Spanish Football and Social Change Football Research in an Enlarged Europe

Spanish Football and Social Change Football Research in an Enlarged Europe Series Editors: Albrecht Sonntag, Professor and Director of the EU-Asia Institute at the ESSCA School of Management, France David Ranc, Assistant Professor at the EU-Asia Institute at the ESSCA School of Management, France Titles include Basak Alpan, Alexandra Schwell and Albrecht Sonntag (editors) THE EUROPEAN FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP Wolfram Pyta and Nils Havemann (editors) EUROPEAN FOOTBALL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY Football Research in an Enlarged Europe Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–37972–6 Hardback 978–1–137–37973–3 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Spanish Football and Social Change Sociological Investigations Ramón Llopis-Goig University of Valencia, Spain © Ramón Llopis-Goig 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author have asserted his right to be identiﬁﬁed as the authorof this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-69143-2 ISBN 978-1-137-46795-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-46795-9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents List of Tables and Figures vi Introduction 1 1 Spaniards’ Secular Ritual 8 2 Historical Configuration 27 3 Team Identification and Football Culture 48 4 The Decline of the Spanish Fury 64 5 The Metamorphosis of Football Clubs 86 6 Detraditionalization, Hyper-consumption and Ambivalence 104 7 Inductor Masculinities 119 8 Hooligans, Ultras and Vandals 136 9 Racism, Xenophobia and Intolerance 153 Conclusion 174 References 184 Index 196 v List of Tables and Figures Tables 1.1 Some indicators related to football in Spain 13 3.1 Identification with football clubs in Spanish society 53 3.2 Reasons for identification with football clubs in Spanish society 55 3.3 Image of FC Barcelona in Catalonia and in the rest of Spain 57 3.4 Preferred composition of the FC Barcelona team 57 3.5 Consumption of televised matches, live attendance and acquisition of merchandising 59 9.1 Evolution of sanction proposals for racist or xenophobic offences in Spanish professional football 170 Figure 3.1 Positioning of the main football clubs in Spain 55 vi Introduction This book presents a sociological analysis of Spanish football, the trans- formation it has undergone in recent decades, and the processes of social change in which it has been involved. In spite of its enormous presence and influence on the sporting and leisure habits of Spanish society, there have been no books published in Spain addressing the study of football from a sociological point of view and with an academic orientation. What exists is a large journalistic production composed of an important number of sports newspapers – d edicated mostly to football – numerous books that examine certain specific aspects of Spanish football (which it would be impossible to mention here) or what could generically be called ‘club literature’, an expression that could include biographies of footballers and coaches, publications focused on the history of the clubs, or books about recent victories of the Spanish national team. Apart from these types of publications, books dedicated to the study of football from the ambit of the social sciences have been quite limited, even though more than three decades ago the essayist Vicente Verdú paved the way with his original and brilliant study on football cultures (Verdú, 1980). On the other hand, the majority of the academic books dedicated to the study of Spanish football are located within the field of history. There have been especially interesting studies by Duncan Shaw and Carles Santacana on the Franco period, the former on Spanish football in general (Shaw, 1987) and the latter focused on the case of FC Barcelona (Santacana, 2006). Equally valuable is the book by Ángel Bahamonde on the significance of Real Madrid in the history of Spain (Bahamonde, 2000), one by Juan Antonio Simón on the 1982 World Cup held in Spain (Simón, 2012) and the most recent one by Alejandro Quiroga on the relationships between football and national identities throughout history (Quiroga, 2014). Spanish sociology has been much 1 2 Spanish Football and Social Change less prolific in the study of football. Its lack of interest in football has been largely due to the influence of the tradition that considered it a form of social anaesthesia and an instrument that extends ignorance. Perhaps for this reason, the first books by sociologists dealt only with topics like the vandalism and violent groups that emerged in Spanish football in the 1980s. The seriousness of the topic and the need to discover the reasons for these behaviours put an end to suspicions of frivolity and signified a scientific and professional challenge for Spanish sociology. The same thing occurred at the beginning of the 21st century when racist and xenophobic outbreaks appeared in football stadiums. In this regard, we can mention the books by Miguel Cancio and Javier Durán in the 1990s (Cancio, 1990; Durán, 1996a), as well as the most recent ones by Carles Viñas (2005; 2006). Naturally, these and other investigators have made many more contributions in the form of articles that are later cited in the different chapters on these topics. As the author of this book, I must say that I have always been extremely fascinated by this sport, called the deporte reyy (the sport king) in Spain, although the reasons for this fascination have varied over the years. In any case, at the end of the 1990s, I began to become aware of the heuristic potential of Spanish football as the object of sociological study. After joining the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Valencia in 2001, I turned the sociological analysis of football into one of my main areas of research. This book is the fruit of more than a decade of dedication to this research area, from which various articles have emerged over the years that have been published in scientific journals. In writing the different chapters included in this book, I have gone back to many of these earlier studies and, when appropriate, used fragments of them. For this reason, and even though I dislike referring to my own work and try to avoid it, my main publications on the different topics addressed are cited in the References. The purpose of the studies presented in this book is to go beyond football as a sport, which means exploring the social, political and cultural dimensions of its recent evolution. The technical aspects of football, that is, those related to the footballers’ physical preparation and the development of playing tactics and strategies, are not foreign to the topics dealt with in some of the chapters of the book, although they are always placed within a broader sociological context. This is the case, for example, in Chapter 4 when examining the evolution of the playing style and recent international victories of the Spanish national team. In other words, the studies included in this book have a first point Introduction 3 of union in the common sociological perspective used to elaborate them. This sociological perspective aims to unravel those aspects that go unnoticed by those who, blinded by its unquestionable social hege- mony, contemplate football as a ‘natural target’. And it is this sociological perspective that makes it possible to identify the ‘analytical orifices’ through which one can sociologically reflect on the game, in order to access the interpretive clues that help to understand why and how Spanish football has become the way it is. The topics emerging from this study perspective form a broad range of interlaced questions: the role of football in today’s Spanish society, the historical

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