In its first practice at UCLA in preparation for its match at the end of the week, FC Barcelona spent approximately 35 minutes at North Athletic Field on Wednesday, in what team representative Chemi Terés said was a “very light practice” to help with “muscle recovery.”
The team, Terés said, had just arrived in Los Angeles from Barcelona a few hours earlier and had not planned on a full-fledged practice for its first evening at UCLA.
The team was greeted by fans who surrounded the tarp-covered fence of North Athletic Field and numbered somewhere in the thousands, observers said. Fans went back and forth between the team’s practice field, North Athletic Field and the team’s locker room in Pauley Pavilion. Fans waited for the squad as it entered Pauley Pavilion through gate 15 on the northeast corner of the stadium.
Notably present at the practice was recent Barcelona acquisition Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The current highest paid soccer player in the world, Ibrahimovic was most recently on Italian league champion Inter Milan for nearly his entire four-year contract. Ibrahimovic is not in new territory, however, playing at UCLA. He was just on campus two weeks ago with Inter.
Ibrahimovic, who had surgery on his fractured left hand’s second metacarpal on Tuesday, had his arm securely restrained in a sling.
Other Barca players present at the practice included Lionel Messi, the Argentine winger whom Diego Maradona dubbed his “successor,” striker Thierry Henry, defender Carles Puyol and 55 other first team players.