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EVERY SINGLE OUTSTANDING THING ABOUT THESE BARCA ANNOUNCERS GOING INSANE

EVERY SPORTS EVENT SHOULD BE LIKE THIS EVERYTHING ELSE IS UNNECESSARY

By Spencer Hall
IT’S ALL TOO MUCH AND THAT’S FINE, MAN
  1. They’re in the booth and calling it in Catalan and doing it without caring about being objective at all. Joe Buck is fine. He does a great job and will let the action talk for itself. If that is your thing, enjoy it, it’s your life and that’s great. I want this: people in the team’s jersey in the booth calling the game like Barca represents their morally superior way of life versus their lesser, obviously evil competition. You would watch this for the Iron Bowl. You would definitely watch this for Ohio State/Michigan, if only to laugh at the Buckeye announcers crushing huge protein shakes for the entire broadcast. For any LSU game by their homer announcers this broadcast would result in some of the ear-scorching profanity you have ever heard. Someone in the back would be sautéing mirepoix and nodding along. If LSU pulled this off, they’d chuck the whole thing into the ceiling and pour bourbon on the hotplate because fire is the ultimate tribute and that’s what they make sprinklers for, and why you gonna make sprinklers if you’re not going to use them? Someone should really do this, is what I’m saying.
  2. They serve alcohol in a lot of European pressboxes. You can’t see that here, but it’s clearly also an outstanding thing about their sports culture along with rampant betting and using sports franchises as elaborate international tax shelters/money laundering nodes.
  3. Everyone in the booth goes absolutely apeshit the minute Barcelona scores their sixth goal. Let’s explain this a little and not assume you are the internet sports fan who instantly knows what this means, and also finds the time to watch Raw every week but also NJPW, and who also reads eight books a week and yeah, might have a serious Adderall problem and no family life? You’re not that person, so let’s explain it.
  4. If you are that person, skip to point 11, you ruthlessly informed addict, or just read this.
  5. This is the Champions League, the biggest annual soccer tournament in Europe. People have rioted over it; Turkish fans without tickets have tried to tunnel into games. TL;DR: It is very, very big shit, and has a gigantic bloated theme song about how great it is to match.
  6. After the first game of a two-game leg against Paris-Saint Germain, Barcelona trailed 4-0 going into a game at home. This was bad, very, very bad—even after Barca got up 3-0 in the second game, Edinson Cavani of PSG scored to make it 3-1, thus giving PSG a tiebreaking away team goal. There are at least eight thousand tweets, liveblog entries, and other internet signals from yesterday from that 62nd minute saying the same thing: this is over, go home.
  7. Then, in the 88th minute, Barcelona’s Neymar scored. Then he scored again on a penalty 18 seconds into injury time. This brought the match to “thrilling, valiant, and ultimately doomed comeback attempt.”
  8. Then, a death-defying 4:53 into vaguely kept injury time, substitute Sergi Roberto hit Barcelona’s sixth goal of game into PSG’s goal. These dudes lost their goddamn minds, and Barcelona completed a historic comeback that has no real comparison in college football. It doesn’t. Bama blowing a ten point lead against Clemson is nothing compared to this. The closest thing to it is TCU coming back from 31 down to beat Oregon in the Alamo Bowl, and even then that’s not quite right because the Alamo Bowl is the Alamo Bowl, and this would be the CFB Playoff version of that.
  9. Remember when Oregon blew a 31 point lead to TCU, and some people thought Mark Helfrich wasn’t a dead man walking? That was an interesting thing to think after watching that, wasn’t it?
  10. The point is: it really shouldn’t have happened in the first place, ever, anywhere, but we’re here now and that’s what matters. You’re up to speed now, and can continue enjoying all the fantastic microjoys here.
  11. First: Most in the press box lost their mind or at least acknowledged that something very entertaining and fun was happening. You should be free to do when sports are worth losing their mind over. This has only happened once, that I know of, in college football: During the 2007 Fiesta Bowl when Boise State pulled off the Statue of Liberty to beat Oklahoma in OT. It should happen more often, because sports and especially college football should be fun, and the people covering it should be fun, and being objective should apply to basic facts and numbers only. Beyond that, you’re mostly a drama critic where the actors play every role in their winter pajamas. Clap if it’s good. Roger Ebert did, and he might have been the best at what he did ever in any kind of entertainment writing.
  12. These dudes are not only wearing Barcelona jerseys in the pressbox. They’re wearing the older Unicef-sponsored ones, not the current ones with QATAR on the front. They’re not just wearing jerseys, they’re wearing the old ones, because they are professionals who are not new at this, and also maybe miss when Barcelona gave themselves the halo effect of being sponsored by a international children’s charity.
  13. The play-by-play man looks like my brother-in-law if my brother-in-law gave up completely and moved to LA where you can wear scarves when it gets below 65 degrees. That’s not important in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a delight to me that I wanted to share, like how it never fails to amuse people that I bounced back so quickly from the cancellation of Backstrom.
  14. Four seconds into this, someone makes a legit Homer Simpson scream. I don’t even know if they’re on camera—this is all so chaotic, though, that it doesn’t matter. It is an exquisite Homer Simpson scream. 11/10 on the Homer Simpson Scream Scale, and completely involuntary.
  15. The guy in the brown shirt in the back row nearly falls over the table fistpumping.
  16. The PBP announcer says Sergi Roberto’s name ten times in a row. He says goal eight times in a row, says some other stuff in Catlan we can’t quite translate but feel in our chest nonetheless. During the ninth GOL, he starts weeping—not crying, or tearing up, but weeping gustily to the point where can’t continue and has to put his head in his hands.
  17. The PBP guy is so overcome that he can’t talk for the last fifteen seconds of the clip, and has to drink some water to even think about recovering. This man is possessed and uncorking something beyond soccer here. Maybe someone died. Maybe someone died a long time ago. Maybe he’s thinking about how he can’t provide the life he wants for his kids, or someone else’s kids, or maybe just about the quotidian tragedies of the day, every day on this planet. Maybe he’s got to poop really badly, but can’t miss the game even at the risk of soiling himself, and is in that extremely emotional place one can only find in a moment of intestinal extremity. He can’t handle it all, and the last goal just uncorked all of that. Hopefully that’s a metaphorical uncorking, but even then it might be worth it. Remember the time Barca came back so hard it made you shit your pants? That’s a high standard for anything else to live up to, and one you’d probably take in exchange for the experience.
  18. Someone else begins screaming in his place.
  19. I cannot even see this person or where they are or who they are. It does not matter because sometimes sports are better not only when I have no clear idea what’s happening, but also if I can only understand every seventh word being said by the announcers.
  20. He tries to pick up the mic again about five seconds before the end of the clip, and has to give up again because it’s STILL TOO MUCH FOR HIM.
  21. The camera shakes when the goal happens, and this is great because I am a slave for any sports camera angle that gets knocked around when people are absurdly excited about something. It’s the third-best jostled camera behind 2.) pylon cam annihilated by diving American football players, and 1.) the net cam that flies all over the place when someone scores in soccer. Give me that wobble or else your televised soccer tournament is traaaaaaaaaaash.
  22. Dude on the left waits a respectable 56 seconds post-goal to begin snapping selfies, but still remembers to snap celebratory selfies. Flawless social media hustle right there, simply flawless.
  23. IT ME:
SPORTS ARE GREAT ALL THE TIME NO WE DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT HOW THIS FELT FOR PSG FANS SHHHHHH