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
