Football and National Identities in Spain

The Strange Death of Don Quixote

A. Quiroga

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137315502
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book investigates the use of football to create, shape and promote Spanish, Catalan and Basque national identities and explores the utilization of soccer to foster patriotic feelings, exposing the often dark vested interests behind the propagation of national narratives through soccer.

1

Football, National Narratives and the Cumulative Media Effect

‘The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people’

(Eric Hobsbawm)¹

On 21 June 2000, the Spanish national team played one of the most memorable games in the history of the European football championships. Needing a win to qualify for the quarter-finals, Spain faced Yugoslavia in the last match of the group stage of Euro 2000. Two minutes into injury time, however, the Spaniards were 2–3 down and their situation seemed hopeless. What followed was a remarkable feat of survival. In the 93rd minute, the referee awarded Spain a penalty and Gaizka Mendieta calmly scored from the spot. Two minutes later, Pep Guardiola’s long cross found Ismael Urzaiz, whose header was agonisingly half-volleyed by Alfonso Pérez to give Spain the match and a place in the quarter-finals. The Spanish press presented the comeback as the product of a unique national ‘courage’, a particular ‘fury’ which gave Spaniards the will to fight when everything seemed to be lost.² What could not be achieved through playing good football and creating chances, the sports correspondent of the daily ABC explained, had been accomplished through ‘heroism, bravery and self-esteem’.³

Four days later, the Spanish national team played France for a place in the semi-finals. The French reached the closing moments of the game 2–1 up, but in the very last minute the Italian referee Pierluigi Collina awarded Spain a penalty. The striker Raúl González took the responsibility, placed the ball on the penalty spot, kicked it violently with his left foot and sent it over the bar to the delight of the Gallic keeper Fabien Barthez. Two minutes later the match was over. Not for the first time, Spain were out at the quarter-final stages of an international football tournament. On this occasion, there was no mention of courage or bravery in the press. The result was presented as a ‘sad and painful’ defeat, due to ‘unfortunate circumstances’ and ‘bad luck’.⁴ The defeat was the consequence of a mysterious historic ‘curse’ on the selección and therefore inevitable.⁵ There was ‘no point in fighting against destiny’.⁶ In a somewhat poetic manner, Enrique Ortego wrote in ABC: ‘The present and the past are written with the same ink and the future always ends at the same place. Spain go home at the quarter-final stages yet again. The semi-finals are their particular Everest’.⁷

In the space of four days, the national team had gone from being portrayed as the embodiment of courage and bravery to being the sad victims of a historical curse that precluded Spaniards from entering Europe’s footballing elite. It is obvious that history does not play football, let alone miss penalties. However, these two opposing representations of the national team perfectly illustrate the main components of a master narrative on Spaniards’ national characteristics that has prevailed in the last century. This narrative is based on two core sets of ideas. In the first place, Spanish footballers, and by extension all Spaniards, are characterised by their furia, a term that translates as fury or rage, but also, above all, has connotations of passion, bravery and courage. In most cases, the term furia has positive overtones and denotes the alleged daring, fighting spirit of Spaniards. Secondly, and with no apparent contradiction, Spaniards are often described as underachievers, psychologically weak, backward creatures and the victims of out-of-control, obscure historical forces. This is the dark side of passion and bravery. This is courage and valour turned into irrational and savage behaviour that prevents Spaniards from winning. The combination of these sets of positive and negative ideas make up what may be named the ‘fury and failure narrative’, a story that links Spanish success to extraordinary courage and defeat to national psychological impediments and/or historical misfortunes. This ‘fury and failure narrative’ emerged at the start of the twentieth century and has endured, in various shapes and forms, well into the twenty-first. This discourse aims at explaining not only sporting victories and defeats but also the very nature of Spanish national identities.

The understanding of nations as constructed narratives has become highly influential among scholars over recent years. This approach to the study of national identities considers nations as a group of metaphors, myths, stereotypes and images produced and reproduced at discursive level.⁸ From the end of the eighteenth century, different collections of metaphors and images began to create a number of master narratives that elaborated a national past for communities and territories all over the world.⁹ In Europe, historians of the Enlightenment were pioneers in creating modern national narratives that were later re-elaborated and propagated by teachers, journalists and politicians throughout the nineteenth century. These national master narratives were disseminated via textbooks, press and literature and found their natural milieu for propagation in schools, clubs, bars and homes. As the twentieth century progressed, other media and genres became important in the shaping of national discourses. Film, architecture, painting, fine arts and music, to name a few examples, contributed profusely to the transmission of the myths and metaphors that constituted the national master narratives.¹⁰ Popular historiography, the non-academic representation of history in written, visual and artefactual forms to non-expert audiences via novels, radio and television, became the most significant means to communicate information about the past in the twentieth century. These popular representations of history frequently favoured crude, one-dimensional interpretations of the past, simplifying national narratives and thus making them more effective in shaping identity.¹¹

Sport also played a key role in the formation of national discourses. Urban economic growth, developments in metropolitan consumption and the commercialisation of leisure brought an unprecedented popularisation of sport in the first decades of the twentieth century.¹² These changes paved the way for the emergence of a specialised press and an increased coverage of sport in mass newspapers. Sports reporting became an additional way to narrate the nation, a supplement to the accounts of historians, writers, musicians and artists. Similar to the cases of literature, music and film, sports writing acquired a national character by ascribing national features to athletes and teams and developing a national narrative. The creation of international competitions, including the modern Olympic Games, led to the belief that athletes and teams had national styles that, somehow, reflected the national identity of the country they represented. Gradually, the bond between the features of national athletes and teams, on the one hand, and national identities, on the other, strengthened, for the media espoused a narrative that emphasised ‘stereotypical national styles’. According to this narrative, and rather absurdly, sportsmen and women had to remain true to their national styles if they were to succeed. Failure was explained in terms of deviation from the genuine national style. Additionally, sports journalists constructed heroic tales of epic performances that, as in other genres, had the ability to turn athletes into national idols.¹³ As with national figures of the fatherland’s history and literature, athletes were compared to the idols of the past, thus drawing a timeline connecting former and contemporary heroes.

No other sport has contributed to the affirmation of national identities and the propagation of national narratives as much as football. Firstly, football appears to capture Benedict Anderson’s notion of an ‘imagined community’ completely, for it is relatively easy to imagine the nation and bolster its identity when the fatherland is represented by eleven players in a game against another nation.¹⁴ In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, the ‘imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people’.¹⁵ The abstract concept of the national community becomes more tangible when ‘visualised’ via a uniformed team. Secondly, football was read as a manifestation of the societies in which it operated. National teams were seen as repositories of national identities in their style of play. The public identified with and took pride in a particular style as opposed to other national styles. This affinity for a specific style showed a national self-awareness and an affirmation of a particular national identity. It also meant that the universal practice of the sport was ‘indigenised’, as certain playing styles were perceived as distinctive to the nation concerned.¹⁶

Certainly, football has also been able to create and reproduce identities at local, provincial and regional levels. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, football teams have become a source of collective identification and an expression of local communities. Provincial and regional rivalries also developed among teams of neighbouring towns all over Europe.¹⁷ On most occasions, however, the creation or strengthening of provincial and regional sport-based identities has proved no obstruction to the fostering of national feelings. On the contrary, the construction of local, provincial and regional identities through the medium of football has reinforced national ones. In this sense football has been no different from other channels of mass nationalisation. For most people the abstract idea of the nation has ‘materialised’ via local institutions such as the school, the town hall, the post office or the church.¹⁸ In the case of football, local teams play in provincial and regional leagues that, in turn, are part of national competitions organised by the national football association. This system is able to encompass a wide cross-section of the public, while still keeping the nation as the ultimate arbiter of local football.

Historiography and methodology

Notwithstanding the long-lasting importance of both football and nationalisms in the Iberian Peninsula, academic scholarship on sport and identities in Spain has only recently flourished.¹⁹ The pioneering works of Duncan Shaw on football and Francoism and Vic Duke and Liz Crolley on Spanish football nations in the twentieth century took a political history approach to explain the links between the sport and national identifications.²⁰ The emphasis here was on the role of the Spanish state as the maker of national identities through football, although counter-hegemonic Catalan and Basque identities were also thrown into the equation. The investigations of John Walton, Francisco Caspistegui, Jorge Uría and Xavier Pujadas have analysed the issue from a social history perspective.²¹ Urban transformations, social modernisation and the commercialisation of leisure are at the centre of these analyses, which tend to deal with the first decades of the twentieth century. Along similar lines, Andrew MacFarland has tried to bridge cultural and social history by focusing on the impact of consumerism on identity. His works have emphasised the role of urban consumption and nationalist agendas when it comes to explaining the rapid growth of football, and its class-based implications, in early twentieth-century Spain.²² Additionally, some other disciplines have contributed to our understanding of sport and identities in Spain. Jeremy MacClancy’s research on the (re)invention of Basque sports and Salvador Duch’s analysis of the Real Madrid–FC Barcelona rivalry have shown that anthropology can substantially further our knowledge of identity creation and transformation processes.²³ Moreover, the sociological works of Ramón Llopis on sports and collective identification and Hunter Shobe’s investigations making explicit the connections between football, identity and geographical notions of place have demonstrated that there is a plurality of valid approaches in academic studies on football and identities in Spain.

Of particular relevance to my investigation are the works of Jesús Castañón Rodríguez. Castañón was a pioneer in the study of the Spanish media’s discourses on football. His 1993 book El lenguaje periodístico del fútbol took a socio-linguistic approach to analyse the historical changes of the narratives produced in the Spanish press from the 1920s until the late 1980s.²⁴ The result was a ground-breaking piece of research that competently interwove transformations and continuities in the political, media and discursive arenas. In a similar vein, Liz Crolley and David Hand have used discourse analysis to explore the representation of identities in the print media of a number of European countries, such as Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. These two linguists have focused on newspapers’ discourse as a way to create and reproduce identities on a daily basis. By analysing football reporting in a transnationally comparative manner, they have explored the mechanisms at work in the reflection of major issues of regional and national identities.²⁵ Following the post-structuralist school of discourse analysis, Crolley and Hand suggest that the media are not merely passive reproducers of existing social attitudes but are also creators of national and regional identities.²⁶ These constructions and reproductions of identities are dynamic processes that require a certain dialogue between self-representation (how nations perceive themselves) and hetero-representation (how nations are perceived by others). Thus when analysing the Spanish case in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Crolley and Hand identify the main elements of the construction and reproduction of identities both ‘in terms of autotypification (Spain portrayed b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Football, National Narratives and the Cumulative Media Effect
• 2 Invention and Development of the Fury and Failure Narrative (1920–1975)
• 3 Transition to Democracy (1975–1982)
• 4 In Search of Modernity’s Ark (1982–2000)
• 5 From Patriotic Bulimia to Nationalist Obesity (2001–2012)
• 6 Football and Identities in Catalonia
• 7 Football and Identities in the Basque Country
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index