The transcendent enthusiasm for a bunch of artifacts and sepia photos moved me. I felt like a nonbeliever watching a religious pilgrimage. And the sheer depth of their faith made me a believer, too.
If you have liberal politics and yuppie tastes, it isn’t easy to find a corner of the soccer firmament that feels like home. The continent has too many clubs that have freaky fascist pasts bleeding into a xenophobic present.
And this is only the first obstacle to finding a team. You could never accept clubs with a cloud of virulent racism trailing after them. (Remove from the list of potential favorites, then, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Glasgow Rangers, Red Star Belgrade, and almost half the teams in Italy.) And for the sake of the underdog, you couldn’t possibly abide the multinational conglomerates, like Manchester United and Juventus, which buy championships every year.
Barca elegantly fills this vacuum. Over the course of its history, it has self-consciously announced its sophis-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM
tication. The Barca museum houses paintings by Dali and Miro. Outside its front gate, it displays modern sculpture, ranging from Donald Judd–like minimalism to neo-futurism. A disciple of Le Corbusier designed the roof of its old grounds.
I’ve heard, but never confirmed, a theory that the club explicitly plucked its colors—red and blue—from the tricolor of the French revolution. If not true in fact, the story has a spiritual truth. Indeed, the team’s modernist aesthetic flows from its leftist politics. At the height of the 1930s anarchism fad, Barca became a worker’s collective, a legacy that continues. Its season ticket holders still vote for the club’s administration, with presidential debates broadcast live on television and candidates making impossibly grand campaign promises to purchase a team of superstar players. More important, according to the lore of the institution, the club was the heroic center of the resistance to Franco’s military dictatorship. Only the Camp Nou provided Catalans a place to yell and scream against the regime in their own, banned vernacular. Manuel Vazquez Montalban, one of Spain’s great contemporary writers, published a novel about Barca called O¤side. He described the club as “the epic weapon of a country without a state. . . . El Barca’s victories were like those of Athens over Sparta.”
Even now in more placid times, a charming fervor surrounds the club’s politics. Government oªcials expound on a¤airs of club as if they were a¤airs of state.
At various moments, the longtime president of Catalonia, Jordi Pujol, recommended changes of lineup, strategic formation, and recruiting tactics. The major Catalan political parties form stealth alliances with the candidates for the Barca presidency, in hopes that the Barca president will invite party leaders to sit in the Camp Nou’s tribune of honor in the center of the stadium.
Because of this sense of mission, the club makes fantastic gestures to prove its purity, to show that it resides on a higher plane than the base world of commerce. Of all the clubs in the world, only Barcelona has no advertisements covering the front of its jersey. Until 2003, the club refused even to entertain offers to buy this sacred space. When the highest paid players in the world—Maradona, Ronaldo, Rivaldo—demonstrate
insuªcient enthusiasm for the cause, Barca and its fans turn on them. They send them to another city, despite the many goals they have scored for the team. If a coach adopts utilitarian tactics that skimp on artistry, he gets sacked, no matter the trophies he has accumulated. Supporters of Barca want nothing more badly than victory, except for romance. And as the club’s long history of underachieving shows, they get far more of the latter.
Unfortunately, large swaths of the world don’t fully appreciate these many splendors of Barca. More than Real Madrid and Manchester United, richer teams that win far more championships, Barca provokes irk and ire. I’ve had Serb translators and Croatian friends bridge the deepest divides and shout their mutual hatred of Barca. I’ve witnessed Israeli academics and Muslim taxi drivers unknowingly form a union of schadenfreude when Barca self-destructs. I guess I can understand the sentiment. “Mas que un club” implies HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM
superiority. The pious refusal to turn its jersey into a billboard damns the business decisions made by every other club to stay afloat. The modern art and the novels may seem too precious by half. Soccer should be watched with beer and burgers, perhaps, not cappuc-cino and cigarettes.
But if Barca’s enemies objectively considered the club they despise, they would find an important reason to stand up and bathe it in applause. Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself.
Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but not ever releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence.
Barca redeems the game from these criticisms, by showing that fans can love a club and a country with passion and without turning into a thug or terrorist.
Sure, its fans can ascend to the highest levels of irrationality—positing wild conspiracies, imagining their own victimhood, and pitting themselves against supposedly existential enemies. Yet they almost never cross into the darker realms of human behavior. There are no opposing fans that Barca considers subhuman and hardly any violence associated with the club. Its stadium is filled with more women and children than any in Europe. It is also filled with immigrants from the south of Spain, who aªliate with the club
