Putting FC Barcelona's Reign Atop La Liga Into Context

If you’re active on Twitter, or read the Spanish newspapers, you may have seen an interesting statistic recently – Barcelona have now sat atop La Liga for over 365 days in succession, or to be more precise, 381 days in total from the 19^th August 2012, to the present day. A figure that large is certainly impressive – but I think it deserves a little context, something to really hammer home just how dominant Barcelona have been in La Liga over the past season and a bit. So, just for fun, here’s a list of random tasks that you could perform in the same time period:

Watch a lot of sport:

How much is a lot? Well, for starters, you could watch each and every game of the 2012-13 La Liga, English Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue Un season, along with every single minute of the 2012-13 UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League plus each game of the main domestic cup competitions – that’s the 2012-13 Copa del Rey, FA Cup, DFP Pokal, Coppa Italia and Coupe de France. But that’s just the appetiser – you could then go on to watch each and every minute of regulation (and overtime) play in the 2012-13 NFL, NBA and NHL season, and bundle in the play-offs too. Even with all that sport to watch, you’ll still have enough time to sleep a little over six hours every night for 381 days.

Watched every match in FC Barcelona’s history (probably):

9144 hours is a really long time, so long in fact that you could fit in a little over 6000 football matches, provided that you watched them back to back. Now, FC Barcelona have been in existence for a little under 114 years, meaning that you’d (probably) have enough time to watch every single competitive match played by the FC Barcelona senior squad in that 114 year history.

Train yourself to be Barcelona’s next centre-half:

There’s a famous book called "Outliers: the Story of Success", and this book, written by Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions a so-called "10,000 hour rule". This rule suggests that with 10,000 hours of practise, an individual can master pretty much anything – from music, to sports to computer programming. So, in the 9144 consecutive hours that Barcelona has topped the league, you could have practised to become a central defender – and probably reached a high enough level to solve our defensive crisis.

Take a trip to Mars:

Don’t worry if football or sport in general isn’t your thing; there are plenty of other activities that you could do in that time-frame – like flying to Mars. NASA believe that it will take roughly eight months to travel to the Red Planet – so if you’re a trained astronaut with access to as yet un-built technology, you could boldly go where no man has gone before, and still have time to spare.

Walk coast-to-coast in the USA:

A few years ago, a couple of individuals walked from coast-to-coast in the USA, on a route that stretched 5057 miles. Assuming that you can keep pace and walk 15 miles a day, you could follow that same route and finish with roughly 40 days to spare.

What else could you do in that time? Dream up some tasks and comment them below!