A Barcelona Holiday for Football Fans |
Posted: January 30, 2017 |
All across continental Europe and the United Kingdom, there are dozens of incredible sites for football fans to experience the game they love. There are small local clubs where children learn to love the game as much as their parents do, and there are also incredible stadiums that have almost as much history as the teams they host. If you are a football fan who is looking to spend a holiday enjoying the game, then you should seriously consider going to Spain. More specifically, you should travel to Barcelona. Barcelona FC FC Barcelona, as it is named in Spanish, is one of Europe’s oldest football clubs. It is also one of the last clubs formed in the 19th century. An entrepreneur named Hans Gamper announced that he wanted to form a football club in late 1899. In late November of that year, eleven men showed up to join his club, fortunately just managing to field an entire side. Barcelona FC has been operating fairly continuously since then. There were some fits and starts in the club’s past due to turmoil and unrest. For example, it was effectively shuttered for a time during the 1930s because the crowd jeered the national anthem, and the Spanish dictator decided to suspend the team’s operations. These are just a few of the jaw-dropping stories that you could hear on a Barcelona FC tour. There is no way that a storied team could exist for more than 100 years without accruing a whole host of exciting stories. FC Barcelona definitely has its share of these incredible stories. The stadium is part of that story. Camp Nou Camp Nou has been the stadium for FC Barcelona since 1957. Construction on the stadium began in 1954 after the side had outgrown its second stadium. They had played in that second stadium, Camp de Les Corts, for approximately thirty years. Before that they had been in a much smaller stadium that only held about 6,000 fans. That was fine for a small team that had only been founded a few years before, but the team grew so rapidly that they had to move out of the old stadium. The same forces - growing popularity and a larger fan base - led to their decision to leave their second stadium. They hired several popular strikers and midfielders who became legends in Spanish football and football all over the world. If you take a tour of the stadium, you will see more examples of this storied history. You can see and hear the tales of individual players who made the side legendary, as well as coaches that helped guide them. There are legendary games in the past and big hopes for the future; even if you’re not an FC Barcelona fan, you will enjoy a tour of the facility. It is an outstanding example of the long history of organised football in continental Europe. It’s also a great way to spend some time in an air-conditioned room on a hot Barcelona day. If you’re a football fan or just headed to Barcelona, you should definitely tour the FC Barcelona stadium.
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