Sorry, just bitter from last season. I know cesar would love to meet Isaiah and Mr or Mrs Pathetico. I’ll be at Church (Nevadas) every weekend till I die. See you there

Ciao

I completely respect the love of another team and fully welcome it, unless you’re a Missouri Tiger, in which case you’re just a bad person.

¿por qué soy del Atleti?

El Atleti es puro sentimiento. Es algo que realmente no se puede explicar pero que a la vez tienes miles de explicaciones.

I look forward to meeting you at an upcoming Offside meetup, tio.

“It’s a sad day when a common American buys into Farca’s propaganda machine. Catalonia is part of Spain. End of story…”

Yes. End of story. Except if it were the end of the story, we wouldn’t be discussing this in the first place. I am by no means an expert on politics, much less Spanish internal politics, but the idea that “Farca” has created an image for itself that is completely out of line compared to the reality of the situations forgets that sport can sometimes transcend mere athletic endeavors. That the Les Corts stadium was one of the only places, if not the only place, in Catalunya where one could speak Catalan freely during the Primo de Rivera regime’s crackdown on Catalanism is not a question. That is a fact.

That Barcelona and Real Sociedad’s Catalan and Basque flag presenting gestures during their first post-Franco game in 1975 (I believe) were powerful symbols cannot be denied. Those acts, defiant or not, depending on your viewpoint, have meaning and they suggest things about the clubs that do them.

That Barcelona is not and never will be a leftist organization singularly hellbent on overthrowing some sort of proto-fascist juggernaut is also not in question, but the idea of “mes que un club” is very real, though not completely unique and certainly not without its share of advertising charm. The primary concern of FCB is playing a sport (and winning at it while making money), but there are secondary concerns which are also important. It may mean very little to someone looking in from the outside, with a different viewpoint, a different cultural background from your average Catalan (and I’m included in that group, naturally), but there is, really, a thing called collective memory and it affects the way people perceive why and how they are involved in something as “trivial” as a soccer club.

[And also, just for the record, I believe myself to be far from the "common American", but perhaps I distance myself too much from my cultural heritage. It is a matter of pride that I've found myself attracted to a club whose stated goals are far removed from most other clubs and that I chose the club for its morals, not the morals for its club. If you wish to know, and perhaps this does help in understanding where I'm coming from, I was neither born in the US nor raised in the US before I was 10.]

Some of you may think of soccer as merely a sport, but probably you think about it the way I think of the KU men’s basketball team: it is an emotional connection I share with my family, a passion that has been ingrained in me since birth that means more to me in many ways than soccer ever can. Because of and not in spite of the fact that sport causes these emotions (absolute heartbreak at every loss and overwhelming joy at ever win), we seek them and offer ourselves up to them. If a club or team speaks to a communal sense of pride beyond the normal boundaries of a sports team, it’s important to try to bring that out, as FCB does via Catalan nationalism. I am neither a Spanish nationalist nor a Catalan nationalist and, indeed, I wish both notions would go the way of the buffalo (along with patriotism in general), but I completely understand the concepts and feelings that drive both of them. This is, after all, a human endeavor we are involved in.

And that is that for me. Discuss it more if you wish, but what it means to me is that I am a culé and proud of the fact that UNICEF is written on the chests of the players, happy to be in a community that shares in my passions about many different social and political issues, and, honestly, happy that I can share a sport with the rest of the world via something that is suggestive (though not defining) of myself as a whole.

And why are you, whoever you may be, attached to your club?