“Someone hired a helicopter to drop the ashes of a relative at Camp Nou”

2023-12-30 09:00:37

BarcelonaFrancesc Aguilar (Sant Vicenç de Montalt, 1954) knows every corner of a world that is changing, the Camp Nou. Walking among tourists and construction workers, he enters the Palau Blaugrana to have breakfast at the bar on the first floor, a space destined to disappear where time has stopped. Club workers make coffee there at a good price. When Roger Cruz (Barcelona, ​​1982) arrives, they greet each other affectionately. On different paths, both share a passion for Barça’s history. This year they published two books almost at the same time from Barça Books, the label created by the club and Planeta in 2022. Two large format books, turned into a treasure for those who love the club’s past. In the case of Aguilar, Barça’s treasures it is a journey into the history of the club through the most important objects that are preserved, whether photographs, balls, tickets or a membership card of Joan Gamper. In the case of Cruz’s book, More than a shirtis a journey through t-shirts because they are the great passion of this tireless collector, who moves heaven and earth to get pieces wherever he is.

David Figueras, the publisher of Barça Books, was in charge of proposing the project to Aguilar, who already had a few books in his history, such as biographies of Stoichkov or Ronaldo. Journalist in media like the disappeared 4-2-4, The newspaper i Sports world –where he would become the person in charge of giving Spain’s vote for the Ballon d’Or awards –, Aguilar accepted and dusted off a contact book that would be worth many euros, if friendships could be valued in money : “I was lucky enough to live in journalism where you had direct contact with people, you had breakfast, dinner, traveled with the players. I was one of the few who got on well with Núñez and Cruyff. I am lucky to have made friends who have helped me in this book. And the club, too, who opened the museum for me at 4 in the morning so I could take pictures, one by one, of all the club’s trophies.” The book, in fact, is a kind of “Barça portable museum”, with careful details such as including posters that can be hung on the wall, match posters or tickets that can be removed from an envelope.

“The idea of ​​the book is for young people to discover things and for older people to remember what they experienced. To connect with the one who keeps the entrance to a match, a flag… who remembers the triumphs, but also the defeats that they scored, like the final in Bern, which was a trauma. Or the one in Seville, which I didn’t live live because I had a bad feeling. I must have been the only one, but I heard what Vicente Giménez said, that I had gone to see the other semi-final. Everyone looked down on a team they hadn’t seen play, in those days when you didn’t watch every game. Vicente said Steaua was very tough. And I decided to send Santi Nolla to the final,” he recalls. “Sometimes it seems that there is nothing before Rinus Michels, you have to claim Barça’s five cups, for example. I am from Maresme and it is explained that when the Kubala team returned from winning the Latin Cup, he got off the train in Mataró to make the final leg of the journey to Barcelona by bus and there were a million people in the streets. This is the strength of Barça. I know people who have been buried with their shirts on or those who secretly threw away their relatives’ ashes in the countryside. Legend has it that someone hired a helicopter to drop the ashes there.” In this book there is also a tribute to generations of Barcelona fans, such as their family members. “I grew up in a farming environment. Barça used to come to a hotel in the Maresme to stay when I was a child, I remember going down to the beach and seeing the players drinking vermouth with shells.” Another era.

More than 200 shirts

While Aguilar speaks, Cruz is nodding his head. He carries Barça in his blood because his father’s uncle was Miquel Gual, a former player of the club, who lived through the famous tour of Mexico in 1937. Living surrounded by old memories ended up turning him into a tireless collector. So much so, that he proposed making a book just about the club’s shirts, based on his own collection. “The jewel in the crown? The shirt from the final lost in Bern in 1961. I have Evaristo’s. I got it at an auction house, it was expensive, because the Brazilian swapped it with a Benfica player. And his descendants sold a lot of memorabilia. It’s a shirt that, sportingly speaking, is negative, because it was a very hard defeat, but it symbolizes the club’s fight to be European champions. I also have the shirt of a rival in the famous party from Kaiserslautern, Marcel Witeczek”. In his book, Cruz shows the shirts, mixing match photos with the preserved ones and adding information. Every shirt used by Barça, even if it was a forgotten third kit.

“Barça has always been a great innovator with shirts at national and almost European level. Think back in the 50s you played derbies with Espanyol who still wore those shirts with buttons, very nice, but Barça had already abandoned them the 1910s for more modern shirts, with more comfortable fabric,” explains Cruz, who began working on the project in 2012. A decade during which, with the help of collector friends, he has not stopped until find the more than 200 designs that Barça has worn throughout its history, collected in the 450 pages of its work.

And many of these shirts, of course, are white. “It’s part of the club’s history. It’s been used a lot, the white one, it shouldn’t be surprising,” says Roger, who, given the choice, stays with the first founding shirt, the one with buttons and blue and green colors .