Do soccer clubs have ideology? If so, who decides what it is? In Spain, for example, Fútbol Club Barcelona and Real Madrid are repeatedly identified with two very different models of society. The rivalry goes far beyond sports. Dictators and politicians realized long ago the power of football and decided to turn the most powerful clubs into ambassadors of their ideas, values or aspirations.
“Soccer in Spain is many other things. Sport-spectacle preferred by the masses, polarizer of interregional tensions and ultra-national projections, football is an indispensable piece for the total understanding of thirty years of the History of Spain ”, said Manuel Vázquez Montalbán already in 1973. The journalist and writer was one of the first intellectuals to naturally accept his passion for football and turn it into a vehicle to explain reality. The book Vázquez Montalbán, football and politics (Base), offers a complete, rigorous, fun and didactic review of the Montalbanian perspective. Its author, Jordi Osúa Quintana, is a doctor in Sports Sciences for a thesis on the sports thinking of the Catalan writer.
Osúa presents a journey that begins with the relationship between Barça and Montalbán’s political militancy and subsequently analyzes the use of football by the leaders – both in totalitarian regimes and in democracies. It raises the analogy of clubs as substitutes for political participation and delves into the mutual transfers between the two spheres. Always with the magic of football present, making it possible for someone who considered Barça to be “the symbolic unarmed army of Catalonia” to one day see himself helping Butragueño symbolically protect a ball while watching a match of the Spanish team on television.
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