The day Athletic Club won the ’84 Copa del Rey final against Barcelona and my father celebrated Endika’s goal at the Bernabéu, I was one and a half years old. He already lived in Madrid, he had arrived a few years before from Getxo (Bizkaia), a athleticzale hardened in many afternoons of soccer in San Mamés, in many matches suffered with the team that he had also left behind.
Since then, my memory has been filled with the goals sung on the radio on Sundays while I do my homework, the anger at home if Athletic didn’t win, the Monday breaks with my friends from Madrid, without being able to brag about anything. I treasured moments and ideas that brought me closer to the club that was my father’s: the Julen Guerrero posters, the matches at the Euskal Etxea on Jovellanos Street, the legend of a barge that had once gone down the Nervión River, rumba the rumba the rum.
It’s not easy being on anyone’s team: in your city no one understands it and in your team’s city no one knows it. It’s like always playing on a neutral field, where an invisible line divides your emotions and your experiences. Football is a team sport also for its fans, who seek a complicit look, a shared alirón. This does not usually happen to a fan from abroad, he waits for his team as a visitor, travels kilometers to feel at home.
From last week in Bilbao, where I traveled with my father and my brother to see the Gabarra rewriting its history, I am left with two things: the joy of seeing my father happy and the feeling of reaching the end of a path. Because it was great to blend in among the million people celebrating my team’s 24th Copa del Rey title (25th for many) and to be, for once, another red and white shirt, but it was even better to accept my status as outside fanthe one who will return home with her chest out, hundreds of kilometers later, to continue supporting her club in this foreign reality.
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