Barça and Francoism, the debate that has reached history faculties

The event was moderated by Joan Villarroya, who can boast of having a Barça card with a very low number. “I can remember the first time I saw a flag at a public event. It was at the Camp Nou, of course. It’s funny when someone doesn’t want to talk about politics and sport, when politics touches everything. Some historians seem to want ignore football, but Josep Fontana, one of the great names in our country, wore the Sports world under the arm And Vázquez Montalbán? He showed that to understand the country, you also need to talk about its sports clubs, especially Barça,” he said with a half-laugh, pleased to see so many young students, ready to ask many questions, some of which were interesting, such as one about the role of the big textile entrepreneurs in the Barça of the 60s.

A week later from the talk at the University of Barcelona, ​​Santacana repeated the talk at the Ateneu Barcelonès, in this case accompanied by Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and the journalist from The vanguard Xavier Garcia Luque, in an event moderated by journalist Marta Ramón, organized by Ateneu and Àgora Blaugrana, an association that unites different groups of Blaugrana opinion. All of a sudden, the dust has been removed from the excellent books of these authors, as Barcelona fans are forced to defend themselves against a surprising accusation: being the team of the Franco regime. “He has neither head nor feet,” Santacana defends. “When you saw the Madrid video, you wondered how they could do something like that, with elementary arguments. I felt that Barça was being insulted in a barroera way”, Garcia Luque was sincere. Santacana, however, added that “there is bad faith and it is very serious, since Francoism is trivialized”.

All, however, accept one idea: it can be said that Madrid was not initially the team of the regime, since the team allowed during the 40s was Atlético de Madrid, then renamed Atlético Aviación. “It was the military’s team, with all the weight it had in a state emerging from a Civil War. But the situation changed in the 1950s, when Real Madrid won great victories. You can say that the regime appropriated of his victories,” explains Viñas. Solé y Sabaté recalls that “Madrid’s history is always under suspicion, since it always came close to power. Madrid ended up being the team of the regime later, since, for whatever reason, it could not be- Atlético de Madrid first”.

Two ways to remember the past

Barça could not become the team of the regime because of its past which means it. Initially, neither was the white club. “Madrid suffered and almost dropped to second place. Its communist president, Antonio Ortega, was shot in 1939. But not for being president of the club: he was shot for being a communist soldier, and it’s funny how the club ignores him. The name does not appear on his website. The reason that is argued is that he was not chosen by the members, that he was not voted. Well, Santiago Bernabéu wasn’t voted for either and it’s named after his stadium”, Viñas defends. Especially from the arrival to the presidency of the white club of Bernabéu, a former player of the club who had been a volunteer on the national side, Madrid will be weaving complicity with Francoism, until he becomes its great ambassador. “A key moment is the famous Di Stéfano case,” recalls Santacana, when the authorities helped Madrid to prevent the Argentine player from being signed by Barça. “It was a key moment. If Di Stéfano arrives at a Barça that already had Kubala, it would have been an unstoppable team. But the authorities sided with Madrid to decree that Di Stéfano should play for both clubs, two years on each side, infuriating Barça, who rejected the pact. And the player left for Madrid, which would begin a golden era,” he adds. Barça would resign, in part, when president Martí Carreto was reminded by the authorities that “you have family and business”. That is to say, as Garcia Luque says, in “a dictatorship everything is prohibited and the authorities give permits. Therefore, they told the Barça managers to pay attention if they did not want to have problems with their businesses”, he adds. The journalist, however, during the event at the Ateneo proposed to write another book about Di Stéfano to collect all the aggressions and fights that the Argentinian player took part in. “And they only sent him off once, but they penalized the referee.”

With Di Stéfano on the field and Bernabéu in the box office, Madrid will become the apple of the regime’s eyes, as Foreign Minister Fernando María Castiella said, who defined the white club as “the best ambassador of the regime, ahead of the diplomats or consuls”. Madrid’s official newsletter echoed it.

Santacana, Viñas o Solé and Sabaté have dived into archives and researched for years. And now they find themselves having to refute the arguments of a video made with little trace. “It’s lazy,” says Viñas. Santacana resigns, “it’s a symbol of an era where you take four images on the networks and you make a video that seems to have the same value as decades of academic work to investigate.” “If we talk about the video that was released a few days ago, the images must be contextualized in the reality of the dictatorship. Barça and all the clubs were controlled by the Franco regime. In the case of Barça, the control is even more narrowed by his past,” says Santacana. It is clear that the Face to sun in the Courts or Barça gave Franco medals. “Everyone did it. It was a dictatorship, you could only have presidents sympathetic to the regime. To say that Barça was pro-Franco because of this fact is ignorance, since all the clubs did it,” adds Viñas. Solé y Sabate remembers how when Barça had to give a medal to Franco in 1974, vice-president Raimon Carrasco refused to go to Madrid, as he said: “I don’t plan to shake the hand of the person who shot my father “, the Catalanist politician Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera. “Now it seems that only Barça went to see Franco. It was a dictatorship, everyone had to go through the Pardo palace”, defends Garcia Luque.

Viñas recalls that “Barça never gets rid of the position of mistrust that comes from its past history. In a way, this means that Barça is conceptualized as a club that is always suspicious”. This is a key point according to all historians. Barça, like all clubs, had presidents sympathetic to the regime, sometimes people who had not even been members of the club, such as the Marquis de la Mesa de Asta Enrique Piñeyro or the military man José Vendrell, who was a member of Espanyol. But the Francoist authorities “always saw it as a Catalan club, dangerous”, according to Solé and Sabaté. The authorities were suspicious of their fans, who would lead acts of revolt, such as the famous tram strike. “During the strike of 1951, the fans refused to take the trams to go to the field even though it was raining, in the middle of a strike against the price increase. You can say that that protest was partly successful also because of that action,” he recalls Santacana, who also remembers the act of “purification that took place in 1939, when the Franco regime organized a match between Barça and Athletic de Bilbao at Les Corts to vent, with the press saying that the concept had to be forgotten ofSport and citizenship, the motto of president Suñol i Garriga, who was shot in 1936. No other club had an act like this where they seemed to want to say that they had cleaned with bleach a club with Catalanist antecedents. Well, they never got over the idea of ​​being the Catalan club. In 1968, when Barça won the cup in the Madrid field, Bernabéu will say what Catalonia likes, but not the Catalans. In other words, the president of Madrid himself continued to identify Barça with Catalonia”.

Historians who have been working in Catalonia for years and who study the relationship between sport and the Franco regime wonder why so few colleagues have done the same work in Madrid, to explain the history of Republican Madrid, which at times it seems as if it did not exist. As if the victorious Madrid had only existed since the signing of Di Stéfano and the first European Cups. When the white club became the best ambassador of the regime. “The good part of it all is that a lot of young people are interested in the past of the country and the club. It’s not all bad,” said Santacana. Both in the Faculty of History and in the Ateneo, the room was filled with people who were curious to know what is true, in these cross-accusations about what the regime’s team was. There were veterans like the journalist Lluís Permanyer, son of a Barça manager who refused to visit Franco already in the 50s, but also young teenagers. According to Solé and Sabaté, all of this is a success for Barça, since “Madrid, for the first time, has spoken about the past, disregarding years of research. But seeing the reaction, if you look at it, they are now silent. After the video, silence. Because they know they are not right,” he concludes.