When Barça returned from Kiev with a suitcase full of caviar

In fact, in 1992, the president of Dinamo explained that “it is difficult to predict a budget because prices change every day,” he said. Sports world. On the cover of that year’s visit, Ronald Koeman, Richard Witschge and Michael Laudrup smiled wearing Meyba tracksuits and the typical Russian fur hat. “People came to offer us hats, military medals, cans of caviar, everything in exchange for sports things, such as T-shirts, tracksuits, gloves or boots,” Andoni Zubizarreta reminds ARA. “I didn’t,” he nuances.

“We carried everything in our suitcases: women’s lipsticks and cosmetics, men’s underwear, pajamas, raincoats, and we exchanged it for caviar, gifts, antiques like watches or typewriters, everything. I remember having it. made with Buriak or Oleg Blokhín [Pilota d’Or l’any 1975]. Or in the hotel itself, the workers would show you the basement things and take you to a corner. “Do you like that? What do you give me in return? ” Life there was very hard, and they saw in us an opportunity to improve their present, “recalls Julio Alberto Moreno on the first visit.

From Kiev, Zubizarreta, in addition to the snow, recalls brief conversations with children or grandchildren of former refugees who arrived in the USSR after the Civil War and, above all, the smoke and smell of gasoline from cars and trucks and the colors of the streets “half off, dimmed, half light.” “It was going to a totally different world in everything, to another planet. I was struck by the homogeneity: all the same houses, the same curtains, the same lamps. And the surveillance. And the control. They wouldn’t let us out of the world. “We wanted to take a picture in a market and a policeman confiscated our camera and sent us to the hotel,” recalls Julio Alberto, a Catalan until 1991.

That same year, after filling out printed forms in the early 1970s and queuing at the airport, when Catalan journalists asked to speak to Dinamo players, the head of the press, illustrating the prevailing hermeticism, he replied, “They are thirty miles from here, as if they were in a prison.” Julio Alberto still has engraved, too, the sad faces of the people of Kiev: “They had a sad, humble look. Full of hope but sad, as if telling you, ‘How lucky you are. You come here. I am from “Here. And why can’t I live like you?”

In 1993 Cruyff argued the decision to fly in time to Kiev: “Why travel earlier if there is nothing in this city? Sadness negatively influences.” Barça landed in Ukraine with a cook and 300 kilos of food “to make up for the lack of food” in the country and in Kiev, “a city of gray skies, marked by a serious economic crisis”, he portrayed Sports world in a text in which he recalled that in 1991, with Cruyff in Barcelona, ​​recovering from a heart operation, “some players wanted to buy 300 cans of caviar, but when they asked to open most of them were full of stones” .

“And that’s where you fish it?”

“One day, opening a can of asparagus, a woman asked me through an interpreter: ‘Where are you fishing for this?'” Jaume Gorro, the chef who accompanied Barça in the match, told the same newspaper. 1992, along with 200 kilos of food: with 48 liters of milk, wine, water, oil, salt, eight dozen eggs, five boxes of yogurt and peasant bread, “because it holds up better,” and so many other foods.

Julio Alberto also states that, at rest, they used to light cotton balls with alcohol to melt the ice in the boots and regain sensitivity in the feet. “At the break we didn’t feel our feet. The boots looked like iron, so stiff from the cold,” said the former defender, before revealing that a few years earlier, when Leonid Brezhnev presided over the USSR, he had had conversations with Leonid Buriak and other footballers. of the Dynamo to help them flee to Spain. “Football is a universal passport. It is a unique safe-conduct,” the ex-winger concludes.