Rivalries

Walking into a crowded bar in Madrid wearing a Barcelona jersey is like jumping into a shark tank with a cinderblock tied to your waste; it’s just not smart. In fact, there are few things dumber, or more pompously arrogant than wearing the colors of a rival team (borderline gang) into enemy territory. 

This is exactly what I did on one of my nights in Madrid. I wore my Barcelona home jersey into a rowdy bar in the heart of Madrid on a Friday night at the request of my Cataluñan friends.

The Madrid-Barcelona rivalry is well-known. Like many rivalries, the never-ending, symbolic battle between the two teams represents much more than just a competitive rivalry, it’s a politically feuled struggle between two warring factions, the historic monarchy of Madrid and the Spanish empire against the rebellious underdog Catalonia, and their desired autonomy and sovereignty.

In Barcelona, if you even remotely mention a slight criticism of FCB, you will never hear the end of it.

One night, while watching an FCB game with Julian, my Catálan friend, I made the mistake of asking if Barcelona had any weaknesses, because according to him, they had none. Just as he began to answer, the other team scored, and before I knew it, Julian would not watch any FCB games with me for two weeks, out of fear that I was bad luck, and a traitor for assuming that FCB had weaknesses.

Another night, I was watching a game with a group of American friends and one made the mistake of wearing a shirt with a cartoon-ized picture of Ronaldo, the notoriously arrogant, high scoring Portuguese star of Real Madrid, playing fútbol with Homer Simpson. Upon standing up from his seat, a man noticed his shirt, and immediately after calling attention to it, it was as if a group of sharks smelled blood in the water. My friend was the injured baby seal, in a frenzy of patriotic Cataluñan sharks.

To the people of Cataluña and Barcelona, fútbol is more than a sport—it’s a politically and historically significant symbol that represents the culture crushing years of Franco’s dictatorship and historic oppression of Cataluña by the Spanish government. It’s a very passionate subject to say the very least.

Surprisingly, upon walking into that Madrileño bar with my Barcelona ‘blau-grana,’ nothing happened. I didn’t get lynched, incite a riot, or get in any physical fights (a few heated debates, but nothing out of the norm). Honestly, I was kind of disappointed at how little the people seemed to care about what originally seemed to be a massive rivalry worth dying over. It just wasn´t a very big deal in Madrid.

Rivalries, I realized, are always much different in the eyes of the underdog. For the people of Cataluña, the FCB –Real Madrid rivalry represents a modern day war, where players are soldiers that fight with goals and slide tackles instead of guns and bombs. For them it’s a message to Spain, and the rest of the world, that Cataluña isn’t just a part of Spain, but it’s own respective country.

For Madrid and Madridleños, FCB and Cataluña is just another defiant colony, squirming resistantly underneath the colonial fist of the Spanish empire. Madrid loves their fútbol, I got yelled at enough to know not to wear my FCB jersey there again, and the glares from across the room made me want to return home, but by the end of the night, I was friends with nearly everyone in the bar. Madrid, on average, began to seem like a friendlier place in general.

Opression is subjective. Opression, from the view of the oppressor, is insignificant. Opression, from the view of the oppressed however, is incredibly significant. The rivalry between FCB and Real Madrid exemplifies this perfectly, and when it comes down to it, seeing just one perspective will never tell the entire story.

Upon explaining the rivalry from the perspective of Barcelona and asking what fútbol meant to Barcelona, Julian, with a fire in his eyes that I had never seen before, told me that, “Spain can take our land, and our language, but they can never take our fútbol.” 

After asking the same question to one of my new Spanish friends in Madrid, he replied with, “Well, I love Real Madrid, but more importantly, want another beer?”

Personally, I rather just watch a Sharks game.

Palabra del día: Rivalridad - Rivalry

En Madrid, la rivalridad fue muy debíl. In Madrid, the rivalry was very weak.