Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid by Sid Lowe

Author:Sid Lowe [Lowe, Sid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-09-25T18:30:00+00:00

A few days after beating Real Madrid 0-5, Barcelona visited El Pardo. One director, Raimón Carrasco, excused himself from the trip on the grounds that he had to travel to Paris; in fact he had refused to take part in an audience with the dictator who had ordered the shooting of his father in 1938. Franco told the players that he had watched the game and was impressed. Barcelona gave the dictator the club’s gold medal to mark their forthcoming seventy-fifth anniversary. According to Montal, they had little choice. The Catalan president of the DND, Juan Gich, had told Barcelona’s president that not doing so would not go unnoticed. ‘And those kind of recommendations were more than just recommendations.’

‘The day arrived, we put on our jackets and we went to El Pardo,’ Montal recalled. ‘They took us to a room and five minutes later Franco came in, dressed in military uniform. He shook our hands one by one, the man in charge of protocol handed me my speech, I read it, we gave him the medal, and the Generalísimo said thank you and disappeared from whence he came.’ When a petition was launched to persuade Barcelona to withdraw the medal in 2003, a commission was put together by the club to investigate and it ruled that Barcelona could not withdraw what was not voluntarily handed out in the first place, an argument founded upon the fact that when the club’s board returned to the Camp Nou that day in 1974 they did not include the presentation in their Libro de Actas, as if to say: let the record state that . . . nothing happened.

This episode demonstrates that while the regime was losing its grip, there was still a limit to the actions football clubs could take. Another example came when Barcelona were warned after announcements over the Camp Nou loudspeaker were made in Catalan for the first time in 1972, the interior minister describing it in dark terms as ‘the most anti-18 July act in memory’ and warning Montal: ‘be careful or next time I’ll be telling you in a different way and in a different place’. The risks were still significant. Resistance and collaboration, whether passive or active, is always a complex subject, difficult to judge with certainty. What is voluntary and what is forced? What do people really want? Beneath the fear and coercion, what do they really think? Shifting regimes bring shifting stories – and not all of them are true. Identities are rebuilt, pasts rewritten. It is true at societal and political level and it is true of football clubs.

Throughout the later years of the dictatorship, virtually the whole of Spain was on a kind of active stand-by, waiting for Franco to die. Real Madrid maintained an expectant silence while Barcelona had begun to push the boundaries. With Franco’s impending death mès que un club would become explicitly framed in political terms, expressed as a manifestation of liberalism, nationalism and democracy. In 1972 Joan Josep

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