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The Guardian interviews Xavi, whose jersey I am wearing today in anticipation of the Arsenal-Barcelona Champions League match.

It’s good that the reference point for world football right now is Barcelona, that it’s Spain. Not because it’s ours but because of what it is. Because it’s an attacking football, it’s not speculative, we don’t wait. You pressure, you want possession, you want to attack. Some teams can’t or don’t pass the ball. What are you playing for? What’s the point? That’s not football. Combine, pass, play. That’s football – for me, at least. For coaches, like, I don’t know, [Javier] Clemente or [Fabio] Capello, there’s another type of football. But it’s good that Barcelona’s style is now a model, not that.

Viva Barça!

Grant Wahl crunches the numbers on MLS player salaries.

The MLS Players Union released its updated list of salaries for every MLS player on Thursday, providing the first clear look at the earnings of newly-added stars like New York’s Thierry Henry and Rafael Márquez, who instantly became the league’s second- and third-highest-paid players. When I posted the link on my Twitter page, a lot of my non-U.S. readers were startled that so much detailed salary information was available, considering it’s unheard of in the world’s other leagues. This is sensitive information, after all, and you certainly don’t see most people (me included) publicizing their salaries for the world to see.

Why would the MLS Players Union release this information? Because the transparency helps the collective, allowing players on the lower end of the pay scale to negotiate higher salaries than they would otherwise. And in MLS the lower end of the scale, as we know, can be awfully low. Still, the minimum salary for a senior player has risen to $40,000, which is better than it used to be.

I fed the latest MLS salary numbers into my spreadsheet and came up with some useful stats. Keep in mind, the salaries below reflect a player’s guaranteed annual income over 12 months.

Google analyzes search queries during World Cup matches:

Throughout the world, real life also slowed during World Cup matches. Which teams had the most loyal fans? Which game captured the attention of world the most? To answer these questions, we looked at counts of queries using Google. People search using Google day and night—except for football fans when a game is on.

Click through for graphs showing the volume of search queries during the big games. When a soccer-mad country like Brazil is playing, the volume of queries drops during the game. There is a small spike during halftime.

Brian Phillips argues that true fans of the beautiful game—fans of total football—should be cheering for Spain on Sunday, not the Netherlands.

Like all soccer writers, I have a debilitating nostalgic streak, and like all soccer writers, I love Holland. The Dutch, who face Spain in Sunday’s World Cup final, are soccer’s most gorgeous losers, a team defined by a single generation of players who brilliantly failed to reach their potential. The Dutch teams of the 1970s—led by the mercurial Johan Cruyff, who’s widely considered the greatest European player of all time—launched a tactical revolution, played one of the most thrilling styles of their era, and lost two consecutive World Cup finals in memorable and devastating ways. In the process, they became the icons of soccer romantics who would rather see teams play beautifully and lose than win and be boring. That’s a harsh legacy for any team that just wants to take home trophies, and this year’s Dutch squad is trying hard to transcend it. The dreams of millions of fans are riding on their success. Personally, I hope they fail.

The legend of Dutch soccer begins, and inevitably ends, withTotaalvoetbal: “total football.” The Dutch haven’t really played total football in years; their current World Cup team is constructed more in opposition to the system than in line with it. But embraced or resisted, it’s the idée fixe that looms over everything they do. Devised largely by Rinus Michels, the Dutch national-team coach who also managed the Amsterdam club Ajax in the late 1960s, total football was a ferocious and freewheeling set of tactics designed to take advantage of Cruyff’s unconventional style of play. Because Cruyff liked to wander well outside the bounds of his center forward position, his teams needed to be able to reorganize themselves swiftly. Total football therefore emphasized fluid position-switching, with players moving into open spaces and the whole formation adjusting on the fly. Combined with a high back line to limit opponents’ space, and aggressive offside traps to keep them from getting the ball, total football produced a relentlessly attacking style of play. It was exhilarating to watch, and it almost, but not quite, conquered the world.