Football, politics and Spain
Spain is different! A potent expression of this difference since the late nineteenth century has been the way in which football has acted as a metaphor for the seminal political changes and cultural developments which have defined contentious interpretations of national and regional identities across the often tortured landscape of Spanish history. Dr Jim O’Brien has written a book on the subject. Here, he explains more.
The folkloric passions and rivalries engendered by football are deeply embedded within wider cultural and political contexts of Spanish society. A detailed study of the cultural, media and political roots of Spanish football has been at the core of the research for my book, La Furia Espanola: Football, Politics and the Media in Spain.
The genesis of my research stems from my keen interest in the football, culture, languages, politics and history of Spain, given extra spice by my close association with the city (and football) of Barcelona.
So it was that I embarked on a journey which has taken me from the postindustrial backwater of Huelva in Andalusia, the birthplace of Spanish football, to the fierce and stubborn pride of Bilbao; from the spirit of Madridista to the dazzling rituals and rhetoric of Catalonia. The scholars, media professionals and football people I have met have assisted in gradually transforming my study from its focus on Spanish football to utilising its complex history as a filter; a way of telling a much wider story on a far greater canvas.
The chapters unfold to reveal football’s critical role, from its cultural labyrinth at the end of the nineteenth century, to its development under the shadow of ‘El Caudillo’ in Franco’s Spain, to its contemporary expression of the complex identities at the heart of an emergent plurinational landscape.
The game has proved to be a recurrent benchmark of continuity and change. In part, the book examines the power of tradition and change in the cultural representation of Spanish football through consideration of two contrasting images: the paradoxes surrounding the iconography of ‘La Furia Espanola’, rooted in the first appearance of ‘La Seleccion’ in the Antwerp Olympic Games of 1920, and the mediated construction of ‘Los Rojos’ in the build up to the European Nations Championship of 2008 and the World Cup of 2010. Both images shed significant light on the capacity of football to reflect, define and shape competing cultural identities in Spanish society.
So much of this research has found a space in my teaching, from a number of students choosing to research aspects of Spanish football for their final-year dissertations to the inclusion of topics within the body of different units on the Journalism and Sports Journalism degree programmes at Southampton Solent University. This has subsequently led to curriculum development in the form of a new unit entitled ‘Football, Culture and Politics in Italy and Spain’, which has grown organically during the conduct of this research.