Morbo: the story of Spanish football
Phil Ball WSC Books, 253pp, £14.99
ISBN 0954013409
The worst of fans, the best of fans: it is a comment so often made of England supporters, whose reputation for violence and disorder arrives in town well before the team bus. Sadly, this reputation is too often confirmed by the antics of a minority in a city square. There is, however, another, more generous England, celebrated for its passion, humour, knowledge and tradition: same game, same country, but a different football nation, though it still wears the colours of the St George's Cross Flag. Phil Ball's study of Spanish football is characteristic of the best of this other England.
Football's home can no longer be claimed by a Lancastrian mill town of 19th-century yore, still less the crumbling edifice of a Wembley building site, but what cannot be denied is the role that English travellers played in carrying the game to the world. Unravelling the origins of Spain's great clubs, and some not so great, Ball consistently uncovers English antecedents: the first registered Spanish football club, Huelva FC, was formed around a squad of English labourers, supplemented by a handful of locals; the red-and-white strip of Athletic Bilbao is thought to have been influenced by merchant seamen from Sunderland or Southampton who were working in the port; Fred Pentland, who led Bilbao to the championship in 1930, was an early English manager abroad, pre-dating El Tel Venables by more than five decades.
Today, Spanish club football is the strongest in Europe, but what explains the underachievement of the national team? The tension created by a nation state seeking to contain regions claiming a nationhood of their own is spectacularly sharp in Spain, and football is a potent symbol of the intensity of the conflict. Imagine a British side that sought to conflate Scots, Welsh, the Northern Irish and English into one team: the tensions in the stands would almost certainly affect the team's performance, and the more the British cause were championed, the greater would be the desire for all four to assert themselves.
It may be curious that professional footballers should be affected by political mood, but Ball's achievement is to remind us of how much 11 blokes chasing a bit of leather around a pitch can mean to a region that thinks of itself as a nation and to a country that dreams of being united. A win or a defeat is about much more than three points won or lost - it's about morbo, and with Ball's account dusted off, there is no need for a phrasebook to understand just what this peculiarly Spanish word means.
Mark Perryman is the editor of The Ingerland Factor (Mainstream, £9.99)
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