The most curious Barça statistics that you didn't know and will surprise you

BarcelonaHow many Barça players have served as mayor? How many matches has the club won while wearing white shorts? What is the highest altitude stadium where Barça has played an official match? How many Barça players were born during the Third Carlist War? Which Barça player was born in the southernmost part of the planet, and who is the only footballer to have played for both Barça and Barcelona de Guayaquil? Knowing how to ask questions is perhaps as important as having the answers. And journalist Oriol Jové (Lleida, 1998) knows how to do both, so now he publishes Barça in figures (Almuzara), a book in which he compiles the most surprising figures from the club's 125-year history. "The player born furthest south and the only one who has also played for Barcelona de Guayaquil, the Ecuadorian club founded by Catalans, is the same person, the Argentine goalkeeper Carlos Medrano," he explains.

Jové was already asking questions as a child, so he got into the habit of creating his own football databases. Whether it was for Lleida or Barça, he would have little idea that these databases would grow to become part of his professional life, now a statistics specialist for the sports editorial team at RAC1. "From the first day I set foot on the radio, I already had the database, but I didn't say so. During the pandemic, a teacher had given me a Microsoft Access manual for Windows 99, and playing with that program, I created the Barça databases. It's always growing, and I've also entered the statistics for all the club's matches," he says. It was about trying to know everything about every match, every player. And this, in many cases, means having to search through old newspaper archives and newspaper archives, since the reports on matches from 100 years ago can be contradictory. "It's incredible the amount of information we still don't know about Barça's history," says this young journalist, who is also part of the group of Barça historians who created the dictionary of the club's players in 2015.

At the beginning of the 2022-23 season, at a meeting of young defenders of Barça's history and the program's presenter You SayAleix Parisé listened with wide eyes. "He asked me how I knew, I told him about my database, and he said I had to use it on the radio. And after a few years of explaining data, the publishing house Almuzara told me to write a book," he recalls. Jové had already published with this publisher the book Lecube, Hitler's footballer, where he had demonstrated his ability to search through archives to tell the story of this player detained by the British to work for the Nazis. A story about which nothing was known until recently.

Unexpected connections in the history of Barça

To do Barça in figures Jové has also worked with similar methods. "I've taken into account all of Barça's official matches in history, around 5,000. You can get a lot of data from the press of the time, but sometimes you find that one newspaper cites a player as the scorer of an assist and another outlet mentions another name. In these cases, I look for a third source. And then I add data like the altitude of the match, the wind, or the temperature. And from there, it's my ability to ask myself questions and notice if there are patterns. Often, everything starts with a hypothesis. I mean, I get the impression that Barça is scoring a lot of goals in the first 20 minutes of a match. Well, first you have to notice things that happen and then know how to translate that into a programming language so the database can answer me." The questions can be as many as you want: "Who is the last Catalan midfielder to score a header in a foreign stadium in a rainy match? You have the answer in the database," he explains. Thus, he has found data such as that the time slot where the club's most goals have been called is from 10:10 p.m. to 10:19 p.m., with 349 goals. stories. And he has done so by ordering the chapters according to the verses of the Barça chant. "One day, feeling the Barça chant, it occurred to me. If I dedicated each phrase of the anthem to a chapter, I could include all kinds of data, like when it says 'It doesn't matter where we come from'... because it allows us to talk about the players' places of birth," he reasons. By cross-referencing data and asking questions, he has come to discover that on the day Barça celebrated their first birthday in Plaça Sant Jaume, one of Messi's great-grandparents in Italy, before they emigrated to Argentina via the port of Genoa, Barça's rival in 1992 was Sampdoria. "I don't know if players had a surname with the letters of the word Barcelona, ​​​​to find out if Wojciech Szczęsny is the player with the most consonants or how many footballers have been called Joan," he says. A lot of data doesn't provide informative value, but they can be distracting and allow us to recover the club's history. Other data does have the name that can be valued on the day," says a journalist. Jové's birthplace is still the birthplace of every player in the club's history. "There are still many players we know nothing about. Sometimes, digging through archives, you uncover a thread and contacting families who tell you they didn't know their grandfather had played for Barça." Jové's database will continue to grow.