league players. On average, the pay of the middle five players rose by $300,000 less on a team with a ten-percentage-point increase in the top three players’ pay share than on a comparable team with no change in the top three’s share.** But salaries for the middle five players nevertheless increased on almost all teams, in many instances handsomely so. Across all teams, the average increase for the middle five between 1989 and 2007 was $1 million, nearly a 200% rise. Even among the six teams on which the top three players’ share of pay rose the most — those to the right in the second chart: Houston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto, Oakland, and the L.A. Angels — the average increase for the middle five players was $540,000.

What accounts for the sharp jump in team payrolls? One element is enhanced revenues due to expanded demand for tickets, TV rights, and team paraphernalia. Another is a shift in the balance of power away from owners in favor of players. These developments have enabled some teams — the New York Yankees are the paramount example, as you can see in the second chart above — to concentrate a growing share of pay on their top three ballplayers and simultaneously provide a large rise in pay for their “middle-class” players.

Implications for the broader economy probably are limited. One, though, is that even if winner-take-all hurts middle-class incomes, if we had very rapid economic growth it might not matter much. Alas, figuring out how to get that isn’t so easy. A good substitute might be moderately strong growth coupled with strong unions (as in the 1950s and 1960s) or low unemployment (as in the late 1990s). But I’m not too optimistic about that either.

__________

* Some recent analysis and commentary: Andrews-Jencks-Leigh, Cowen, Drum, Kenworthy, Klein, Thoma, Yglesias.

** This is based on a regression of change in middle-five players’ pay on change in top-three players’ share of team pay, change in total team pay, and 1989 level of middle-five players’ pay.

The Book of Basketball offers thoughtful and informed answers to a number of interesting questions: Who was a better player: Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain? Who were the top 96 players, in order, in NBA history? Which were the best teams in NBA history? Which twelve players would form the best basketball team? The most interesting chapter of all, in my view, is one titled “How the Hell Did We Get Here?” — a fascinating year-by-year discussion of developments in the league, the players, the styles, and how they were influenced by trends in American society.

The data come from the usual statistics on scoring, rebounding, assists, turnovers, shot blocks, and other quantifiable aspects of basketball. They also come from journalist reports, from basketball books, from Simmons’ interviews and discussions with (current and former) players, coaches, and basketball executives, and from thousands of games and game segments that are now viewable on the internet and on channels like ESPN Classic.

Simmons has a deep passion for his topic, stemming partly from his having attended hundreds of Boston Celtics home games as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. That passion is key to the book. It helps not because it leads him to openly reveal his love for the Celtics or his lack of love for Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Kobe Bryant. Simmons’ frankness, coupled with his enthusiasm and flowing prose, no doubt help make this book a hit with many basketball fans. For me, Simmons’ passion matters because it’s surely what led him to spend so much time examining individual and team statistics, reading about and digesting reports and books on earlier eras, watching countless hours of game footage, and talking and debating with other experts and analysts. It’s Simmons’ knowledge about his subject — his reliance on evidence, in various forms and from an array of sources — that makes this a terrific book.

It’s therefore particularly surprising and disappointing that the book’s key chapter is missing. In chapter 1, before he gets to history’s best players and teams, Simmons heads straight to basketball’s most important question: What explains which teams win championships? He gives us a sensible though debatable hypothesis (pp. 46-48 in the 2010 paperback edition). But then he moves on, offering only some scattered analysis.

Simmons’ hypothesis: “teamwork over talent.”

A little elaboration: “Teams that play together, kill themselves defensively, sacrifice personal success and ignore statistics invariably win the title.”

More elaboration:

Here’s what we know for sure:

1. You build potential champions around one great player. He doesn’t have to be a super-duper star or someone who can score at will, just someone who leads by example, kills himself on a daily basis, raises the competitive nature of his teammates, and lifts them to a better place.

2. You surround that superstar with one or two elite sidekicks who understand their place in the team’s hierarchy, don’t obsess over stats, and fill in every blank they can.

3. From that framework, you complete your nucleus with top-notch role players and/or character guys who know their place, don’t make mistakes, and won’t threaten that unselfish culture, as well as a coaching staff dedicated to keeping those team-ahead-of-individual values in place.

4. You need to stay healthy in the playoffs and maybe catch one or two breaks.

That’s how you win an NBA championship.

This seems plausible, even compelling. Then again, it sounds like a to-the-tee description of the Utah Jazz from 1988 to 2003. The number of NBA titles the Jazz won during that span: zero.

We need evidence and analysis. Here’s what Simmons offers (pp. 47-48):

1. The list of Best Players on an NBA Champ Since Bird and Magic Joined the League looks like this: Kareem (younger version), Bird, Moses, Magic, Isiah, Jordan, Hakeem, Duncan, Shaq (younger version), Billups, Wade, Garnett, Kobe. It’s a list that looks exactly how you’d think it should look with the exception of Billups.

2. The list of Best Championship Sidekicks Since 1980: Magic, Parish/McHale, Kareem (older version), Worthy, Doc/Toney, DJ, Dumars, Pippen/Grant, Drexler, Pippen/Rodman, Robinson, Kobe (younger version), Parker/Ginobili, Shaq (older version), Pierce/Allen, Gasol. You would have wanted to play with everyone on that list … even younger Kobe.

3. Too many to count, but think Robert Horry/Derek Fisher types.

4.

Sprinkled throughout the book are additional bits and pieces of evidence that bear on the “teamwork over talent” hypothesis. But the only systematic analysis is in the chapter I mentioned earlier in which Simmons goes through the 1960s Russell-Chamberlain years comparing their teams and outcomes. It’s a very good chapter. The key conclusion is that contrary to conventional belief, Russell’s supporting cast wasn’t consistently better talent-wise than Chamberlain’s. And there’s loads to indicate that Russell prioritized and fostered a team-first approach whereas Wilt did not. Russell’s teams won eleven NBA titles; Chamberlain’s won two. Hypothesis confirmed.

But only through the early 1970s. The Russell-Chamberlain chapter ends on page 83, and I spent the rest of the 734-page book waiting, largely in vain as it turned out, for examples of post-Chamberlain teams that had sufficient talent to win an NBA title but didn’t because they lacked the teamwork element. Surely the 2004 Lakers. Possibly the post-1986 Houston Rockets, though Simmons says they also were hindered by Ralph Sampson’s bad luck and by cocaine.

So here’s what I’m hoping for in the second edition: the missing chapter(s) in which Simmons walks us through each of the past forty years with an assessment of the talent and teamwork of the top four or five or eight teams. Why add more to a book that’s already very long? Because we need that analysis, and Simmons is the person to do it. It would ensure that The Book of Basketball, already splendid in many respects, remains the book of basketball for many years to come.

Real has two of the best attacking players in the world in Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka, and a strong nucleus around them. This year’s Real team played with an attacking style that was fun to watch. In Spanish league competition it scored far more goals than its recent predecessors.

I suspect this will change under Mourinho. His preferred style is counterattack. That’s how his Inter Milan teams of the past two years have played, and it’s the way his Chelsea teams of the mid-2000s tended to play, despite their wealth of offensive talent. Mourinho’s Chelsea did use an offensive-looking 4-3-3 formation. But a team’s formation matters less than its strategy on the field, and the main thing Mourinho added to Chelsea when he arrived in 2004-05 was a defensive-minded counterattacking style. The club’s goal record bears this out. Chelsea upped its scoring slightly in the first two of Mourinho’s three seasons, but its chief improvement was in allowing fewer goals.

Real Madrid were successful this year, but not successful enough. Their record in the Spanish league was one of the best ever: 31 wins, 3 draws, 4 losses. Yet they finished second to Barcelona. In the Champions League, Real slipped up in the round of 16. Mourinho has been brought in to do better. And he might. Make no mistake: counterattack can be an effective strategy. It’s no accident that the Italian national team, a consistent practitioner,  has won two of the last seven World Cups, reaching the semifinals two other times. And the only teams to fare well against Barcelona in the Champions League the past three years — Manchester United in 2008, Chelsea in 2009, Inter Milan this year — did so via a cautious, defensive approach.

As a spectator, though, I much prefer teams willing to play genuinely attacking soccer. This year’s Chelsea team, for instance, was more enjoyable to watch than its Mourinho-era counterparts, with many of the same players.

Few teams have the talent to thrive with an attacking style. The current Real squad is one that does. It would be a pity to waste it. Perhaps at Real Mourinho will change his stripes, but I’m not optimistic.

The book’s lead chapter tries to answer the question “Why does England lose?” Why has England’s national team fared so poorly in the quadrennial World Cup since its one and only triumph in 1966? This is, the authors note, “perhaps the greatest question in English sports.”

England has a rich soccer history. It is one of only seven countries to have won a World Cup. It ranks fifth all-time in World Cup matches played (55) and wins (25). Its club teams have been highly successful; between 1970 and 2006 an English team won the world’s top club competition, Europe’s Champions League, nine times, which compares favorably to Germany (6), Italy (6), the Netherlands (6), and Spain (5). Yet England won none of the ten World Cups played during that span. Indeed, it never reached the finals, and made it to the semifinals only once. Why?

Kuper and Szymanski begin by dismissing the popular notion that the problem lies in English clubs’ overreliance on foreign players, which supposedly hinders the development of native talent. I agree with their skepticism here. Then they show that a large share of England’s national team players are from working-class households, and they suggest it would be good if more were recruited from the middle class. But they don’t look to see if other more successful countries have done that. They then say England has suffered from being outside the continental European soccer knowledge network. As a result, while other leading European national teams shifted to a rapid short passing game, English soccer remained wedded to a “kick-and-rush” style. But they don’t address the obvious question of why, if the kick-and-rush style contributed to failure in the World Cup, it yielded such success at the club level during the same period.

Ultimately, Kuper and Szymanski assert that the question “Why does England lose?” is wrongheaded, for England’s national team actually hasn’t performed too badly. Here they turn away from World Cup results and look at goal difference in all games played by the national team. They examine all countries’ national teams over the period 1980 to 2001 and discover that GDP per capita, population, and number of matches played since 1872 are helpful predictors. They find that England’s team has done, relative to what this formula predicts, about as well as those of Germany, Italy, Argentina, and France.

Yet here the authors are, I think, trying to be a bit too clever. England truly has underperformed in the past ten World Cups. Kuper and Szymanski note that “Any mathematician would say it’s absurd to expect England to win the World Cup … random factors play an outsize role in determining the winner.” Okay, fair enough. So let’s use getting to the semifinals as the benchmark. Over the past four decades eight nations have dominated world soccer: Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. The following chart shows how these countries have fared in reaching the World Cup semis since 1970. England’s record is second-worst.

How well should England have done? We can predict these countries’ recent World Cup success pretty well by looking at their historical performance. The following chart plots the number of semifinals reached in the ten World Cups since 1970 by each country’s World Cup match wins over the entire history of the tournament, from 1930 to 2006. Given its overall number of match victories, England ought to have reached the semifinals three times since 1970, rather than just once.

What accounts for England’s poor results? I think it’s a fairly simple story. First, it helps to host the World Cup tournament. These countries have hosted six of the past ten, and in five of those six instances the host made it to the semifinals or beyond: Germany in 1974 and 2006, Argentina in 1978, Italy in 1990, and France in 1998. (Only Spain in 1982 failed.) England didn’t host any. Second, you need to do okay — not great, but okay — in matches decided on penalty kicks. Penalty kick shootouts have been used in the World Cup since 1982. In the seven tournaments from 1982 to 2006, England was eliminated on penalty kicks three times, with not a single penalty-kick win. In contrast, Germany is 4-0 in penalty-kick shootouts, Argentina is 3-1, Brazil is 2-1, and France is 2-2. Only Italy, at 1-3, rivals England’s record of futility in World Cup penalty-kick matches.

Had it hosted one of the past ten World Cups and won a penalty-kick shootout in either 1998 or 2006, England’s semifinals appearances might well have jumped from one to three, putting it right at the expected number.

This year has been especially pleasurable, because Barcelona have a delightful team. Their front five — Lionel Messi (Argentina), Samuel Eto’o (Cameroon), Thierry Henry (France), Andrés Iniesta (Spain), and Xavi Hernández (Spain) — are a joy to watch. Messi has more skill on the ball than anyone since Diego Maradona and is probably the world’s best player at the moment. Eto’o, lightening quick with excellent touch around the goal, has scored 125 goals for Barcelona in the last five seasons. Henry has been one of the world’s top three forwards over the past decade; he’s slightly past his peak form, but still very good. Xavi and Iniesta are exquisite dribblers and passers whose talents and personalities seem ideally suited to bringing out the best in Messi, Eto’o, and Henry.

As one indicator this Barça team’s quality, here’s their goal difference — average goals scored minus goals allowed — this year compared to that of the nine other clubs that dominate European and world club soccer. (Since 1990, these teams have won 14 of the 19 Champions League tournaments, including 10 of the last 11. One of them will win it again this year, as all four semifinalists are among this group.) I’ve included both regular league and Champions League matches.

If you’ve been tempted by soccer but found it boring, consider watching Barcelona play in the Champions League semifinals this Tuesday and next Wednesday (April 28 and May 6). The matches will be shown on ESPN2 at 2:45pm eastern time. I can’t guarantee it’ll be worth your time; at this stage of major competitions (the Champions League is soccer’s biggest aside from the World Cup), teams often play cautiously. But I’d advise against waiting. The style and flair of this team come along very rarely, and all it takes is a juicy offer from another club or an injury to one of the key players to destroy it.

I should say that I wouldn’t bet on Barcelona winning the Champions League this season. They’re a bit suspect defensively, and in any case in soccer, as in many sports, the most attractive team doesn’t always come out on top. But for at least some fans, the outcome is a secondary consideration when you’re able to see what Pelé once called “the beautiful game” played so beautifully.

Now, not so much. This assessment seems about right.

Germany vs. Portugal (Thursday)

Croatia vs. Turkey (Friday)

Netherlands vs. Russia (Saturday)

Italy vs. Spain (Sunday)

Hope: based on their first-round form coupled with history of disappointment, I’ll root for Portugal, the Netherlands, and Spain, and perhaps for a Portugal-Spain final.

Expectation: a final that includes Germany or Italy, quite possibly both.