When I was ten years old, one afternoon my parents received some friends from a certain provincial city whose name I will not say now so as not to make enemies. The fact is that those friends had a child my age and they already know: behave well, leave your toys with him, pay attention to him, he is your guest. I remember that while the elders were talking about their things, I tried to keep my word and be kind and assist him, but it was impossible for me to connect with that shy boy to the extreme who responded to my words with murmurs and dry monosyllables. The silences between us were abysses. In one of those, desperate, I took out the best joker that exists to start a conversation with a stranger and asked him if he liked football. He looked up, smiled full of excitement and nodded his head. “And what is your team?” I insisted. Then he raised his chin and said that he was a fan of the club in his city, that provincial city that I don’t want to name so as not to be hated by its inhabitants. At that time that team was crawling through the Second Division B. I swear that my reaction was not premeditated and that what I responded came from my soul. It turns out that I looked at him with compassion and said: “Fuck, poor thing. I’m sorry”.
I don’t think we spoke again all afternoon.
At that time my team, Athletic Club, had not long won the League and we were used to winning and winning. For me, being a fan of a champion team was a source of pride and I couldn’t understand that someone would follow the colors of a club whose goal was to go up to Second Division, that division that for us was a kind of unthinkable hell. How bad you must have been for your goal to be to reach the abyss with which the most doomsayers scared us. How fucked up it is to be a fan of a team like that, I told myself. My reaction was not condescending, but empathetic.
This week I read bad skin, (KO Books) by Toni Padilla, a book in which the Sabadell journalist tells of his love for the Harlequinado club. There are no glosses on great sporting feats in his pages, but there is a chronicle of a passion for a shirt that is his own and cannot be any other, an inherited jacket that he wears with pride no matter what happens on the pitch. A song to the satisfied assumption of a destiny. Reading Padilla’s feelings about his colors, I remembered Albert Camus’s famous phrase: “You have to imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Also this week the writer Miqui Otero spoke to me about San Andreu and Europa and how the young people of Barcelona had approached this different and more authentic football than that of the mega-elite. Although he was concerned at the same time: there are already posters in English on the streets of Barcelona informing tourists about these teams’ matches.
These days the images of fans of clubs of a certain ancestry are repeated taking the stands and streets of cities that boast of them with motherly pride: Hércules, Castellón, Deportivo, Racing. In others, local football is greening in a new spring: Córdoba, Burgos, Oviedo, Gijón, Salamanca. It seems that pride in the local club, local and neighborhood football has finally been awakened in the Spanish leagues. It is possible that the fan, tired of football globalization, has turned his eyes again towards the nearest club, like that husband, that wife, who realizes that nothing that her lover seemed to offer him was worth leaving the club. home. I hope it is true and football shines less in gold and more in silver and bronze and tin, and also steel, copper, bronze, brass and iron.
That day, as a child, I behaved like an idiot because I ignored the most important lesson of the soccer stands, which is the same as that of love: there are no clubs better than others. The best is always yours, the one you love. And it is precisely because you love it. I wish I could travel back in time and change my answer. Put your hand on the shoulder of that shy boy and convey to him the admired respect that he deserved.
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