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
