Then, eleven years ago, it was Ronaldinho and Zidane. Today it's Messi and Ronaldo.
Back then, in the first edition of this book, we wrote: "We have combined our own views on football into one. And as much as we want to say that our starting point is our love for the game and our hope that the stands will eventually produce football fanatics on the field... in reality, the pages that follow are all that remains of the insatiable desire of two guys who reached their forties but refuse to reconcile with the unfulfilled dream that when they grow up they will become football players."

Now, with another decade behind us, managing "unfulfilled desires" may be easier. However, reconciling with the idea that we have definitively "lost the ball" and that the game remains in the hands of football fanatics, a crude commodity and a money laundering machine for respectable businessmen and dark activities, is impossible. Such reconciliation is equivalent to admitting that the story is over...
Obviously, the story is not over. We are simply living the prolonged chapter of decay, where everything seems stagnant and the same, both within and beyond borders, in relation to the management of football as a commodity.

(from the authors' preface)