Tag: barcelona

Compensation at the right tail

Yesterday I was reading this article ($) about how Liverpool FC is going about (not) retaining its star forwards Sadio Mane and Mo Salah, who have been key parts of the team that has (almost) “cracked it” in the last 5 seasons.

One of the key ideas in the (paywalled) piece is that Liverpool is more careful about spending on its players than other top contemporary clubs. As Oliver Kay writes:

[…] the Spanish club have the financial strength to operate differently — retaining their superstars well into their 30s and paying them accordingly until they are perceived to have served their purpose, at which point either another A-list star or one of the most coveted youngsters in world football (an Eder Militao, an Eduardo Camavinga, a Vinicius Junior, a Rodrygo and perhaps imminently, an Aurelien Tchouameni) will usually emerge to replace them.

In an ideal world, Liverpool would do something similar with Salah and Mane, just as Manchester City did with Vincent Kompany, Fernandinho, Yaya Toure, David Silva and Sergio Aguero — and as they will surely do with De Bruyne.

But the reality is that the Merseyside club are more restricted. Not dramatically so, but restricted enough for Salah, Mane and their agents to know there is more to be earned elsewhere, and that presents a problem not just when it comes to retaining talent but also when it comes to competing for the signings that might fill the footsteps of today’s heroes.

To go back to fundamentals, earnings in sport follow a power law distribution – a small number of elite players make a large portion of the money. And the deal with the power law is that it is self-similar – you can cut off the distribution at any arbitrary amount, and what remains to the right is still a power law.

So income in football follows a power law. Income in elite football also follows the same power law. The English Premier League is at the far right end of this, but wages there again follow a power law. If you look at really elite players in the league, again it is a (sort of – since number of data points would have become small by now) power law.

What this means is that if you can define “marginal returns to additional skill”, at this far right end of the distribution it can be massive. For example, the article talks about how Salah has been offered a 50% hike (to make him the best paid Liverpool player ever), but that is still short of what some other (perceptibly less skilled) footballers earn.

So how do you go about getting value while operating in this kind of a market? One approach, that Liverpool seems to be playing, is to go Moneyball. “The marginal cost of getting a slightly superior player is massive, so we will operate not so far out at the right tail”, seems to be their strategy.

This means not breaking the bank for any particular player. It means ruthlessly assessing each player’s costs and benefits and acting accordingly (though sometimes it comes across as acting without emotion). For example, James Milner has just got an extension in his contract, but at lower wages to reflect his marginally decreased efficiency as he gets older.

Some of the other elite clubs (Real Madrid, PSG, Manchester City, etc.), on the other hand, believe that the premium for marginal quality is worth it, and so splurge on the elite players (including keeping them till fairly late in their careers even if it costs a lot). The rationale here is that the differences (to the “next level”) might be small, but these differences are sufficient to outperform compared to their peers (for example, Manchester City has won the league by one point over Liverpool twice in the last four seasons).

(Liverpool’s moneyball approach, of course, means that they try to get these “marginal advantages” in other (cheaper) ways, like employing a throw in coach or neuroscience consultants).

This approach is not without risk, of course. At the far right end of the tail, the variance in output can be rather high. Because the marginal cost of small increases in competence is so high, even if a player slightly underperforms, the effective monetary value of this underperformance is massive – you have paid for insanely elite players to win you everything, but they win you nothing.

And the consequences can be disastrous, as FC Barcelona found out last year.

In any case, the story doing the rounds now is that Barcelona want to hire Salah, but given their financial situation, they can’t afford to buy out his contract at Liverpool. So, they are hoping that he will run down his contract and join them on a free transfer next year. Then again, that’s what they had hoped from Gini Wijnaldum two years ago as well. And he’s ended up at PSG, where (to the best of my knowledge) he doesn’t play much.

Liverpool FC: 2014 vs 2019

Last night I watched the first half of the Champions League semifinal between FC Barcelona and Liverpool FC, going off to bed when the score was 1-0 in favour of Barcelona. I woke up this morning to much dismay to see that Liverpool lost 3-0, but I’d constructed this post in my head when Liverpool was trailing 1-0, and so executing now.

It’s about the difference between the title-challenging Liverpool of 2014 and the title-challenging Liverpool of this season. Luis Suarez, in a brilliant interview with Sid Lowe, had mentioned that the current team is much better than the 2014 team, but last night’s Champions League game suggests that the two teams five years apart are simply two very different teams.

Last night Barcelona went ahead with a goal from Suarez in the 25th minute. It wasn’t an easy goal. There was a cross from the left by Jordi Alba, and Suarez got ahead, and managed to get the precise touch required to put it past Alisson into Liverpool’s goal. Liverpool had dominated the game until then, but with that one little half chance Suarez had converted.

Ten minutes later Sadio Mane got a chance to equalise, from a broadly similar chance. It was another ball above the defence from Mo Salah, but Mane hit it to the sky. And that was representative of Liverpool this season – both Mane and Salah have required lots of chances to score.

In that sense, Liverpool’s defence and midfield this season is far superior to the title-challenging side of 2014, when Suarez led the line. Back then few chances were created, but Suarez and an in-form Daniel Sturridge would take most of them, meaning that even with the midfield creating few chances and the defence leaking lots of goals, Liverpool could mount a challenge.

One could only imagine how this season’s team would have performed with someone of Suarez’s finishing ability leading the line. Salah, Mane and Firmino are no doubt a brilliant front three, but their conversion rate is low. If only one of them had a higher conversion rate, we wouldn’t have been struggling in both the League and the Champions League this season.

 

1/13: Leaving home

Tomorrow, Pinky turns 30. I set out wanting to write 30 blogposts about her on the occasion. As it has happened, I managed 13 before I ran out of ideas and time. Anyway, I hope she likes them! 

Sometimes it’s hard to understand what some people are going through. When they put up a brave face and tell you that everything is okay, and they don’t crib, you simply assume that all is right with them. You don’t once try to understand that there might be some struggles going on within, and that the brave face is a result of being able to somehow deal with all of that.

Pinky hasn’t had the last three years easy. In August 2014, she moved to Barcelona to live by herself for the first time ever (she used to live with her parents until she moved in with me in 2010). The small matters of living alone for the first time, and in a new country, were compounded by lack of funds. We’d purchased an apartment in Bangalore earlier that year, and had exhausted a lot of our savings for that.

Unsure of how much she had to spend, Pinky economised. She would write a long email to me every day (and I’d wake up every morning looking forward to that mail), and while she seemed to be having a good time meeting new people and partying late into the night (on many days I’d be awake in Bangalore by the time she got home in Barcelona), she was also careful about conserving money.

There were times when she’d go out with new-found friends and not eat anything because the restaurant was too expensive. She’d ask for tap water, or the cheapest drinks, on nights out so that she didn’t blow away the savings. For breakfast she had buns and croissants bought in bulk at supermarkets – that came at a big discount.

She told me she looked forward to my visits to Barcelona in the hope that she could “spend normally”. In her last term when I lived with her in Barcelona, our monthly spending was three times what she normally spent when living alone!

And Barcelona was hardly the toughest part of her MBA. Her focus on e-commerce and operations had taken her for an internship to Jakarta, where she landed right in the middle of Ramzan. With her office being in an out-of-the-way warehouse, there were no lunch options available nearby, and she spent nearly the entire month without lunch, going all day hungry. Also a delay in her pay and reimbursement had led to a working capital crunch, which nearly left her homeless (it ultimately didn’t get THAT bad).

It was similar later that year when she was in U. Michigan as an exchange student. She survived an entire term without a lamp in her room (it was an unfurnished house), and slept on the floor on a mattress another student had donated to her. Food was also a struggle, as being the only woman among a bunch of Indians left her as the “resident cook” of her apartment. And the US sprawl meant she couldn’t get nutritious ingredients, which were only available at far-off supermarkets.

Yet, whenever we spoke, she was mostly positive and seldom cried. Irrespective of the difficulties she went through, she was focussed on her academics and career. It was only much later, after she had graduated that she had told me how she’d gone through really tough times.

And even amidst the toughness, she remained resourceful. She found that her US Visa allowed her to work on campus, and managed to make some money as a teaching assistant. Back “home” in Barcelona, she wrote cases and made more money. And despite some setbacks, she kept her job-hunt going, graduating with a much sought-after job with Amazon.

I’m proud to be married to her! And you might wonder why I’m suddenly writing all this – she turns 30 tomorrow, and this is as good a time as ever to express my gratitude to her!

Payment systems

I had lunch today at a rather fancy Japanese restaurant here in Barcelona (I’ve forgotten if I wrote that blog post last year on how you get fantastic East Asian food of all kinds here). I didn’t pay a fancy price – this concept called “Menu del dia” (menu of the day), one of the very few good things instituted by General Francisco Franco meant that you can get cheap weekday lunches at most restaurants in Spain.

The above (Katsudon and beer), along with some noodle soup and two sushis and a cup of coffee, set me back by €13, which isn’t too bad by Barcelona standards (most weekday lunch platters at restaurants cost ~€10).

While eating I noticed that other patrons at the restaurant were walking up to the bar to pay the owner directly, rather than asking for the bill at the table.

So once I was done with eating and drinking, I went up to the bar to pay. The owner had seen me coming and had prepared my bill, which he presented to me. As I reached into my pocket, he got out the card swiping machine.

It might have been a shock to him when I presented a €20 bill instead, and he had to scramble to produce the change from somewhere inside the kitchen (the other patrons before me had all paid by card).

While this is one data point, it’s interesting how the economy here has moved to a situation where the default method of payment is through credit/debit card, rather than by cash (though my favourite bakery refuses to accept card for payments less than €5). The ease of card payments (most debit cards nowadays come enabled with NFC, though a fair number of merchants still insert the card to read the chip) combined with ubiquity of cards has meant that card usage has started trumping cash.

It will be interesting to see how the payments ecosystem will develop in India, which is still largely a cash economy. My belief (and hope) is that India will leapfrog credit/debit cards (as it has leapfrogged landline telephones and big box retail, moving directly to mobile phones and e-commerce) and take up electronic payments in a big way.

IMPS (immediate payment service) is already a fantastic protocol for bank-to-bank transfers, and the costs are extremely low. In April, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) will be rolled out, which makes transfers to hitherto unknown people even easier! If our banks do a good job of implementation, there is a good chance it might get adopted widely (long back I’d made a case for the RBI to subsidise such payments).

Parks and public safety

I spent the last hour and a half working from a park near my house in Barcelona. It helped that I wasn’t using my laptop – I was mostly working with a notebook and pen. The incredible thing was that never once did I feel unsafe working in that park, and it has to do with the park’s design.

I got accosted by a human only once – by this guy asking me if I had a cigarette lighter and who walked away when I said no, and by dogs (of all shapes and sizes) multiple times. Despite the fact that I was in a park, and people don’t go to parks at 10 am on a weekday morning, there was a constant flow of people in front of me. There were, to put it in other words, sufficient “eyes on the street” which contributed to the place’s safety.

I’ve ranted sufficiently on this blog about the design (or lack of it) of Bangalore’s public parks (one with a name sufficiently similar to that of this post). The problem with the parks, in my opinion, is that they are exclusive closed spaces which are hard to access.

The sprawling Krishna Rao Park in the middle of Basavanagudi, for example, has only two or three entrances, and the number of trees in the park means that large parts of it are hardly visible, providing a refuge to unsavoury elements. This phenomenon of few entrances to parks is prevalent in other city parks as well, with the consequence that the BBMP (city administration) closes off the parks during the day when few people want to go in.

The park I was sitting in this morning, on the other hand, had no such safety issues. It helped that there weren’t too many trees (not always a positive thing about parks), which improved visibility, but most importantly, it was open on all sides, providing a nice thoroughfare for people walking across the area. This meant that a large number of people in the vicinity, even if they didn’t want to “go to a park” ended up passing through the park, because of which there was a constant flow of human traffic and “eyes on the park street”, making it a significantly safer space.

There might be (maintenance-related ) reasons for having limited entrances to parks in Bangalore, but the administration should seriously consider opening up parks on all sides and encouraging people to walk through them (after all, walking paths are an important part of Bangalore parks). Maintenance costs might go up, but safety of parks will be enhanced significantly, and it will be possible to keep parks open at all times, which will enhance their utility to the public.

Maybe Krishna Rao park, with roads on all sides and in the middle of Basavanagudi, might serve as a good pilot case for this.

Watching the Clasico in a bar

No, this post doesn’t have to do with the current El Clasico between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. When I’d watched the previous Clasico on March 22nd I’d formed a blog post in my head but I never got down to writing it (combination of travel and NED and enjoying my holiday) so I thought this is a good time to put it down.

On that occasion I was in Barcelona and briefly toyed with the idea of going to watch the game at the Camp Nou. That idea was quickly shelved given that tickets were going for about €500 each. Then there was hope that the game would be telecast on local TV (like the Barcelona-Ajax game I had watched at the Camp Nou was), but that wasn’t to be. The only option was to watch it at a pub.

While there were several bouts of NED due to which I had decided I won’t see that game, when Maxime, my wife’s flatmate, went out, I couldn’t help but join him. The first task was to find a suitable pub, especially given that it was a Sunday.

There is an interesting hierarchy of local businesses in Barcelona. Most Spanish-run supermarkets, for example, are closed on that day, though the Pakistani-run places (which are interestingly plentiful in the city) are open 24×7. A large number of Spanish-run bars are closed on Sundays, too, while the Chinese bars (again plentiful) are open all day.

Given that it was the Clasico and it was not broadcast on terrestrial television, there was no surprise that bars were full. Seating-only bars were thus out of question. And some of the standing-allowed places were choc-a-bloc. Finally it was this Chinese bar near the Entença station that Maxime and I went to.

The place was full, like most other bars in Barcelona that night, but there was some standing room with a view of one of the televisions. A sign at the entrance greeted us saying that each person was expected to order at least one beer for €2 (normal price for a beer in such a bar is €1,80). Estrella thus Dammed, it was time for the game.

I don’t remember much of that game, but the atmosphere in the bar was far from the kind I’d seen elsewhere. The crowd was partisan, of course, with anyone who wanted to support Real Madrid doing so silently (remember that this is a politically charged fixture, especially given renewed calls for Catalan secession). Loud cheers accompanied the Barcelona goals. The Madrid goal was met with silence, as you might expect (and people stepping out for a smoke). People stepping in and out created another problem – it was a rather cold spring evening, and every time the door opened it let in rather cold wind and disturbed the thermal balance of the bar!

There were a couple of other noteworthy sidelines on the evening. The first was how hard the bar staff worked. Expecting it to be a big night, they had pressed in extra staff, with possibly the entire family of the people who ran the bar involved. Children who looked as young as ten or twelve hurriedly ferried dishes from the kitchen to the tables (there were a few tables, which I’m assuming were pre-booked). Service was overall top notch, with our €2 beers arriving within two minutes despite the massive crowd at the bar. Considering that some bars were shut (given it was a Sunday), it was incredible how hard this one worked to make most of a good Barcelona night.

 

And then there were these guys at the slot machines. Like most other cheap bars in Europe, this one too had a couple of slot machines and they were all occupied, by people who couldn’t care less about what was going on around them, and whose only worry in life was to bet against the house. It could have been yet another night at the bar for them, except that the beer cost them twenty cents extra.

PS: I got distracted by the Manchester City – Liverpool game and hence took much longer to finish this post. I started writing it as soon as El Clasico started.

Barcelona Harbour and Montjuic

Last evening I decided to trek up Montjuic, a hill that is in the middle of Barcelona. I remember reading a long time back (probably on my last visit here) that there was a nice hiking path up Montjuic, and decided to go, without any plan. I conveniently forgot to look up the hiking path, and instead consulted google maps on the phone.

After a while the route got boring (this was after I had passed Placa Espanya). At around the same time I had started climbing the hill, and the combination of the elevation and lack of interesting things around (there were no shops or people or anything of interest on that road) made me want to turn back. I had almost turned back when I hit a bus stop, and bus number 55 came there. And off I climbed and went.

The bus dropped me at the bottom of the Montjuic Funicular, and I thought I’ll take that. But the steep price (EUR 11 for both ways) put me off, and a helpful tourist office nearby told me that the peak was 20 minutes walk away. I did the walk in 10, only to be confronted by another queue – for tickets to go into the castle. I decided to have a look around before I went in.

Going around the castle towards the side that faced the sea, this is what I saw:

barcaport

 

And I sat there, stunned. There were other people sitting or standing in the same area, most of them couples. And most of them seemed like they were looking out at the sea as they sat there. The sea held no interest to me, however, though my object of interest had something to do with the sea. It was the Barcelona harbour!

I had never before seen a container terminal in operation, and here was one, right under where I was standing, in full flow. There were three ships docked, each of a different size. Containers had been stacked up all over the terminal, as if they were lego blocks. You had these machines that were roaming all over the place, which would pick up containers and place them elsewhere. And then you had these forklifts  stackers with orange claws which would place load and unload containers to/from ships.

Just to stand there and watch this operation was mindblowing, and I stood hence for about half an hour. I noticed some nooks in the Montjuic castle where some couples were cuddled up. These nooks gave a great view of the container terminal. So I harboured visions of cosying up in one of these nooks with the wife, watching the operations of the Barcelona container terminal, analysing the operational effectiveness of the place and the algorithms involved. But then the wife was at school, and so I moved on.

On my way back I “got lost” again, as I wandered on some hiking paths past some of the infrastructure that I understand had been built for the 1992 Olympic games. Once again I got “bailed out” by a bus stop, and a bus that dropped me at a point in town that I had been to earlier. “Problem reduced to known problem”, I exclaimed and walked home from there.

For visitors to Barcelona I would highly recommend going up Montjuic. I have no clue what the castle is like, for I didn’t go in. The hiking paths are supposed to be good but I didn’t explore much of that. Yet, it is a fantastic place to go to and watch global commerce in action, as trucks roll in and out of the container terminal, only to be divested of their containers by these machines that place them aside and then transport them on to the ships. It has to be seen to be believed!

The Steven Davis Role

The first encounter between Liverpool and Southampton in the 2013-14 English Premier League season happened at Anfield in September, and Southampton won 1-0 with a Dejan Lovren goal from a set piece. So when the two sides met again at St. Mary’s in the latter half of the season, with Liverpool chasing the title, it was known that it would be a tough game for Liverpool.

Southampton dominated the first half, playing a front four of Steven Davis, Adam Lallana, Jay Rodrigues and Rickie Lambert. However, it was Liverpool who scored in that half, and led 1-0 at the break. Here is a picture I found on twitter that was uploaded at half time:

Southampton manager Mauricio Pochettino decided to change things for the second half. He took off his most unspectacular forward player Steven Davis and replaced him with Gaston Ramirez, the promising Uruguayan. Soon, Southampton unravelled and Liverpool completely dominated the second half as they won 3-0.

Now, there is no doubt that Ramirez is more talented than Davis and is definitely a better player in general. However, in the context of the rest of Southampton’s team, Ramirez’s introduction proved to be a disaster and there was little cohesion in their attacking play from the time he came on. Southampton became a disjointed team and went out of the game.

This has led me to define what I have come to call the “Steven Davis role”. It is basically a player who is not individually the best, but provides some kind of a glue that holds the team together. The player’s key skill, rather than looking at it from traditional axes such as passing or shooting or tackling or intercepting, is to change position, and to make sure that the team holds its shape at all times. It is to make sure that any players who are out of position are covered for, and that the attack retains its shape and focus.

Now, it must be remembered that last season Southampton’s attacking play was primarily based on strong movement and interplay between their front four. They had nominal positions defined, but they hardly stuck to those as they moved around in attack. Thus, Lambert who would start upfront would sometimes appear on the wing, with the nominal “number ten” Lallana going forward, for example.

And key to this system was Davis, who wasn’t particularly talented, but who would move in a way that would balance the attack. If the other three would move left to attack, he would take up a position slightly to the right – not too far away from the attack but providing a kind of counterbalance. He never led attacks himself, but he was always available to support the others’ attacks. And this is what made Southampton dangerous.

Once Davis had gone off, Southampton had no one to play this role. The kind of interplay they had in the first half disappeared. And their attacks became toothless and each attack had only one dimension which was easy to cover even for Liverpool’s normally shaky defence, as they kept a clean sheet.

It was a similar case I saw last night at the Camp Nou, with Barcelona’s Pedro Rodriguez playing in a “Steven Davis” role. Messi started in the middle and Neymar wide on the left. Pedro nominally started on the right. But soon it became clear that he was a kind of a “wide support striker” – his job was to appear in positions that complemented the rest of the attack rather than being in positions where he led the attack (though he did lead one glorious counterattack where he hit the post). It was like a kind of balance that he offered the team, and ensured their attacks had coherence (of course this being Barcelona they had Iniesta and Rakitic just behind to offer more “focal points”).

Last night was the last game of Luis Suarez’s ban, and it will be interesting what Barcelona do with him when he gets back this weekend. The instinct will be to remove Pedro in his favour, but it is not clear if an attack of Messi-Neymar-Suarez will be able to offer the same kind of coherence as an attack of Messi-Neymar-Pedro. That said, Suarez is an extremely intelligent player and showed in his Liverpool days that he is capable of being a “fighter”, so he might as well be played. But that will mean that Neymar will have to occasionally play the Davis/Pedro role, and it is not clear if he is capable of doing that.

We are in for interesting times.

The post has so far focussed on football but it is evident that his kind of a role is necessary in other team situations, including corporate teamwork, also. Sometimes you need that one guy who need not be individually spectacular, but is versatile and mobile enough that he can do several things, fill in for different people and make sure that any team he is part of will be “complete”. And in the absence of one such guy, the team can lose coherence and fail in its task.

Drink structuring

At lunch yesterday it appeared like the men at the next table respectively asked for a cold coffee and an iced tea. What the waitress did was very interesting. She plonks a regular cup of “cafe con leche” (coffee with milk) in front of one guy, and a large cup of hot water with a tea bag in front of the other. They start mixing sugar into their respective drinks (it wasn’t added earlier). Then she brings two large glasses with lots of ice in them. The men presently pour their drinks into that glass and start drinking.

Two Tuesdays back I was at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Midway through my tour I saw this little cafe in the museum and decided to warm myself with some hot chocolate. After paying a princely EUR 2.75, I saw the barista take some canned cold chocolate from the fridge, use the steamer of the coffee machine to heat it up (in the process effectively adding copious amounts of water), and then hand it to me as “hot chocolate”. That was the last time on this trip I ever ordered hot chocolate.

It’s very interesting how “illiquid drinks” (an oxymoron if there is one – but as regular readers know, liquidity here refers to the economic concept and nothing physical) are structured here and offered without significant cost to the seller. Yesterday was the first time in two weeks in Barcelona, for example, that I saw someone drink cold coffee/tea. Given the low demand it doesn’t make sense for the restaurant to keep the infrastructure to make “real” cold coffee (a mixie and all that). Similarly with the chocolate at the cafe at the Rijksmuseum!

I haven’t seen this back in India – the only time I’ve seen drinks being structured thus was at that little overrated cafe in Alliance Francaise where I once had a lemon ice tea – the guy puts boiling water on a cup with a tea bag, waits for a couple of minutes for it to infuse, stirs sugar, throws out the bag, takes a large glass full of ice American-style, squeezes lemon into it, adds the tea and hands it over.

Maybe Indian restaurants could take a cue from how drinks are structured here – though it will be hard since the Indian customer is more demanding. Adigas, for example, can offer cold coffee (iced coffee to be precise). It will be an interesting experiment without too much cost (other than the ice).

While on the topic of drinks, one of the last great liquor advertising campaigns in India, before liquor advertising was banned in 2001 (and then had to go surrogate), was UB Export Strong Beer’s “yaake cool drink” series starring Upendra. It was incredibly low-priced beer, comparable to the price of a coke. So the tagline went “yella OK but cool drink yaake?” (everything is fine but why cool drink?). I had the beer for the first time two months back, when it was the only available beer at a party. Watch the ad here:

Last night at dinner I ordered a Coke. It was the first time since I landed in Barcelona that I had ordered a soft drink. I began wondering why. It was clear when the bill appeared. I had been charged EUR 2.78 for the (Georgia green glass 350ml) bottle of coke. I remember seeing the menu and seeing that wine was priced at EUR 2.15 there. Beer similar. A clear case of “yaake cool drink”.

Simple arbitrages

Yesterday I visited the Sagrada Familia, the still work-in-progress grand basilica in Barcelona. As I got off the metro station, I saw a long line, perhaps longer than Hanuman’s tail at its longest. It was wrapped all round the massive basilica, on two sides. And to consider that it was a weekday morning at a time of year that is not peak tourist season!

Undeterred, I walked on. Walked on beyond the back of the line and round the other side of the basilica. There was a much smaller line here. This was for people who had already booked their tickets – online or elsewhere. I stood at this line for two minutes and then decided to check at the gate. There were multiple gates and this line (the shorter one I stood at briefly) led into only one of them. There was hardly a line at any other gate. I showed my ticket on my mobile at one such gate and was let in!

A few pertinent observations:

  • It is fairly well known that lines at the Sagrada Familia can be really long and every online forum recommends you to book tickets online. Why, then, do so many people still turn up there to just stand in line for tickets? I thought a lot of people read online fora nowadays!
  • The whole myth of their being no shortest line at supermarkets? It is a myth only at supermarkets where most shoppers are regular customers and know how many counters there are and what the queue structure of each is. When you go to visit the Sagrada Familia, which unless you are extremely religious or interested in architecture you will do only once in your lifetime, you don’t know how many counters there are for entry. So you just take your place in whatever line you find first. And that leads to queues of unequal length!
  • I’m surprised at the number of people who had printed out their tickets. I was among the few who showed it on my phone and faced no problems whatsoever – my ticket had a QR code and the reader just read it off my phone! It was a similar experience at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam last week.

    As a tourist, printing is not an easy job – you will need to find places where you can get printouts and they usually charge exorbitant rates. Yet, I see so many other tourists actually printing out their tickets!

  • My ticket was for entry between 9:15 and 9:30 (the Sagrada Familia asks you to intimate when you’re going to land up, so that they can distribute the crowd). I landed at 9:05 and was let in without any eyebrows raised. I’m happy it wasn’t 100% rule based
  • I took one of the lifts up one of the towers of the basilica, an experience which I think is overrated. I had to deposit my bag in a locker as I went up. It was funny that I had to drop a 20 cent (or 1 Euro) coin into the lock of the locker to complete the circuit and be allowed to lock! I picked up my 20 cent coin later on when I retrieved my bag. I have no clue what the intended use of this money dropping is!

Overall it was a very satisfying visit. I’ve written another essay on it which I hope to publish elsewhere. Will let you know when I do.