How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (23 page)

When the city fell, Franco killed unknown numbers of them and buried them in a mass grave on Montjuic hill, the future home of the Olympic stadium.

But there was another, equally important reason for Franco’s hatred for Barca. The Generalissimo followed the game obsessively, and, more specifically, he followed Barca’s rival, Real Madrid obsessively. He could recite Real lineups going back decades and let it be known that he relaxed in his palace by watching the game of the week on television. (Not coincidentally state TV featured Real Madrid in its weekly broadcast far more than any other team.) When he watched, he even had a stake in the outcome. Franco liked to play a state-sponsored pool that allowed him to place bets on soccer.

Franco prosecuted his personal vendetta against Barca to the fullest. Manuel Vazquez Montalban has written, “Franco’s occupying troops entered the city, fourth on the list of organizations to be purged, after the Communists, the Anarchists and the Separatists, was Barcelona Football Club.” At the start of Franco’s three-year revolt, fascist gendarmes arrested and then executed Barca’s left-leaning president Josep Sunyol as he drove across the Guadarrama hills to visit Catalan troops guarding Madrid against a right-wing siege.

When Franco’s troops made a final push to conquer obstreperous Catalonia, they bombed the building that
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

held the club’s trophies. After demolishing the club’s hardware, the Francoists set out to strip it of its identity.

The regime insisted on changing “Football Club Barcelona” to “Club de Football Barcelona”— not a tiny aesthetic point, but the translation of the team’s name into Castilian Spanish. It also insisted on purging the Catalan flag from the team crest. And these were only Franco’s opening salvos. To oversee the ideological transformation of the club, the regime installed a new president. He should have been well suited to the task.

During the war, he had been captain of the civil guard’s

“Anti-Marxist Division.” At Barca, he carefully kept thick police files on everyone involved with the club, so that he could impede and undermine any oªcials with latent nationalist sympathies.

During these early years of the Franco era, one event jumps from the history books. In 1943, Barca played Real in the semifinals of the Generalissimo’s Cup. Moments before game time, the director of state security entered Barca’s locker room—a scene enshrined in the journalist Jimmy Burns’s magisterial history of the club,
Barca.
He reminded the players that many of them had only just returned to Spain from wartime exile thanks to an amnesty excusing their flight. “Do not forget that some of you are only playing because of the generosity of the regime that has forgiven your lack of patriotism.” In those recrimination-filled years, the hint wasn’t hard to take. Barca lost the match 11–1, one of the most lopsided defeats in team history.

This was the first of many favors the regime

granted to Real Madrid, which seemed to return the a¤ection by placing its new stadium on the Avenida de
Generalissimo Franco. According to some, the regime gave decisive aid to Real Madrid in its signing of the best player of the fifties, the Argentine Alfredo Di Ste-fano, even though Barca had already agreed to terms with him. When Real Madrid won championships,

Franco bestowed medals on the club and honorifics not granted other winners. Paul Preston, the caudillo’s biographer, wrote, “Franco saw the triumphs of Real Madrid and of the Spanish national team as somehow his own.” All this is fact. But there’s a way in which these facts don’t add up to quite the anti-Barca conspir-acy that Catalans present. One significant detail gets in the way. In the early years of the Franco era, Barca experienced one of the better runs in its history.

It’s a paradox—repression and triumph—and

leads to one of the thorniest questions in the political history of the game. Umberto Eco has phrased it this way: “Is it possible to have a revolution on football Sunday?” For Barca this subject sits especially uncomfortably. Its fans like to brag that their stadium gave them a space to vent their outrage against the regime. Embold-ened by 100,000 people chanting in unison, safety in numbers, fans seized the opportunity to scream things that could never be said, even furtively, on the street or in the café. This is a common enough phenomenon.

There’s a long history of resistance movements igniting in the soccer stadium. In the Red Star Revolution, Draza, Krle, and the other Belgrade soccer hooligans helped topple Slobodan Milosevic. Celebrations for Romania’s 1990 World Cup qualification carried over into the Bucharest squares, culminating in a firing squad that trained its rifles on the dictator Nicolae
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

Ceausescu and his wife. The movement that toppled the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner had the same sportive ground zero.

But when Barca fans proudly point to Camp Nou’s subversive spirit, they can’t satisfactorily explain why Franco didn’t just squash it. Of course, he could have easily. He ran an eªcient police state, where both the trains and the grand inquisitors ran on time. To crack down on Barca, as Primo de Rivera had done in the 1920s, would have required few troops. But he set this option to the side and he chose to let the partisans scream their obscenities against him. Franco never explicitly justified this policy of tolerance. But its purpose was clear enough: to let the Catalan people channel their political energies into a harmless pastime.

If Barca let Catalonia blow o¤ steam, it turned out to be a tidy arrangement for all involved. Franco never faced any serious opposition from the Catalans. Unlike the Basques, the other linguistic minority su¤ering under Franco, the Catalans never joined liberation fronts or kidnapped Madrid bank presidents or exploded bombs at bus stations. And Barca supporters, for all their noise in the Camp Nou, never seriously objected to the Franco apologists who ruled the club’s boardroom.

While Catalonia kept its head down, it got on with business. Franco’s nationalist economics, which included subsidies and tari¤s, abetted a massive industrial boom in metropolitan Barcelona. Immigrants from the south of Spain, many thousands in the fifties and sixties, came to work the region’s factories. The new industrial strength and concomitant wealth helped take the mind o¤ oppression and memories of slaughter.
Catalans have a self-description that explains this temperamental instinct toward going along. They like to say that they possess a national quality called
seny,
a word that translates into something in between prag-matism and canniness. It’s the legacy from their centuries as Mediterranean traders, a businessman’s aversion to trouble. (A classic example of
seny
: Catalans insist that their language be taught in universities and deployed on street signs. It can be found everywhere, except the real estate sections of many Catalan-language newspapers. Nationalism shouldn’t ever obstruct a deal.) In this self-description, the Catalans also admit that they possess a yin to the
seny
yang. They have another national characteristic called
rauxa,
a tendency toward violent outbursts.

This characteristic propelled Catalonia to fight so determinedly during the Spanish Civil War and

made it so pugilistic in the years before.

Whether by Franco’s design or not, Barca helped to preserve Catalonia’s
seny
and
rauxa
in a state of comfortable equilibrium. A sportswriter told me a parable that illustrates this point. Two criminals, locked away in one of Franco’s prisons, execute a perfectly planned break. They time their escape so that they can watch Barca play Real Madrid in the Camp Nou. As good fortune would have it, the liberated watch their beloved Barca triumph. They have both freedom and victory.

From here, they had simply to follow the script provided by dozens of buddy movies and hit the road. But they performed their roles as Catalan men, not Holly-wood actors. Cured of their
rauxa
by Barca, they retrace their steps to the building where they had
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

su¤ered for so long. They seek out a warden and turn themselves in.

III.

There’s a thin line between passion and madness. The former Barcelona striker Hristo Stoichkov constantly crosses it. As a teenager in Bulgaria, he once instigated a massive mid-game brawl. His performance that day was so violent, so feral and uncontrolled, that the Bulgarian soccer federation banned him from the game for life. But he was too good and too adored to su¤er this fate. When the Bulgarian public complained that it had been deprived of a great hero, the federation down-graded the punishment to a year’s suspension. With maturity, his violent outbursts never really abated. In four years at Barca, referees tossed him from 11 games.

He would not only put himself in the faces of referees, he would stomp on their toes. A few months before I went to visit him in Washington, D.C., where he played last season, he had just scrimmaged against college kids, a meaningless “friendly” match. But Stoichkov has only a limited ability to modulate his style, and the notion of friendly has no cognitive resonance with him.

In the game, he slid into a freshman from behind with both his legs turned up, so hard that he snapped the player’s bones. The sound of cracking traveled across the field. On the sideline, spectators and players retched.

Reducing Stoichkov to his temper, however, sells him short. He isn’t without incredible appeal. A poll once found him the most popular Barca player of all
time. In part, his popularity was a just reward for performance. Between 1990 and 1994, he scored 104

goals for the club. His eccentric playing persona, in turns delicate and brutal, contributed massively to Barca’s
annus mirablis,
including its lone Champions League title. In 1994, he won European Player of the Year. Catalans also worshipped Stoichkov, because he replicated their passion—and the unreasonable expectations, unfair demands, and hypercriticism that come with such passion. “My colleagues are lazy, dumb and money hungry,” he once complained. Like the Catalans, Stoichkov believed that Barca should be playing for the cause and not a paycheck.

Only a few native Catalan players have more

enthusiastically championed the political ideology of the club or the country. It goes beyond the requisite hatred for Real Madrid, although Stoichkov has expressed his disdain with singular intensity. (“I will always hate Real Madrid,” he once said. “I would rather the ground opened up and took me under than accept a job with them. In fact, I really do not like speaking about them because when I do it makes me want to vomit.”) He has a fanatical devotion to Catalonian nationalism. When Bulgaria played Spain in the 1998

World Cup, he hung a Catalan flag from the balcony of his hotel. He promised that he would wear a T-shirt beneath his jersey agitating for secession from Spain.

These gestures, much hyped and appreciated in

Barcelona, only culminated a personal history of rabid Catalanism. He has been a leader in a campaign for Catalonia to withdraw its support for the Spanish national squad and to field its own separate team at the
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

World Cup. Barcelona papers have reported that he has endorsed the Party for Catalonian Independence—

strangely placing himself left of the mainstream of Catalan nationalism.

Stoichkov proves the inclusiveness of Catalan nationalism, its greatest virtue. It welcomes, even worships, foreigners. Barca’s history is full of foreign players—

Scotsmen, Hungarians, Dutchmen—who have taken

up residence in the city and become proponents of the club’s politics. (Dutch great Johan Cruy¤ named his Barcelona-born son Jordi, possibly the first Franco-era baby with this Catalan first name.) The foreigners can become Catalan, because the ideology of Catalanism holds that citizenship is acquired, not inherited. To become Catalan, one must simply learn the Catalan language, disparage Castilian Spain, and love Barca. Catalan nationalism is not a racial doctrine or theocratic one, but a thoroughly civic religion. Catalan nationalism is so blind that it will accept you even if you have an impossible personality.

Getting an interview with Stoichkov is not easy.

After weeks of putting me o¤, he agreed to meet after practice in the locker room of his club, D.C. United.

Stoichkov sat on a chair fresh from a shower, wearing a terry cloth robe with a hood. To amuse his teammates, he pulled the hood over his head, jumped out of his chair, and mimed the motions of a boxer preparing to fight. There was a wild quality to his drama. He threw hard punches in the air and bounced into naked guys as if he were going to pound them. When he returned to his chair, I sat down beside him and began to introduce myself.
“In Spanish,” he said. “Much better in Spanish.”

“Bueno. Yo soy . . .”

I realized that Stoichkov made me too nervous to ask questions in Spanish. He blurts out his phrases and has perfected the tough man’s look that seems menacing even in the nude. He wears a permanent coat of stubble over gaunt cheeks. His most innocuous movements look like wind-ups to a punch.

I asked the team’s press handler for some help. He recruited the team’s equipment manager to translate.

Clearly, our interview would be a disaster. But I had spent too much time negotiating logistics to waste the opportunity. As I began to explain my project, Stoichkov cut me o¤.

“How many copies will you sell? Sharing my

thoughts, will that entitle me to earn some money out of this?”

There was a long pause, during which he stared at me intently. I had no idea how to measure the seriousness of his question.

“No,” I replied.

“Why not?”

“I’m a poor journalist.”

He seemed very self-satisfied with his line of questioning. His responses preempted the translations.

“Will you earn money?”

“Sure, maybe a little bit.”

“But there are poor children in this world.”