IT IS OFTEN said that Citizen Kane is about so much more than a guy who runs a newspaper and it seems equally disingenuous to suggest that Barcelona versus Real Madrid is just a football match.
It also is about two different footballing philosophies, about Messi versus Ronaldo and ultimately, Spain versus Catalonia. With the possible exception of Celtic versus Rangers, no footballing occasion is more hate-fuelled or rife with political connotations.
Therefore, the task of documenting the history of the games involving both these great sides is an undoubtedly arduous one. Yet few journalists seem better suited to this challenge than Sid Lowe.
For over a decade, Lowe has written about Spanish football for a number of publications, including ESPN and The Guardian, so he is no stranger to El Clasicos. Moreover, even prior to undertaking research for his just-released new book, Fear and Loathing in La Liga, Lowe already possessed an extensive knowledge of Spanish history.
He has previously written a PhD on the political history of the Catholic youth movement and the Foundation of Francoism between 1932 and 1937, which was subsequently turned into a book. And Lowe says that while his academic background doesn’t necessarily give him any advantages over other journalists most of the time, in this instance, it certainly helped.
“In this particular case, I think [it was beneficial], because of the political and the historical element, because I come to it with that sort of understanding anyway.
“If this was a book about another Spanish club, perhaps not, but because it’s about these two and because of the Spanish Civil War and the fact that it plays such a big part, I think it probably has made a significant difference and it does help and mean that perhaps this does have a focus that might not otherwise be the case.”
So suffice to say, Fear and Loathing in La Liga is not your stereotypical football book. Indeed, considerable sections of narrative, in attempting to understand the socio-political backround from which the Real-Barca rivalry emanated, barely mention football at all. Yet, as Lowe tells TheScore.ie, it was always his intention to look deeper than the games themselves.
“For me, the interest in writing about sport is nearly always about human endeavour,” he explains. “It’s almost always about triumph over the odds. It’s nearly always the case that the narrative of sportswriting is about the redemptive qualities of sport. But in this even more so, because I don’t think Madrid and Barcelona as a rivalry can be understood without that socio-political component.
“So I was very determined from the start that this had to be done with an eye on the societal impact, on the political impact, on the historical impact of the rivalry. And then, I wanted to tell some stories about the people involved and what it was like for the really big, historic moments for people on either side.”
Nowadays, the rivalry is more popular than ever, attracting millions of TV viewers worldwide — and its increased prominence partly inspired Lowe to undertake the project in the first place.
“I think the obvious prompting point was that run of four clasicos in 18 days in 2011 and the sense at the time that this had reached some kind of peak,” he says. “It had been impossible to imagine that a game between two Spanish clubs could dominate not just their domestic football, but European football as well.
“And through that, that sense there were certain issues, talking about what the two clubs represent, what their identities are, how they’ve come to reach that point. And I think, how they’ve reached this point was the question. What’s the human experience been? That interest in the historical and political dimension.”
The book is epic in almost every sense of the word, so it’s no surprise it took the Madrid-based British journalist over three years to complete.
“Maybe I’m an idiot for imagining that it would be anything other than this. You talk about taking on the history of the two biggest clubs in the world and by definition, that’s going to be huge — to the extent that it’s a long book, I think it’s about 550 pages, despite the fact that from the first draft to the final version, we probably lost about a third of it.
“So we cut out maybe 50 or 60,000 words. And that’s because you start to talk about one era and you start to find elements of it interesting. And that effectively forces you to settle. You’re always wanting more. You’re then hoping to find out about another, so you go and talk to another player, so the process was very long and I was determined from the start that while there was the possibility to write the book from my knowledge and my experience of covering the two clubs over the last 10 or 12 years — and that that might be enough for a British or an international audience, I was determined that if I was going to do it, I was going to do it properly.
“Perhaps it wasn’t a kind of stated desire, but in my own mind, I had to say to myself, this has to be a book that will be worthwhile for Spanish audiences as well. It’s not enough to tell just a few basic truths about Madrid and Barcelona that everyone in Spain knows. I wanted to tell stories that even people in Spain might not necessarily know.”
Celtic-Rangers and United-Liverpool are often perceived as being unique, but Lowe believes no other rivalry in football is quite as special as Madrid-Barca.
“In a way, Celtic-Rangers is the one that gets closest because of its political and societal significance, because of the symbolism and it’s that symbolism that’s really important.
“And put in very basic terms, I think you could make the case that Real Madrid-Barcelona is a club game that’s effectively an international match because it has that importance in terms of national identity, because of Madrid being seen as representatives of the whole of Spain and Barcelona clinging to that identity of being the unofficial Catalan national team, which [former Barcelona president] Joan Laporta calls them. So I think that makes it bigger. The sheer size of the two clubs makes it bigger.
“The fact that they’re democratic clubs theoretically owned by their members is very significant. And that they’re the eponymous clubs of the two big cities in Spain — cities that seem to be in permanent conflict. Even if the conflict isn’t as prevalent as it sometimes can look, people are part of this apparently permanent conflict, so that’s significant.”
He also believes that, in recent seasons, the fact that El Clasico has featured, by most accounts, the two best players in the world — Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi — has helped to further spice up this rivalry.
“They’re brilliant in different ways and seem to embody what the clubs are about. They’re dependent on each other to really measure their success and you add to that the fact that they’re also at the best two clubs in the world and that’s what’s really changed the last five or six years. They’re both at the very top at the same time — that’s very unusual.
“But they’re there because of each other. They egg each other on. They need each other to continue to strive towards that excellence and that domination.”
More often that not these days, Barcelona-Real Madrid games are increasingly heated, with red cards a familiar sight. Does he consequently believe that the hostility between the two clubs has intensified in recent years, or has such enmity always been prevalent?
“It’s hard to judge that because the way emotions are expressed and externalised changes over time — the depth of media coverage, the internationalisation of the rivalry, the importance of things like social media, particularly Twitter, has changed the outward side of the rivalry but not necessarily changed the internal emotions and feelings between the two clubs.
“There are times when you think it can never get worse. Then it does and then it settles. But it’s also cumulative, so everything that happens before feeds into what’s happening now. It’s a very historically aware rivalry, and when they play each other, there’s a very keen sense of that, but all of those other 200-plus games between them, it’s as if all of those are somehow informing this game as well.”
The antagonism between the two sides is not helped by the fact that both Barca and Real Madrid have local newspapers, such as Sport and Marca, which are unapologetically biased in their team’s favour.
“It’s a reflection of society,” Lowe explains. “It both reflects and enhances society and has a really big impact on it. So no, I don’t think it’s healthy at all. But it is inevitable and it is something that is there whether we like it or not.”
YouTube credit: jotancs
One of the most notorious incidents between the clubs in recent memory was the shock €60million transfer of Luis Figo from Barca to Real Madrid and the subsequent furore it provoked.
Figo had signed a lucrative deal with Florentino Perez agreeing to move to Madrid if the latter won the club’s presidency, which no one expected him to do at the time.
The Portuguese winger, however, publicly vowed that he would never leave Barca for their arch rivals, yet following Perez’s shock presidential election victory, Figo could not go back on his original agreement and thus, was consigned to life at Madrid.
As a result of his move, the star was public enemy number one at Barca. During a subsequent meeting between the sides, a pig’s head was thrown in his direction from a supporter at Camp Nou, thereby epitomising the level of hatred that the Catalan club’s fans felt towards him back then.
“One of his teammates once said to me that the facts don’t matter, what mattered was the lie. I think Figo does feel guilty about that, but what happened was the astonishing reaction from the Barcelona fans actually helped to convert him. It made him think ‘well, you know what? I shouldn’t feel guilty, because look at the way they’re treating me’.
“When it first happened, he felt outmanoeuvred and ultimately put in a position where there was no way out. As he himself said, it starts with a moment’s hot-headedness and it ends up being a reality.”
Nowadays, such a high-profile player moving directly between the clubs seems inconceivable, but as Lowe points out, it felt equally improbable at the time.
“On the face of it, I’d say no, we won’t see it again, but the problem with that is we never expected to see it then either. One of the reasons why it was so huge is because he was arguably the best player in the world at the time. And because he was so important to Barcelona — emotionally, he was seen as a real leader, he was seen as someone who understood Barcelona, who got what they were about. And that really did have a massive impact on the situation, because of the move.
“It wasn’t just from Barcelona to Real Madrid. It was from Barcelona, someone who represented the club and wore the captain’s armband and won things and embraced Catalonia. It just knocked everybody sideways and it is as possible to imagine it happening now as it was then.”
And speaking of animosity, Lowe himself has encountered plenty of it, given that he has well over 100,000 followers on Twitter. His sometimes spiky replies suggest he is not altogether comfortable with such attention, and he concedes that there are pros and cons to attracting it.
“It was Oscar Wilde who said ‘give the man a mask and he’ll speak the truth,’ and it feels to me that that can be adapted to the Twitter age to say ‘give the man a username and he’ll act like a twat’.
“So sometimes it feels like that, but of course, the problem is that it’s very easy for us when we sit under attack to focus always on the negative. But actually, there are some really fascinating people out there. You just feel like you sometimes have to sift your way through [bad people] to get there.”
While these words concern the social networking site, he could just as easily be talking about the Madrid-Barca rivalry. For like Twitter, as this fascinating new book illustrates, it encompasses both the best and the worst aspects of humanity.
Fear and Loathing in La Liga by Sid Lowe is published by Yellow Jersey. More details here.
