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.”
“Are you one of the poor children?” I asked.
“I’m giving you an opportunity to earn some money and we won’t receive anything? I don’t want the money, I won’t keep the money. I’ll give it to poor children. I HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM
wrote a book in Spanish and it sold 600,000 copies.
Am I going to receive something or not?” I was now in the embarrassing position of having most of the team eavesdrop on our conversation.
“That’s not the way that I work as a journalist,” I told him.
“Would you pay Michael Jordan? Hristo Stoichkov will sell you many copies.” He said that if I wrote him a check he would personally deliver the money to UNICEF. “It’s not for me.”
I tried to explain the practice of American journalism. “This is just not the way we do business. It’s not part of our ethical system.”
While I spoke, he rose and stepped into his locker.
“Well, it’s part of my ethical system.”
“Then we can’t talk?”
“No.” He stripped o¤ his robe.
We didn’t shake hands. As I left the locker room, I angrily described Stoichkov’s solicitation of this bribe to his press handler, who just shrugged. Because Stoichkov is a hero of Barca, I couldn’t stay mad long, either. Besides, in our short exchange, he had told me nothing yet managed to encapsulate the Catalan ethos—canny about commerce alongside a streak of feistiness. And if Catalonia could find it in its heart to forgive his lunacy, so could I.
IV.
Some close followers of the game, especially in Madrid, might object to this characterization of Barcelona as a bastion of healthy, nonviolent patriotism. They will point to recent games against Real Madrid in the Camp Nou, where Barcelona fans threw projectiles on the field, including sandwiches, fruit, golf balls, mobile phones, whiskey bottles, bike chains, and a severed bloody boar’s head. If there was any democratic spirit in such displays, it was the universality of this rage.
Men with cigars and three-button suits, women with pearls and Escada pantsuits screamed the same obscenities, just as vulgarly and loudly as the working sti¤s.
As a supporter of Barca, I can’t deny these o¤enses.
My club su¤ers a pathological hatred toward Real Madrid. They are the Celtic to our Rangers. But there are several key di¤erences between this rivalry and the Scottish one. Where Celtic and Rangers cynically col-lude to exploit and profit from hatred, no rationality governs our ill will, no superego regulates our id. When Barcelona froths over Madrid, it moves in stupid, self-defeating directions, not financially profitable ones.
Barca has a long history of underachieving, results that don’t befit its all-star rosters and enormous payrolls.
And this history can be attributed—at least in part—to our Real Madrid complex.
It is not easy to overestimate Real Madrid. By any measure, they are the most successful club in the sport—the New York Yankees on a continental scale.
They have won more Spanish League titles than anyone. They have dominated the Champions League.
Nevertheless, Barca still succeeds in giving Real Madrid far more credit than it deserves. This is their description of the politics of Spanish soccer:
A party with Francoist roots runs the Madrid city HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM
council. To subsidize the footballers, the council bought Real Madrid’s training ground from the team, paying $350 million. With one check, the city council helped finance the purchase of David Beckham, Ronaldo, and Zinedine Zidane, arguably the three best players in the world. In the Catalan view, Real’s political network starts locally but extends all the way to the top. Spain’s right-wing president Jose Maria Aznar has been a Real fan since his seventh birthday; he cries when the club wins championships; he dines with Real’s board of directors.
Because of Madrid’s political connections, it gets what it wants. When Barca fans pelted Real players with the contents of their pockets, the league unjustly punished the club by making it play two home games behind closed doors, no fans allowed. “Madrid only wins championships when dictators, like Aznar and Franco, have power,” the Catalan talk radio host Xavi Bosch told me.
It’s a compelling portrait of power and influence, except in the details. Just as
