One Night At Camp Nou
Few football fans will ever get to see those who they most admire up close; to peer over the shoulders of a world-class artist as they compose their latest work. Sanaa Qureshi visits Camp Nou for the first time, to witness Barcelona take on Levante, and the age of Messi.
There is very little that football fans agree on but one of the few, universal truths of the game is that we are living in a unique moment. The age of Lionel Messi. What a time to be alive. What a time to be a mobile football fan with a passport, some expendable income and a very base desire to witness greatness.
Tickets are easy to buy and the stadium is easy to enter. The area we are seated in is mostly filled with people just like us, people who have travelled from outside the city, or the country, people who have decided to build their very own tiny stake in the narrative of Messi’s career, people who also contain within them a very base desire to witness greatness.
It’s only really in the last few years that my football fandom has manifested as my physical presence in stadiums, as an active, moving part of a collective, and within spaces that are exclusively for Everton fans. This relationship remains a bonus - an experience that adds layers to my fandom but not necessarily one that defines it. So the need to see Messi play, live, felt at times both ugly and reassuring. As fans, football is primarily a game we watch - our participation is in our observation - and travelling to Barcelona to do only that felt like the easiest way to assert myself as a serious football fan. The discomfort arose when I looked around the Lateral Upper stand on a windy Sunday evening and realised that was precisely what we were all doing; asserting something I have continuously tried to acknowledge as archaic, that fandom is only real inside stadiums.
Camp Nou is an astounding place. Situated in the east of Barcelona, the walk to the ground feels exactly like it should - passing small shops and large supermarkets, a heaving McDonald’s and stores selling all the Barça-themed items you might ever need. You know you’re getting closer before you can see why and when the stadium finally emerges, it appears as a delightful reveal.
There is no lack of people wearing Barcelona shirts. They’re largely from the last few seasons - Rakuten at the front, UNICEF at the back - and predictably, it is Messi that they most want to be. Scarves adorn necks just before they’re held aloft for a photo and every time Barcelona’s number 10 wanders with the ball, people sit up in their seats. When his shots fly off target, or straight into the keeper’s arms, the chorus of disappointing ohhhs that follows is a rare moment the crowd feels like a collective instead of disparate individuals visiting the same art exhibition at an allotted time. Messi, the famous artworks, and us, clamouring and ready with our phone cameras acting as an extension of our eyes.
No-one around us seems at all disturbed by the fact I am explaining to my friend, in great detail, each player’s back-story, or that I refer to Ansu Fati as my son and celebrate his brace as though this is simply an infallible truth. I help her identify players from their shirt numbers because although we can see the entire pitch, the clarity benefitting somewhat from distance, our location remains a little vertiginous. Towards the end of the game, Barcelona start drifting and there is palpable impatience every time Messi glides towards the goal. That he hasn’t scored seems to be a smudge on an otherwise routine ninety minutes of football, despite one especially stunning assist for a gifted seventeen year old finding his feet in the shadow of Barcelona’s superstars. I’m happy with this outcome, and satisfied to discover Messi isn’t faster or slower in real life - he is just as imagined, his movement blurry and his passing lucid with anticipation.
Watching Messi inside a stadium lays bare exactly what distinguishes him from his peers - that he can so consistently and diligently distil his absurd talent into the smallest actions, and moments. There is a flurrying dribble just outside the box - defenders lost, the quick one-two - pass and receive and accelerate, the searching balls that gently demand more of his teammates, the first touch to pull the game’s tempo with him. I am not waiting for a goal, or a ridiculous free-kick because I have seen all of that before. I came to witness Messi’s mundane, the moments steeped in potential that amount to nothing more. With many of these come pauses in play; the camera turn to Messi, a bemused grimace, hands on hips, head lightly shaking, seen on the screens all around Camp Nou.
“I’m happy and satisfied to discover Messi isn’t faster or slower in real life - he is just as imagined, his movement blurry and his passing lucid with anticipation.”
Throughout the game chants are sparse, scattered and feel unassuming in a stadium with a capacity of almost 100,000 that is only 60% full for this fixture against a side who had beaten Barça earlier in the season. The home side are quicker if occasionally a little careless under Setién’s guidance and aside from the goals, the moment that most rouses the crowd is a strange drop-ball situation where Levante seem to take undue advantage. People begin to filter out before the final whistle, stopping at the bottom of the stairs for a photo. We’d all paused in the same spot before the game commenced but this image was different - play ongoing behind, Messi running and breathing and moving and passing in real time as fans stop to memorialise him and the gigantic club to whom he has given his career.
One of the lasting feelings I’ve observed and perhaps even partaken in whilst watching football from away stands has been a sincere and occasionally heady lack of self-consciousness. That’s where photos of awkward, flailing limbs come from, where you hear teenagers representing your team freely lambasted by fifty year old men, where shots of people weeping openly close out Match Of The Day. Here at Camp Nou this comes through the labour of memory, the nearness of phones and cameras, the desire to appear in the same frame as the greatest footballer of many lifetimes, to create an image of ourselves enmeshed in the spectacle, to become the spectacle.
There is a couple sat in front of us who are visiting from Germany. The woman rests a phone on her knee, the camera on, idle, the game taking place through her eyes and her viewfinder. Her finger hovers near the record button and every time Barcelona move the play towards Levante’s goal, her partner nudges her, readying her for the potential of a moment. She tilts the phone upwards slightly, presses record and waits. She only stops recording when her partner nudges her again, disappointed. Next to them is a father and his son, visiting from somewhere much further away. The father has a camera around his neck and his phone hovers in front of his face, zooming in and following Messi even when there is seemingly nothing to see.
The refrain from fans echoing around stadiums and social media is for their peers to enjoy the moment, to cease recording, to take fewer photos, to simply exist in the present as though there is only a singular interpretation of what the “moment” is. But if your physical experience of football, or of a particular footballer, is not amassed over time or regularly accessible, the only moment you have is the one being memorialised. It was heartening to be around so many people unconcerned by the limits of this demand, whose enjoyment was simply in their proximity.