By now, I’m sure that we all recognize who this is:

That’s Andrei Arshavin, Nathan’s mancrush and the summer’s most overrated performer this side of Heath Ledger’s Joker. You also probably know what shirt he’s holding: Barcelona’s new home kit. What you probably don’t know is that strange symbol on his jacket. That’s the crest of Zenit St. Petersburg…the club Arshavin plays for. You might wonder why he’s holding that jersey. Hell, you might even be wondering where he got that jersey. After all, he plays in Russia, for a team that might meet Barcelona in this year’s Champions League, and his club just rejected a transfer offer for him from Barcelona. A reasonable person can be forgiven for thinking that this is some sort of bizarre “tapping up”(British for “screwing with players that don’t belong to you”).

Fear not. This picture was merely on the front page of Sport, a Catalan sports daily, not the Barcelona website. Unlike the American sports media, which pretends to pride itself on objectivity (unless Brett Favre is involved…his musk enraptures sportswriters), the Spanish media concerns itself with fellating the local club. After all, journalistic integrity doesn’t matter when you’re writing about the local side, right? In practice, this means that sports magazines and newspapers tend to be auxiliary branches of a club’s pr department. Well, as long as the club is named Real Madrid or Barcelona. Real Madrid has As, Marca and a host of other papers, and Barcelona has Sport.

Which brings us to the question posed earlier: what the hell is Arshavin doing with that jersey? It’s simple. Sport flew a reporter and photographer from Barcelona to St. Petersburg in order to interview a Zenit player on his love of Barcelona and desire to come there. Indeed, the headline of the article translates as “Arshavin: ‘Call Me, Barca.’”  Let’s go over that again. Barcelona’s propaganda mouthpiece/ sports newspaper photographed another team’s player holding up a Barcelona jersey and fed him questions about how much he wanted to play for Barcelona after his team rejected Barcelona’s bid for him. This sort of thing happens every time a player is linked with Barca (or Madrid, in other papers): a player is interviewed about how much he wants to come to Barca/Madrid, before a bid has come in or right after one has been rejected. It’s almost as if the clubs order these papers to unsettle players. Because, you know, actually tampering with an opponent’s player can theoretically get you slapped with a hefty fine (don’t worry, Michel Platini is much more interested in egineering a Champions League group berth for the champions of Latvia). Much easier, to get the local media to do it for you. A few years back, Real Madrid gave every Real beat writer a shiny new bike, free of charge, but I’m sure that has nothing to do with Spain’s pathetic “journalism.”

-Ryan