2023-07-13 19:09:42
“It has finally seen the light”, some must have thought when reading the title. “What a no-brainer”, others will think. It’s normal for you to be envious and want to be at a great club like Barcelona. There are plenty of reasons. The most immediate: to play in Primera next season. But beyond the current situation, the list is long: winning titles, being able to sign the best players in the world, feeling that you represent the spirit of a great people like Catalonia, having favorable arbitrations, seeing the news of my club in the newspaper covers and filling the TV news, having sections that monopolize Catalan sport, having the favor of the country’s political and factual powers, being friends with Javier Tebas. I could fill three articles (or ten) with reasons for envy. But that’s not it, none of these – or any other obvious thing – causes me this capital sin.
I would like to be from Barça so that I can be just a little bit. As are all my cultural friends. Depending on the era – of the team and of their own life – they follow their club with a greater or lesser distance. In general, they live peacefully. They watch Barça from reüll and when there is a special moment they pay a little attention to it. I, on the other hand, cannot do it. Because Espanyol needs me. I can’t get over it. It’s like a problem child: it makes you suffer more and you have to be more on top of it. But you love him in a special way.
If I were a culer, my football fandom would have been anonymous. As a parakeet it has been quite the opposite. In high school, when I was in the first year of BUP (14 years old), the fanatical culers from the upper years came to look for me because I was the only parakeet out of more than 500 students in the school (Catalan, drinking and modern). At work, at vacation spots, in dens, everywhere, parakeets are the only parakeets. And so anonymity is impossible. I, and this is a confession, am not as interested in football as it may seem. I think it is given undue importance and prominence. I don’t like it when I live it with the passion I live it. But I have no other way out. That’s why it’s so hard for me to understand the very few passionate culers I admire. Because the vast majority of those I admire and love live football with an intelligent distance, as I would live it if I hadn’t fallen – by chance – into the white-and-blue lunchbox as a child.
Football is absurd. Being from Espanyol, exhausting. But we cannot abandon it. Especially now that the abyss is at hand. The problem child is at the worst age and needs us more than ever. what will we do
#Espanyol #envious #Barça