Olympics Game History

The Olympic Games which originated in ancient Greece as many as 3,000 years ago, were revived in the late 19th century and have become the world’s preeminent sporting competition. From the 8th century B.C. to the 4th century A.D., the Games were held every four years in Olympia, located in the western Peloponnese peninsula, in honor of the god Zeus. The first modern Olympics took place in 1896 in Athens, and featured 280 participants from 13 nations, competing in 43 events. Since 1994, the Summer and Winter Olympic Games have been held separately and have alternated every two years.The Olympic Games of AD165 ended in a horribly spectacular fashion. Just a couple of miles from the main stadium, watched by a large crowd, an old man called Peregrinus Proteus – an ex-Christian convert, turned loud-mouthed pagan philosopher and religious guru – jumped on to a blazing pyre to his death. He had been threatening to do this ever since the previous Olympics, four years earlier. The self-immolation was modelled on the mythical death of Heracles (one of the legendary founders of the Games) and was meant as a gesture of protest at the corrupt wealth of the human world, as well as a lesson to the guru's followers in how to endure suffering. Despite his brave words, as the days of the Olympic festival went by, Peregrinus kept putting off the final moment. It was not until the Games had officially finished, that he actually built the pyre and took the plunge. But there was still a big audience left to witness his death, because traffic congestion (too many people trying to leave the place at once), combined with a shortage of public transport, had prevented most people from leaving Olympia. Then as now, presumably, only the VIPs were whisked away. The story of Peregrinus is told in detail by an eye-witness, the ancient satirist and essayist Lucian – who not only describes the old man's last moments and the scuffles that broke out around the pyre between his supporters and detractors, but also throws in the point about the ancient Olympic traffic problems. Lucian himself has no time for Peregrinus: "a drivelling old fool", bent on "notoriety", he sneered. But the story is not, as some have taken it, a sign of the decadence of the Olympics under Roman rule (by AD165 Greece had been part of the Roman empire for over 300 years). Quite the contrary. It was surely because the Games were still such a major attraction that Peregrinus chose the occasion for his histrionic suicide; and it was because of their considerable cultural significance that the incident was so prominently written up.When we now think back to the ancient ancestors of the modern Olympics, we usually prefer to bypass the Roman period, and concentrate instead on the glory days of classical Greece. It's easy to ignore the fact that the ancient Games were "Roman" for almost as long as they were "Greek" – in the sense that they were celebrated under Roman rule and sponsorship from the middle of the second century BC until they were abolished by Christian emperors at the end of the fourth century AD. In fact, a pedantic chorus of protest has recently been raised at the appearance of explicitly Roman rather than Greek gods (Mars not Ares, Minerva not Athene, and so on) on the British coins minted to commemorate the 2012 Olympics. And this is not so very different from the chorus of protest raised in 2000, when the Sydney Olympic Committee put an instantly recognizable Roman Colosseum on their Olympic medals (and on that occasion the angry voices were not quelled by the claim that it was meant to be a "generalised" image of an arena, rather than the Colosseum itself). Forget the story of Peregrinus: in most modern accounts, the true ancestor of "our" Games lies in the rose-tinted age of classical Greece, between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, or maybe even further back (according to legend the ancient Games were founded in 776 BC, though not much has been found to justify that date).For us, talk of these "original" Olympics usually conjures up a picture of plucky amateur athletes, men only, of course, fiercely patriotic, nobly competing in a very limited range of sports: running races, chariot races, wrestling and boxing, discus and javelin throwing. There were no team games then, let alone such oddities as synchronized swimming. Everything was done individually, for the pure glory of winning – and for no material reward. You didn't even get a medal if you came first in an Olympic competition, just a wreath of olive leaves, and if you were lucky a statue of yourself near the stadium, or in your home town. The very luckiest might also be celebrated in one of the "Victory Odes", specially composed by the Greek poet Pindar, or one of his followers, that are still read and puzzled over 2,500 years later (and I mean puzzled over: they are written in some of the most difficult and obscure Greek to have come down to us, and the prospect of being asked to translate one of Pindar's Olympian Odes scares even the brightest student of classics).

What is more, the whole contest was performed in honour of the gods. Olympia was a religious sanctuary of Zeus and Hera, as much as it was a sports ground, and the Games united the Greek world under a single religious cultural banner. Though the warring city states of Greece were usually doing just that – warring – every four years the "Olympic truce" was declared to suspend conflict for the period around the competition, to allow anyone from everywhere in the Greek world to come and take part. It was a moment when sport and fair play trumped self-interested military conflicts and disputes.As with most stereotypes, there are some grains of truth here: there were no medals and no women at the ancient Olympics; the contests were keenly fought, man against man, ostensibly for nothing more than glory for oneself and for one's city; and the whole thing was done under the watchful eye of the ancient gods. But taken altogether, as a picture of what the ancient Games were really like, this tissue of clichés is deeply misleading. In fact, it owes more to the preoccupations of the founders of the modern Olympic movement – through whose sometimes frankly warped vision we now look back to the original Games – than it does to the ancient Greeks themselves. Men such as Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who successfully relaunched the modern Olympics in 1896, systematically projected their own obsessions – from their disapproval of alcohol to their rather woolly ideas of world peace and harmony – on to the early centuries of the ancient Games and their participants.

One particular obsession of those in charge of the modern Olympics – until as late as the 1980s – has been the cult of the amateur. Coubertin, and later A very Brundage, the tyrannical president of the International Olympic Committee between 1952 and 1972 ("Slavery Bondage", as he was nicknamed), sometimes cruelly policed the frontier between the amateur contestants – who were warmly welcomed as modern Olympians – and the professional interlopers, who were most definitely not. One of the most mean-spirited incidents in modern Olympic history is the story of the brilliant American athlete Jim Thorpe, who won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912. He was an ordinary working man, part native-American, and a famously down-to-earth character: on being presented with a commemorative bust of himself by King Gustav of Sweden, he is supposed to have replied "Thanks, king." But there was a bitter sequel. It later came to light that he had received some trivial payments ($25 a week) for playing a bit of minor league baseball in the US; he was reclassified as a professional, stripped of his medals and asked to return the bust. A change of heart did not come until 1983, when his family was sent some replica medals. For Thorpe it was too little, too late. He died in 1953, in utter poverty.

For Coubertin and his like, the Olympic Games of classical Greece made their total ban on professional athletes legitimate. The great competitors of the fifth century BC, they would have insisted, were noble amateurs, not vulgar money-grubbers selling their athletic prowess for cash. Well, yes and no. The competitors at the classical Olympics were certainly not "professionals" in the sense that we (or Coubertin or Brundage) would understand the term. But that is largely because our own familiar divide between "amateurs" and "professionals" did not operate in classical Greece. To put it another way, if we approach the ancient Games armed with modern categories of sporting competition, we do not find many "grubby professionals", but we don't find much "noble amateurism" either.

For a start, the winning athletes may not have received cash prizes at Olympia for their performances, but many of them did very nicely when they got back home. It wasn't just a question of honorific statues. The various Greek cities offered all kinds of rewards to their athletics stars, from free meals for life at the state's expense to cash handouts and tax exemptions. And just under the surface of the surviving evidence, there are hints of something rather closer to a professional athletics circuit than the founding fathers of the modern Games would have liked. According to the ancient lists of Olympic victors, between 588 and 488 BC, 11 winners in the short sprint race ("stadion") – that is, about a third of the total number – came from the not particularly large, or distinguished, town of Croton, one of the Greek settlements in southern Italy. Maybe the people of Croton just got lucky, or maybe they lived in some fanatical athletics boot-camp. But much more likely they were buying in top talent from other cities, who then wore the colours of Croton. Great Britain has, of course, got form in this area. Long before the recent convenient change of allegiance of long-jumper Shara Proctor and the other so-called "plastic Brits", we had had welcomed the South African runner Zola Budd – who competed for us in the 1984 Olympics, disastrously as it turned out.

But no less damaging to the idea of the ancient world's pure amateurism is the fact that some of the most prestigious wreaths of victory went not to the athletes themselves but to men whom we would call "sponsors". The grandest event of the Games was the chariot race, but the official winner was not the man who actually did the dangerous work, standing in the chariot and controlling the horses, but the king, princeling or plutocrat who had funded him and paid for the training, at no doubt vast expense – not unlike the Queen's winners in modern horse-racing. In fact, this was the only Olympic event at which a woman could claim victory – as one Spartan princess did in the fourth century BC. So far as we know, she did not get a victory ode (though she did get a statue at Olympia). But some of Pindar's best-known Olympian poems were written to celebrate not athletes at all, but these rich grandees who had for the most part shown no sporting prowess whatsoever, just a deep pocket.

The other main myth about the ancient Olympics that Coubertin and his colleagues promoted was their contribution to world peace and understanding (or at least, back in the classical period, Greek peace and understanding). This centred on the so-called "Olympic truce", which has increasingly been turned into the model for our own ideal of a gathering of all nations, friend or foe, under the Olympic banner (an ideal challenged several times over the last few decades, and under strain again this year with the question of what to do about Syria). Ancient Greek politics may not have been quite as messy or confused as the modern version of Messrs Samaras and Tsipras, but the conflicts of antiquity tended to be waged more in the style of the Arab spring than of the smoke-filled rooms of Brussels and Strasbourg. In fact, the ancient Games were by no means consistently marked by an atmosphere of national or international harmony.

There are, it is true, some ancient references to a cessation of hostilities to ensure that competitors and their trainers could reach the Games safely, and in one of the temples at Olympia you could still see, in the second century AD, a supposedly very early document – almost certainly a later forgery – that referred to the origins of this "truce". But how it was enforced, and by whom, is anyone's guess. It was a nice symbol, but athletes travelling across enemy territory to get to Olympia wouldn't, I imagine, have got very far by appealing to the "truce" if they were confronted by a squadron of hostile soldiers. On one occasion, in the fourth century BC, there was actually a full-scale battle in Olympia itself during the Games. A force from the nearby town of Elis (which traditionally ran the ancient Olympics, and no doubt profited from them) invaded the site, right in the middle of the pentathlon, to get control back from the rival town of Pisa, which had temporarily taken them over. And the truce certainly didn't prevent people exploiting the Games for violent power struggles back in their own cities. In the 630s BC, there was a coup in Athens against one of the leading families while they were away competing in the Olympics (though it was brutally quashed when the competitors returned home).

In general, the real-life experience of competing in – or, for that matter, just watching – the ancient Olympics was a far cry from anything that Coubertin had in mind. The modern Olympics are (officially at least) committed to the ideal of fair play. However much rivalry there is about national positions in the medal table, participation is still supposed to be more important than winning. That is nothing like the ancient Games, where winning was everything, where there were no prizes for runners up (no equivalent of silver and bronze medals, that is), and no such thing as honourable losers. Contestants fought viciously, and cheated. When one Athenian contestant in the fourth century BC was caught red-handed attempting to bribe his rivals in the pentathlon, a fine was imposed. The Athenian authorities thought this so unreasonable that they threatened to boycott the Games in future – though they were forced to give in when the Delphic oracle refused to give them any more oracles until they coughed up the money. The point was that for the ancients the only thing that mattered was coming first, using any method you could get away with. Pindar even hints (writing of another set of Games held at Delphi) that the losers sloped off home in secret, for fear of the taunts and abuse they were likely to receive from their disappointed supporters or contemptuous rivals.

So, if the ancient Olympics were a rough and sometimes brutal experience for the competitors (deaths in the boxing and wrestling contests were not uncommon), they were a decidedly uncomfortable one for the spectators too. The Games seem to have attracted crowds of visitors, but there were hardly any decent facilities for them: it was blisteringly hot, with little shade; there was no accommodation for the ordinary visitor (beyond a no doubt squalid and overcrowded campsite); and the sanitation must have been rudimentary, at best, given the inadequate water supply to the site, which could not even guarantee enough clean drinking water to go round.

But this is where the Romans come in. The likes of Coubertin lamented the Roman influence on the Games; they deplored the growth of a professional (and lower) class of competitor, as well as the malign influence of the Roman emperors themselves (who were occasionally known to take part in events and were supposed to have had the competition rigged so that they could win). For the spectators, though, it was the sponsorship of the Roman period – some of it devoted to "improving" the facilities for visitors – that made the Olympic Games a much more comfortable and congenial attraction to visit. True, as Lucian attests in his story of Peregrinus, the Romans did not solve the problems of traffic congestion, but they installed vastly improved bathing facilities, and one rich sponsor laid on, for the first time, a reasonable supply of drinking water. Herodes Atticus, a Roman senator who was Athenian by birth, built a whole new conduit to carry water from the nearby hills, leading into a large fountain in the middle of the site. Predictably, perhaps, some curmudgeons thought this was spoiling the Olympic spirit. According to Lucian, Peregrinus in some of the speeches he made on a previous visit to the Games, denounced Herodes Atticus. In a typically ancient misogynist vein, he accused Herodes of turning the visitors into women, when it would be better for them to face thirst (and the possible diseases that came with it) like men. For most visitors, though, an efficient Roman fountain must have been a blessed relief.

For much of the period of Roman rule, Roman grandees and their friends bankrolled the Olympic enterprise (which seems to have eaten money in the ancient world, too, even without any ridiculously expensive opening ceremonies or security operations). Nero, who has had a bad press for, among other things, shifting the date of the Games so that he could conveniently compete himself, subsidised new facilities for athletes, and King Herod (the infamous one) is known to have come to the financial rescue of the Olympics in 12BC. In some ways the character of the Games continued with little change. Roman princes safely entered the chariot-racing competitions, just as the princes of the Greek world had half a millennium earlier. Great athletes may well have outstripped the achievements of their predecessors. In AD69, for example, a man called Polites from modern Turkey won the prize for two sprint races and the long distance – a considerable achievement given the different musculature required. Apparently it was the first time it had been done in almost a millennium of Olympic competitions. And there was the same disdain for losers. One poem of the Roman period pillories a hopeless contestant in the race in which everyone ran dressed in armour. He was so slow that he was still going when night fell, and got locked in the stadium overnight – the joke was that caretaker had mistaken him for a statue.

But in other respects the Romans worked towards an Olympics that is much more like our own than the earlier "true Greek" version. Whatever his other faults, Nero tried to introduce some "cultural" contests into the Games. The Olympics had always been (unlike other Greek athletic festivals) resolutely brawny, with no music or poetry competitions. Nero didn't succeed in injecting much culture for very long (it soon reverted to just athletics) but, knowingly or not, the 19th-century inventors of the modern Olympics took over his cultural aims. It's easy to forget that in the first half of the 20th century, Olympic medals were offered for town planning, painting, sculpture, painting and so on (they have long since entered the ranks of "dead" Olympic sports, along with tug of war and running deer shooting). Coubertin himself, under a pseudonym, won the 1912 gold medal for poetry with his "Ode to Sport". It was truly dreadful: "Sport thou art Boldness! / Sport thou art Honour! / Sport thou art Fertility!" …

The most lasting contribution of the Romans, though, was to make the Olympics, as we now think of them, truly international. That was, in a way, a byproduct of the Roman empire and the (more or less compulsory) internationalism that came with it. But if the classical Greek Olympics had been rigidly restricted to Greeks only, Roman power opened up the competition to most of the then known world. It is a nice symbol of this that the last named victor at Olympia in 385AD, the prizewinner in the boxing contest, was a Persian from Armenia called Varazdates.

But there is a sting in the tail of this Greek vs Roman story of the Olympic Games. For it was not only the hopelessly confused Baron de Coubertin who lionised the Greek achievement in the Olympic Games; nor was he the first to do so. At the same time as the Romans were ploughing money into the Olympics and making it effectively an international Roman celebration, authors of the Roman period were already inventing the romantic image of the great old Greek days of Olympic competition. Writing in the second century AD, Pausanias – a Greek born under the Roman empire – devoted two volumes of his 10-volume guide to the noteworthy sites of Greece to the monuments of Olympia. He sees the place almost entirely through classical Greek spectacles. He is the source of most of our stories about the notable Olympic achievements and heroes of centuries earlier. He doesn't even mention Herodes Atticus' splendid and useful Roman fountain, which he must have seen as he walked round the sanctuary. Even Peregrinus, when he was speechifying near Olympia in 165AD, about to throw himself on the pyre, was comparing himself to the great tragic heroes of "classical Greece", centuries earlier. The Games have been a nostalgic show for longer than we can imagine. It has probably always seemed that they were better in the past.

FC Bayern Munchen Club History

                                     Football Club Bayern Munchen e.V., commonly known as FC Bayern Munchen, FCB,Bayern Munich or FC Bayern, is a german sports club based in Munich, Bavaria Germany. It is best known for its professional football team, which plays in the Bundesliga. The top tier of the German football league system abd is the most successful club in german football history having won a record 26 national titles and 18 national cups. FC Bayern was founded in 1900 by eleven football players led by Franz John. Although bayern won its first national championship in 1932, the club was not selected for the bundesliga at its inception in 1963. The club had its period of greatest success in the middle of the 1970s when under the captaincy of Franz Beckenbauer, it won the European cup three times in a row (1974-76). Overall, Bayern has reached ten European Cup / UEFA Champions League finals, most recently winning their fifth title in 2013 as part of a continental treble. Bayern has also won one UEFA cup, one European cup winner's cup, one UEFA Super cup, one FIFA club world cup and two Intercontinental Cups, making it one of the most successful European clubs Internatinally. They have a nicknames of The FCB, The Bavarians, The Reds, Star of the south, FC Hollywood. Since the formation of the bundeliga , bayern has been the dominant club in German football with 26 titles and has won 8 of the last 12 titles. They have traditional local rivalries with TSV 1860 Munchen and 1.FC Nurnberg, as well as with Borussia Dortmund since the mid 1990s. Since the beginning of the 2005-06 season, Bayern has played its home games at the Allianz Arena. Previously the team had played at Munich's Olympiastadion for 33 years. the team colors are red and white and the team crest shows the white and blue flag of Bavaria. In terms of revenue Bayern Munich is the biggest sports club in the world,generating 487.5 million euro for the 2013-14 season. Batern has over 270,000 members. There are more than 4,000 officially- registered fan clubs with over 314,000 members. The club has other departments for chess, handball, basketball,gymnastics,bowling,table tennis and senor football with more than 1,1.. active members. FC Bayern is ranked second in the current UEFA club coefficient rankings and second in IFFHS's latest IFFHS club world ranking. Amongst Bayern's chief European rivals are Real Madrid, A.C.Milan and Manchester united due to many classic wins, draws and losses. Real Madrid versus Bayern is the match that has historically been played most often in the champions league with 14 matches and the european cup with 19 matches. Real's biggest loss at home in champions league came at the hands of Bayern on 29 February 2000 (2-4). Due to Bayern being traditionally hard to beat for madrid. Madrid supporters often refer to Bayern as the Black Beast. Despite the number of duels, Bayern and Real have never met in the final of a champions league or European cup. The two teams met in the 2011-12 champions league semi-finals which resulted in 3-3 on aggregate forcing extra tie and penalties. Bayern won 3-1 on penalties to reach their first ever home champions league final. They then again met in 2013-14 UEFA champions league semi-finals a rematch of the 2012 semi-finals with Real Madrid winning 5-0 on aggregate. 

Chelsea Football Club History

                   Chelsea Football  club are an english professional football club based in Fulham, London that competes in the Premier League of England Founded in 1905, the club's home ground since then has been Stamford Bridge. the nickname of the clubes are The blues and The Pensioners.Chelsea had their first Major Success in 1955, when they won the league championship. They then won various cup competitions between 1965 and 1996. The clubs greatest period of success has been during the last two decades, winning 21 trophies since 1997. Chelsea have won five national league titles, seven FA Cups, five League Cups, Four FA Community Shields, one UEFA Champions League, one UEFA Europa League and one UEFA Super Cup. Chelsea are the only London Club to win the UEFA champions League, and one of four clubs and the only British Club, to have won all three main Uefa Club Competitions. Chelsea's Regular kit colors are royal blue shirts and shorts with white socks. The club's crest has been changed several times in attempts to re-brand the club and modernize its image. The current crest, featuring a ceremonial lion rampant regardant holding a staff, is a modification of the one introduced in the early 1950s. The club have the sixth-highest average all-time attendance in english football. Their average home gate for the 2015-16 season was 41,500, the seventh highest in the premier league. Since 2003, chelsea have been owned by russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. In 2016, they were ranked Forbes Magazine as the seventh most valuable football club in the world at 1.66 billion dollar. chelsea have only ahd one home ground, STamford Bridge, where they have played since the team's foundation. It was officially opened on 28 April 1877 and for the first 28 years of its existence it was used almost exclusively by the London Athletic Club as an arena for athletics meetings and not at all for football. In 1904 the ground was acquired by businessman Gus Mears and his brother Joseph, who had also purchased nearby land with the aim of staging football matches  on the now 12.5 acre site. Stamford Bridge was designed for the Mears family by the noted football architect Archibald LEitch, who had also designed Ibrox, Craven Cottage abd Hampden Park. Most football clubs were founded first and then sought grounds in which to play, but chelsea were founded for Stamford Bridge.

Manchester United Football Club History

                      Manchester United Football Club is a Professional football club based in Old Trafford, Greater Manchester, England, That competes in the premier league, the top flight of English Football. Nicknamed " the Red Devils", the club was founded as Newton Heath LYR Football Club in 1878, changed its name to Manchester United in 1902 and moved to its current stadium, Old Trafford, in 1910. Manchester United have won a record 20 League Titles, a joint-record 12 FA cups, four league cups and a record 21 FA community shields. The club has also won three European Cups, one UEFA cup winners Cup, one UEFA super cip, one Intercontinental cup and one FIFA Club world cup. In 1998-99 the club became to acheive the treble of the premier league, the FA cup and the UEFA Champions League. The club's most recent trophy came in August 2016 with the 2016 FA community Sheild. The 1958 Munich air disaster claimed the lives of eight players. In 1968, under the management of Matt Busby, Manchester Unites became the European Cup. Alex Ferguson won 38 Trophies, including 13 Premier League titles, 5 FA cups and 2 UEFA Champions Leagues, Between 1986 to 2013. When he announced his retirement. Jose Mourinho is the club's current manager, having been appointed on 27 May 2016. Manchester United was the second Highest earning football club in the world for 2013-14, with an annual revenue of 518 million euro and the world's third most valuable football club in 2015, valued at 1.98 billion dollar. As of June 2015, it is the world's most valuable football brand, estimated to be worth 1.2 billion dollar. It is one of the most widely supported football teams in the world. After being floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1991, the club was purchased by Malcom Glazer in May 2005 in a deal valuing the club at almost 800 million Pound after which the company was taken private again.In August 2012, Manchester United made an initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The club holds several rivalries, most notably with Liverpool, Manchester City and Leeds United and more recently with Arsenal.

Badminton PV Sindhu History

              Indian Badminton Player makes History In Rio Olympics and the name of the person is Pusarla Venkata Sindhu. she born on 5 July 1995 in Hyderabad to P.V.Ramana and P.Vijaya both former volleyball players. She eventually started playing Badminton from the age of eight.She pursued her education in Sri Venkateswara Bala Kuteer,Guntur. SHe first learned the basics of the sports with the guidance of Mehboob Ali at the badminton courts of Indian Railway Institute of Signal Engineering and Telecommunications In Secunderabad. Soon after she joined Pullela Gopichand's Badminton Academy. P.V.Sindhu received International Attention as she broke into the Top 20 in the Badminton world Federation rankings released on 21 September 2012. On 10 August 2013, Sindhu became the first ever Indian woman's singles player to win a medal at the 2013 world championships. On 30 March 2015, she received India's fourth highest civilian honor, the Padma Shri. On 18 August 2016, at the 2016 summer Olympics, she became the first Indian woman to reach the finals in the badminton event on an Olympics after beating Nozomi Okuhara of japan in the Semi finals. she subsequently won the silver medal and the  youngest Indian overall to make a podium finish in the Olympics. She also became the second Indian female shuttler to win an olympics medal after Saina Nehwal's Bronze medal at 2012 summer Olympics at London. 
                National Level honors Padma Shri the fourth highest civilian award of India (2015), Arjuna award (2013).
                 Other honors: FICCI breakthrough sportsperson of the year 2014, NDTV Indian of the year 2014, 10 Lakh rupees from the badminton association of India for her victory in the 2015 Macau open badminton championships, 5 Lakh rupees from the badminton association of India for her victory in the 2016 Malaysia Masters, For the Rio summer Olympics 1.01 lakh rupees from Salman Khan for qualifying as an Olympic participant.

Barcelona Football Club History

                     The history Of Football Club Barcelona goes from the football club's founding in 1899 and up to current time. FC Barcelona also known simply as Barcelona and familiarly as Barca is based on Barcelona, Catalonia , Spain. The team was founded in 1899 by a group of Swiss, English and Spanish footballers led by Joan Gamper. The club played amateur football until 1910 in various regional competitions. In 1910 the club participated in their first of many European competitions, and has since amassed 10 UEFA trophies and a Sextuple. In 1928 Barcelona Co-founded La Liga, the top tier in Spanish football along with a string of other clubs. As of 2016 Barcelona has never been relegated from La Liga, a record they share with Athletic Bilbao and arch-rival Real Madrid. The history of Barcelona has often been politically. Though it is a club created and run by foreigners, Barcelona gradually became a club associated with Catalan values. In Spain's transition to autocracy in 1925, Catalonia became increasingly hostile towards the central government in Madrid. The Hostility enhanced Barcelona's image as a focal point for catalonism and when Francisco Franco banned the use of the Catalan Language, the stadium of Barcelona became once of the few places the people could express their dissatisfication. The spanish Transition to democracy in 1978 has not dampened the club's image of Catalan pride. In the 2000's a period of sporting success in the club and an increased focus on Catalan Players - club officials have openly called for Catalonia to became an independent state. 
                       They won 5 UEFA Champions League tropies, 3 FIFA Club World Cup,4 European Cup winners,3 Fair cup winners, 5 UEFA super cup, 2 Latin Cup,4 Pyrenees Cup,24 LaLiga Champions,28 Copa Del Rey,11 Spanishcopa De Espana,2 Spanish League cup,1 Mediterranian League,1 Catalan League,23 Catalan League Championship,1 Ctalan super cup,8 Catalan Cup,3 Eva Duarte Cup. In 2016 they won Laliga chamipon and Copa Del Rey and SuperCopa De Espana

REAL MADRID FOOTBALL CLUB HISTORY

             Real Madrid club is a Spanish professional football club based in Madrid, Spain. Founded in 1902 as Madrid football club, The team has traditionally worn a white home kit since inception. The word Real is Spanish for royal and was bestowed to the club by King Alfonso XIII in 1920 together with the royal crown in the emblem. the team has played its home matches in the 85,454- capacity in Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in downtown Madrid since 1947. Unlike most European sports entities, Real Madrid's members have owned and operated the club throughout the history. The club is the second most valuable sports team in the world,worth 3.24 billion euro and the world's highest earning football club for 2014-15, with an annual revenue of 577 million euro. The club is one of the most widely supported teams in the world. Real Madrid is one of three founding members of the Primera Division that have never been relegated from the top division, along with Athletic Bilbao and Barcelona. The clubs hold many long standing rivalries, most notably El clasico with Barcelona and the El Derbi Madrileno with Atletico Madid. Real Madrid established itself as a major force in both Spanish and European football during the 1950's. The club won 5 consecutive European cups and reached the finals 7 times. this success was replicated in the league, where the club won 5 times in the space of seven years. This team which consisted of players such as Di Stefano, Puskas, Gento, Raymond Kopa and Santamaria is considered by some in the sport to be the greatest team of all time.   
             In domestic football, the club has won a record 32 Liga titles, 19 copa del rey, 9 Supercopa de Espana, 1 Copa Eva Durate, 1 Copa De la liga. In International football, the club has won a record 11 European cup/UEFA champions league titles, a joint record 3 Intercontinental Cups, 2 UEFA cups, 3 UEFA Super cups and a FIFA club World Cup.Real Madrid was recognized as the FIFA club of the 20th century on 23 December 2000 and named best European club of the 20th century by the IFFHS on 11th may 2010. The club received the FIFA centennial order of Merit in 2004. The Club is ranked first in the latest IFFHS club world ranking, setting a new ranking-points record. The club also leads the current UEFA club rankings.