Change team

My dear Carlos Marañón wrote in Diario AS that “At the antipodes of my micro-egoism, one of the things I pride myself on in this life is that there are people who remember me through an intermediary team. “Let them listen to Espanyol’s result and think of me.” The truth is that I remember Carlos Marañón every time Espanyol receives a hit or a joy, I imagine him smiling or contracted in sadness, like in a scene from a Richard Curtis movie. In the same way that I remember my friend Juanlu when Mallorca achieves something notable. Or my friends Iñigo and Nerea if Athletic takes boats out on the estuary. I know that my friend Mario will sleep soundly if Atlético plays a good game. And I am worried about the mental health of my friend Hector, who has been invoking outlaw gods and swearing apostrophes in Aramaic for months during the Granada season.

In life you are part of many secondary teams. Some of that equipment ends up leaving, like the people who brought it to you. And it is very difficult to say goodbye, also to episodic shields. Others stay forever, already impervious to ups and downs or betrayals. I was thinking about it this week, about how easy it is to acquire tangential football likes and dislikes, and how difficult (if not impossible) it is to stop being from one team to become another.

Personally, it seems legitimate to change teams, but I would only understand it if your club has been tried at the Hague Court for crimes against humanity. People change their partner, their apartment, their job, their washing machine, their mattress, their mobile phone, even their ideology for genuine and practical reasons, normally because we believe that we will benefit from making the change. But none of that can apply to supporting a football team. There is no practicality in a football choice, there is only a bond. And this is basically the reason why football is what it is. Without that irrational and intransigent loyalty, football would have long been in ruins, with fallen busts of presidents and tourists visiting for fifty euros a ticket.

Bobby Robson described it perfectly: “What is a club anyway? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent them. They are not television contracts, exit clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. “He is a little boy walking up the stadium steps for the first time, holding his father’s hand, looking at that sacred expanse of grass beneath him, and, helplessly, falling in love.”

There will be those who think: But what’s the point of maintaining a decision—to be on one team or another—that we normally make in childhood? Well, precisely for that reason, because in childhood we make the most honest decisions. All of us who support humble teams since childhood have thought about what it would be like to wake up one day becoming one of those fans who celebrate titles like someone who celebrates that after a Monday comes a Tuesday. Not even Kafka dared to do so much. We have all thought about what views the roller coaster of glory will have from above, because we have always seen it from below and with neck pain. But, how does one change equipment? How do you cancel a feeling? And above all, for what. Why support a brand if you are supporting something much better, if you are supporting an emotion.

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