Spanish Soccer 101

Spanish Soccer 101

Leo Messi is so good that he often makes his opponents look foolish. In his final goal tonight against Málaga—to complete yet another hat trick—he ran down 70% of the pitch and shot past the goalie with what was all but an impossible angle. The people in the bar where I was watching the game positively burst out laughing, as if Messi had hit the goalie in the face with a pie. You half-expect to hear that Harlem Globetrotter music every time he touches that ball.

I was already a pretty big fan of soccer before I moved to Spain. A big reason I have followed the sport is because I was lucky enough to attend a Real Madrid match when I came to Spain for a visit a few years ago. The 2006 World Cup finals in Germany were extremely popular in Seattle where I was living at the time. I would go to a bar and watch the games as early as six in the morning among crowds as big, boisterous, and beer-fueled as anything you see on a Saturday night. I also knew that a little knowledge of the sport goes a long way as far as having something to talk about with strangers in a Spanish café or bar. More importantly, moving to Spain meant I had to give up being a baseball fan; I had to find something to fill the void in my life.

The Spanish first division, ominously referred to as "La Liga" here, contains 20 teams, with every large city in the country fielding at least one team in this competition. The second league is made up of 22 lesser clubs. Each year the bottom three squads in the first division are sent down to the second and the top three in the second are promoted. Valencia currently has two teams: Valencia Club de Fútbol and Levante Unión Deportiva. Valencia has been in the first division for most of its history while Levante bobs up and down.

The 20 First Division teams play each other two times, once at home and once away for a total of 40 games in the season. Teams are awarded three points for a win, one point for a tie, and nothing for a loss. The League champion is the team with the most points after the final game. If there is a tie at the end of the season the winner is decided on a goal differential. The odds against this are fairly staggering so it never happens, except my first season in Spain when Madrid was declared the winner on goals after the very last game of the year. Besides league play there is the internal league yearly competition called the Copa del Rey. Then there is the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League tournament which pits the best European clubs against each other in an annual playoff.

The Spanish football season starts at the end August and ends sometime in May. There are usually international games in June, July and August, so I suppose that soccer is a yearlong sport. It’s kind of like our baseball, football, and basketball rolled into one super sport. It’s not that people here don’t take other sports seriously—basketball is very popular in Spain—it’s just that soccer has a special place in their hearts—probably where religion used to be before people here pretty much gave up on it. There aren’t many new cathedrals going up in Spain these days, now they build huge new sports stadiums. Teams in the Spanish Liga play one game a week, unless they play two games because of some other competition. Matches are on Sunday unless they are on Saturday. Extra games are on Tuesday or Thursdays, or any other day of the week. Football is as essential as oxygen for lots of people here so they need to breathe it in on a regular basis.

I remember on a visit to Spain some years ago I noticed that there was a soccer daily newspaper in Madrid devoted to Real Madrid, one of the most famous football teams in the world. I thought that a daily paper dedicated to soccer was a bit excessive. How much news could there be if there are only one or two games a week for each team? I thought that a daily paper for soccer was excessive until I realized that there is a daily paper for soccer FOR EVERY TEAM! I’m sorry, was I shouting? Some teams have more than one newspaper devoted to them.

I like sports as much as the next slob but this just seemed a little crazy to me. At least it did at first. Now I realize that one daily newspaper for each club is just about enough, that is if you supplement this with the regular newspaper’s coverage of soccer. Some cities have two soccer dailies. Did I forget to mention that? Of course, you also have to watch the constant television broadcasts of soccer news. How else are you going to see a replay of that great goal last night? I guess that following scores and different European leagues on the internet just goes without saying. If you aren't doing this then you are living like an animal.

I am lucky enough to be living in a city that has a really good team. They have won the La Liga six times. They have won the Copa del Rey seven times. Valencia finished as the runners up in the Champions League in 2000 and 2001. After I arrived in Valencia they made it to the quarter finals of the Champions League in 2007 before finally bowing out to Chelsea. The following year Valencia was back in the Champions League playoffs along with three other Spanish teams: Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Sevilla. The next year Valencia was invited into the UEFA Cup (sort of a step below the Champions League) because they won the Spanish Copa del Rey. If this isn’t enough soccer worship for anyone’s taste you have to remember that every two years there is also the European Cup finals or the World Cup.

Just like in the United States, bars here are often heavily saturated with sports, if by sports you mean soccer, and if by saturated you mean that people just won’t shut up about it. Just like soccer in Spain takes on the roll of our three main sports of baseball, football and basketball, bars in Spain double as restaurants and coffee shops. Just like the Spanish football season lasts almost all year, people go to bars early in the morning until late at night. More than likely, the bar will have a television tuned to sports news or an actual game, if one is being played somewhere on the planet. The bar tops are littered with football newspapers and regular papers usually opened to the sports section.

I go to a bar at least once a day at the absolute minimum; I have to have one professional cup of coffee every afternoon. Quite often I go more than once a day depending on how much coffee, wine, beer, or food I decide to consume when I am out of the house. This is why I first decided to become fluent in Spanish football conversation. Talking about football is the great equalizer; it’s the great ice breaker, even if my Spanish language skills aren’t always up to the task. Talking about sports is sort of like the knucklehead’s version of Esperanto, the universal language. An offhand remark about football goes a long way in establishing my credentials as a local in the places I frequent. A casual reference to a player in the league who is currently tearing up the nets helps to gloss over any errors I make in grammar or diction.

It would be difficult to overstate just how seriously football is taken in Spain. I saw a halftime commercial during one game that showed a man in the shower. They showed his bare ass as he was washing up (It’s hard to believe Americans went ballistic over a woman’s breast). He gets out of the shower and slips, hitting his head really hard on the sink. They show him lifeless on the floor of the bathroom when suddenly his eyes open and he gets up. They cut to a caption that says, “This isn’t a good time to die,” and then you are reminded that there are only 14 days until the Barça-Real Madrid match was to be held. No one in the bar laughed at this commercial but me. Then I realized that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny and perhaps I should start taking my Spanish Professional League soccer a little more seriously. This same station was urged to pull another similar commercial that showed a man apparently dying in a traffic accident and then getting back on his feet as if nothing had happened. I remember they had television spots warning that the Real Madrid – Barcelona FC match was only 100 days away, 89 days away, and so on.

Europeans are almost always surprised to find an American interested in their sport. I tell them that things are changing in the U.S. And lots of people follow the sport. I read an account of a group of American fans behaving rather badly before one of the World Cup games in Germany back in 2006. A fan from another country said that was the way football fans are supposed to act and he had an increased respect for the Americans. I think we Americans can do hooliganism as good as the next country.

Som Campeons*

*(We are champions!) A text message I was sent in Valenciano after Spain defeated Germany to win the Eurocopa in June of 2008.

Pase lo Que Pase, España Siempre (Whatever happens, Spain Forever)

-From the start I thought that this motto for the Spanish national football team was rather defeatist.

By default I became a Spanish football fan the day I arrived here in Valencia a little over one and a half years ago. I adopted Valencia Club de Fútbol and the Spanish national team as my own, with all of the ups and downs that come with being a sports fan. While I have been satisfied with the modest success of Valencia CF, the Spanish national team had been on an absolute terror since I moved to Valencia. Spain won its qualifying group to enter the 2008 Eurocopa finals held in Switzerland and Austria. The Spanish team, known as La Selección, carries a heavy contingent of Valencia CF stars. Once in the tournament, held every four years between the World Cup, Spain managed to win easily all three of their games in the group stage, with Valencia CF forward, David Villa, scoring a hat trick in the first match against Russia. In the semi-final round Spain was paired with the current World Cup champions, Italy.

Spain had not defeated the Italian team in competitive international play in 88 years. The game ended in a 0-0 draw and neither team scored during the 30 minutes of extra time. It would go into penalty kicks in which the two teams alternate taking five kicks from the penalty mark. Whoever leads after five kicks wins, if it is still a draw, the first team to lead wins. Spain and Valencia CF have not had the best of luck when games end in penalties. In the 2000-2001 Champions League final, Valencia CF lost in penalty kicks to FC Bayern Munich, a bitter defeat still felt here. Spain lost to England on penalty kicks in the quarter-finals of the 1996 Eurocopa. In the 2002 World Cup, Spain lost to Korea on penalties in the quarter-finals (although they beat Ireland on penalties to get to that game). Italy, on the other hand, is known for coming out ahead in penalty shoot-outs and had beat France on penalties to win the 2006 World Cup title.

The Spanish have had many bitter defeats over the years and I don't think that any of my friends thought for a minute that Spain had a chance in the Eurocopa. I think they were too afraid to admit to any optimism, at least not out loud. When the game went into penalty kicks my Spanish friends became practically despondent. I reminded them that the Boston Red Sox baseball team finally won a World Series after 86 years.

Gianluigi Buffon, who plays for Juventus in the professional season, is considered by many to be the best in the world. Iker Casillas, the superstar goalkeeper for Real Madrid, is also thought to be one of the better players at this position. Buffon had blocked a penalty kick in Italy's game with Romania to keep their tournament hopes alive. If you were a betting type person the odds seemed stacked against Spain. In an earlier semi-final match the Croatian squad had come completely unraveled when it went into a penalty shoot-out with Turkey. You could see fear and resignation written all over the face of the first Croat player to make his attempt which he missed badly. David Villa was the first player to take a kick. He approached the ball with a confidence bordering on arrogance. He made his shot easily. In the end, Iker Casillas was able to save two goals to Buffon's one and Spain would move on to take on Russia in the semi-finals.

Spain had already trounced Russia 4-1 in the group stage but Russia looked like a completely different team coming off their victory over Holland, one of the heavy favorites to win it all. Not only did Spain beat Russia again but they gave them another hiding, 3-0. Now Spain had to play Germany in the final match to be held in Vienna. I had already mentioned that I was going to host the final at my place for all of the football hooligans in my circle. Sitting at a bar after Spain's victory over Russia, someone mentioned that we should drive to Madrid on Sunday to watch the final at the Plaza de Colón where tens of thousands of fans had been watching all the previous games. Big crowds aren't really my thing but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see a bit Madrid again. Besides, I was just about the biggest Spanish supporter of all the people I have met here so far. I was also the most optimistic about their chances from the very beginning since I wasn't saddled with the years of heartbreak like the average Spanish fan.

Madrid Bound

The drive between Valencia and Madrid isn't the most spectacular three hours of driving, but the views seem to go on for thousands of square miles in some parts. There is the odd castle, the occasional village cathedral, and lots and lots of agriculture—mostly olive trees and vineyards, although it seems impossibly dry and hot for grapes. You definitely know that you are driving through Spain as this section of road looks like every travel poster you have ever seen for La Mancha. I got a big kick out of my friend's GPS system that talked to him in a rather sexy Spanish female voice. I wonder if they use the comforting voice of a woman so as not to offend the normal male's obdurate refusal to admit when we are lost. I wonder if she's single?

Through a friend's recommendation we stayed at Hostal Naranco on Calle de la Puebla 6, 2° near the Gran Vía metro. We paid 16€ each for two huge rooms with bathrooms. I have paid over 100€ for a similar room. I had never stayed in a hostel before and I just always thought that they were crappy and only patronized by junkies.

Evidently, this section of Madrid is a gay neighborhood. I didn't really notice. The night after the game, the comedy television news program Intermedio did interviews with gay dudes about who they thought was the best looking player on the Spanish team and one of the guys they spoke with was standing about a block from our hostel. “It's a small world, gay people are everywhere, get used to it,” I think is the message here.

But we weren't here for the room (or a tolerance workshop) so we ditched our stuff and started off towards the Plaza de Colón. We had been delayed by a horrific traffic jam just outside of Valencia so we arrived only about two and a half hours before the game. This meant that we only had time for a quick bite to eat while we jumped into the flow of people heading towards Plaza de Colón. The mob consisted of almost equal parts drunken boys screaming football chants and great-looking young women—and a few odd foreigners, one of whom was wearing his Spanish team jersey.

We got to the square an hour before the game and immediately decided that it would be a shitty spot to watch the match, that's if you could even get close enough to one of the big screens to see anything. The viewing spots were woefully inadequate to accommodate the huge crowds that had been showing up to watch all the games. There were no screens outside of the interior of the square where most of the fans were smashed together. We decided to fall back and find a bar nearby—easier said than done as this area is just about the least bar-friendly neighborhood I have ever seen in Spain. If you want to buy a Gucci bag or an Armani suit you are in luck, just don't try to buy a beer.

We finally found a place and it was more crowded, smoky, and suffocating that the Plaza. Two people in our group were steadfast in their desire to watch the game from the square so we headed back. Along the way we stopped into a completely overwhelmed convenience store that looked like it was being looted by people wearing Spanish national colors. The mob was actually well-behaved and the checkout lines were orderly and fast. The problem was there wasn't any cold beer. Nothing like a piss-warm beer on a hot summer evening, I always say. People weren't even waiting to get to the cash register before they consumed their purchases. I popped a warm beer and toasted the coming Spanish victory.

We muscled our way into the outer ring of the Square and I was able to see half of the screen from one direction and the other half on the opposite side. The game began with a huge roar from the crowd. It was on!

I got a kick out of everything people had brought to the square to eat and drink. Every sort of beer, wine, liquor combination was on hand. Lots of kids were drinking huge, one liter cups of sangria. The young guys standing right behind us had a bag of cheese doodles as big as a pillow. It looked like a comedy prop right out of Pee Wee's Playhouse. At one point they seemed to have tired of this snack option and when I turned around I saw that someone had stepped on it, ripping the bag open at the bottom. When I looked at it a bit later I noticed that a box of cheap sangria had turned over, mixing with the cheese doodles making a mess that would soon dwarf the Exxon Valdes oil spill. One of the guys in our group stepped in the goo and he looked every bit as pathetic as those poor, oil-drenched sea birds along the Alaska coast. The Brits call cheese doodles cheezy-what-its, which sounds pretty funny but not as funny as seeing a Brit's shoe completely covered in crappy sangria and cheezy-what-its.

From where we were standing our view of the screen was being blocked constantly by people waving flags or a girl getting up on someone's shoulders. This inspired improvisational chants from those whose views were being blocked. ¡Hijo de puta, que te caes por el culo! (Hey asshole, please fall on your ass). It was hilarious when the person on the receiving end of the chant finally realized they were the target. They would turn around and then meekly slide out of view. At one point two young guys climbed up on a hedge and completely blocked everyone's view in our section. They seemed resistant to the chants so I took it upon myself to wade on up and ask them to please get down.

I asked them very politely if they could move. They basically told me to fuck off and this was their spot. Without losing my temper I explained that they were blocking the view of about 100 people behind them yet they still held their ground, or perch, on the hedge. One of them began to raise his voice to me and I called him an asshole (gilipolla). I told them that I was going back to where I was standing and if I had to come back to tell them to get down, I wouldn't be talking any more, if they knew what I meant. I think they did. Sometimes people just need someone to remind them of their manners. I started heading back to my group and they got down after a short, face-saving interval. I was the hero of the mob. That is until Torres scored his brilliant, run-completely-around-your-defender-and beat-Lehman-to-the-ball goal.

The crowd reacted like no other crowd I have ever been a part of. Everyone who could shook up a beer and sprayed it into the air which I thought was really immature and inconsiderate until I did it myself, and then I thought it was pretty funny. Everyone was drenched and loving it. Torres, who had a marvelous year at Liverpool scoring 29 goals, had yet to really come alive in this Eurocopa. I had been telling everyone to watch out for him because he was going to bust loose in this final. Luckily, he didn't need to bust loose. Spain was able to keep Germany scoreless and his one goal was enough. In six games Spain had only been scored on twice. While Spain's Iker Casillas is now considered the best goalkeeper in the game, he could have sat in a lawn chair for most of the Eurocopa because the rest of the Spanish defense was absolutely stifling.

The after-game revelry was riotous spontaneity, pure and simple. If there was a fountain, people swan in it; if there was a statue, people climbed it; if there was a bar, people entered, used the bathroom, ordered a quick shot, and left (OK, at least we did that a couple of times). Our group had an informal competition to see who could instigate the most football chants among the mob. My deep tenor chant of EEEEEE-KEEER (Iker Casilllas) never failed to get people going. A popular chant in the mob was “Yo soy español, español, español (I am Spanish).” I didn't really feel comfortable with that one as my citizenship status is merely honorary at this point. Chanting that I am an illegal alien who happens to be a fanatic supporter of the Spanish national squad just doesn't have a nice ring to it in Spanish.

Madrid will probably never be this insane ever again, even when they win the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. What happened in Madrid was the release of several decades of pessimism, defeatism, and self-doubt. What brought Spain out of this funk was a team of players too young to have any doubt about their abilities. Spanish fans maintained a sense of very guarded optimism after the first victory in the Eurocopa. Spain had disappointed too many times in the past for people to get too carried away. The players were another story. From the start they displayed a sense of confidence and belief in the team that carried them all the way to the end, and perhaps further if you are looking at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Of Threats and Lessons Learned

People in Spain are very passionate about soccer. This seems like a rather cliché observation coming from an American who has spent so little time in this country. It seems like something someone would say who was seriously lacking in creativity and original thought. I’m saying it not because I lack creativity or original ideas; I’m saying it as a defense against charges that I threatened an 11 year old boy with violence while watching a football match on television. I have a few other remarks for the jury, or the judge, or whoever you speak to in a Spanish courtroom (I hope I never need to learn this the hard way).

I realize that it is perfectly acceptable in Spain to bring your children to a bar. The Spanish make little distinction between bars and restaurants; they are both places for everyone to enjoy. I realize that it is not unusual for young children to stay up to watch a soccer match on television that begins at 10:00 p.m. on a school night (At least I believe that it is a school night. You never know here with the hundreds of holidays on the calendar). I don’t mind if an 11 year old boy watching a match with his father expresses a lot of opinions about the players, even when most of these opinions are unfavorable and often insulting, at least to me. With all of this understood, there are still rules to follow when you watch a match in a public place and the sooner this little loudmouth learns these rules the better.

The game was between Real Madrid and Betis (a team from Sevilla). I’ve noticed that most people in Valencia are Barcelona fans; at least they are when our own club isn’t playing. Tonight, in this bar, everyone seemed to be rooting for Madrid, including the opinionated juvenile delinquent up too late on a probable school night but who can tell in Spain where people take off work with some of the flimsiest excuses you are ever going to hear. The youth in question showed his support in a sort of New York manner: by criticizing every player on the Real Madrid squad: Guti is slow, Casillas is a lousy goalkeeper, Sergio Ramos can’t pass, and on and on. Everyone has a right to their own opinion. Spain is a free country, at least I think that it is. Is Spain a free country? We say it all the time in America but I’m not really sure exactly what that even means.

I do know that there are limits to freedom. I don’t think that it is acceptable behavior in any bar in Spain to insult one of the best players for the Spanish national team and the full-time ace forward for Real Madrid, Raul. It’s just not done. You don’t scream “fire” in a crowded theater and you don’t talk trash about Raul. This is why I told the little punk next to me that he was going to get a serious beating if he ever got down to insulting Raul in his inventory of criticism for the Real Madrid team. His father seemed to agree with me as he threw his hands in the air in a gesture that means, “What are you gonna do?” This gesture translates into any language. I don’t know what you’re going to do, dad, but I’m going to give your kid a vicious beating if he starts in on Raul. I’d be doing it for his own good. I wouldn’t expect that a Canadian kid would have lived to see his first zit if he talked smack about Wayne Gretzky, Muslim kids don’t mock the Prophet, and this little runt needed to learn that in Spain, if you have anything bad to say about Raul, you keep it to yourself. Everyone at the bar seemed to agree with me on this.

I don’t think any Spanish court would convict me on this crime of threatening a minor, especially since Raul scored the first goal of the game on a penalty kick.

Top Excuses for Weaseling Out of Work to Watch Football

First of all, try not to over-think this too much by feigning some illness you read about in a Stephen King novel. Just like back when you were in school it’s better to stick with the tried and true classics. Remember to make the call from home and not in a crowded bar with a bunch of drunks belting out a teary national anthem. 

People tell me to DVR it but it’s not as if a guy who still has four payments to make on his toaster is going to have a modern television. It’s not like watching the matches in a bar is really being economical as my last World Cup bar bill would have been enough to send one of my non-existent children to Yale for four years…and that was just during the group phase. A friend says he’ll watch the game at work on his iPhone which I don’t think is too cool seeing how he drives a school bus—they only job he could get because he’s on probation.

So if you’re looking for an excuse to duck out of work just rely on one of these timeless originals:

1) Diarrhea. This is always a conversation stopper and I guarantee if you use this excuse there won’t be any follow up questions. The only response you’re likely to hear is “Eew!” before they hang up on you.I'm fully aware that the mere mention of diarrhea is childish but do you want to watch football or do you want to be a grown up and go to work?

2) Dead Grandparent. This one is also bullet-proof even if you’ve used it a few times because people don’t know how many grandparents you have in our divorce-prone society.

3) Had to take child to the emergency room. A great one if you have kids but it will elicit a lot of unwanted attention in the form of condolences about your precious baby when you just want to concentrate on the damn game and forget about the little monster for 90 minutes. Seriously, is that asking too much out of life?

4) Play dumb. “What? I had to work today?” Works best if you actually are stupid.

5) Car trouble. For hippies replace “car” with “recumbent bicycle.”