Monday, July 09, 2012

La Roja: the roots of soccer's Spanish fury...

During Franco’s dictatorship, between 1939 and 1975, soccer was a pastime that was actively encouraged by the state—that is, as long as it was not exploited by the enemy. And the enemy ranged from communists, Freemasons, and freethinkers to Catalan and Basque nationalists, most of them decent human beings whose clubs were rooted in local cultural identities. It gave Spanish soccer, when I was growing up, its political edge; it separated us soccer lovers into democrats and fascists.

Franco was brutal on and off the field. Far from magnanimous in his hour of victory, Franco emerged in 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, determined to rule his country with an iron grip. Spaniards were divided between those who continued to support him and his military rebels and those who had fought against him on the side of the democratically elected Republican government. The former were rewarded with jobs, social security benefits, and new houses. The latter faced imprisonment, execution, and social exclusion, including exile.

Culturally, Spain was reduced to a playground, carefully controlled. With an increasing number of Spaniards migrating from the countryside to the big cities, in particular Madrid and Barcelona, and the spread first of radio and then television, soccer overtook bullfighting as the most popular pastime, tolerated by a regime that saw sports through the prism of self-preservation, a vehicle for defusing antagonisms of a dangerously political ilk. Of those years, one of Spanish soccer’s most eminent native commentators, Alfredo Relaño, has written, “Soccer kept growing. Spain began to rebuild itself after the war. It was a time when there was little to do except work as many hours as possible ... pick up the pieces from the ruins, and on Sundays go to the soccer match. Full story...

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  6. Ukrainian reporter and Dutch soccer fans...

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