In The Shadow of Giants

Leandro Vignoli

Description

What is it like to support a small team in a city where a footballing giant lurks? Leandro Vignoli spent 50 days on the road, getting up close and personal with the fans of 13 football clubs from ten of Europe's big cities to bring you the inside story. This book isn't about glitz and glamour - it's a celebration of each club's identity peppered with a sprinkling of history. From St Pauli's social activism to Millwall's struggle with hooliganism, from Rayo Vallecano's working-class roots to Torino's glory and tragedy, from the Catalan identity to East Germany's socialist past, no stone is left unturned as Vignoli visits teams in Barcelona, Madrid, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Lisbon, Paris, Turin, Glasgow and London. Each chapter has a game as a backdrop alongside interviews with fans. A football fanatic himself, Vignoli weaves a narrative filled with passion and understanding that gets to the root of what it's really like to support an underdog side dwarfed by a footballing giant.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785319341
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Leandro Vignoli, 2021
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785318870
eBook ISBN 9781785319341
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CONTENTS
Preface
1. Espanyol and the Wonderful Minority
2. Love Rayo, Hate Racism
3. The Incredible Failure of 1860 Munich
4. Blood for Union Berlin
5. Sometimes St. Pauli; Always Anti-Fascist
6. Fuck Off, I m Millwall
7. The Last Kings of Scotland
8. Nobody Hates Fulham
9. There s No Football Without Orient
10. There is Only One Belenenses
11. Red Star Paris is a Feast
12. This is Sparta
13. The Glory and Tragedy of Il Grande Torino
Postface
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Credits
Photos
You can change your wife, your politics, your religion, but never can you change your football team.
- Eric Cantona
Why couldn t you beat a richer club? I ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.
- Johan Cruyff
It s not about how hard you hit. It s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
- Rocky Balboa
PREFACE
What is it like to support a team that never wins?
I asked this question to football fans all around Europe during a 50-day trip attending games. However, what I quickly discovered is that there is no single answer. And perhaps, more importantly, there is no perfect answer. When we fall in love with a team, normally when we re young, it s for a combination of reasons. These reasons may disappear as we get older: supporting a football team is a lifelong commitment that most people are not keen on. However, sometimes those reasons grow even bigger, and they develop into fervent passion. That s when we re ready to have our hearts broken.
The act of supporting a team is not rational, just like when you fall in love with someone. People tend to look for their soulmates through common tastes, in music, movies, books, or even a compatible lifestyle, like if the other person is a night owl or not. And all of a sudden one finds the perfect person, who happens to like fuckin James Blunt and Jennifer Aniston movies, while one would rather listen to Slayer all day and watch all the Mad Max sequels. Just like sometimes the football team that you love happens to be absolute shite . True love is like that.
I know how this analogy sounds long-winded to some of you, but diehard football fans will refer to their support as love, which is not something objective that can be explained. Neuroscientists have tried to, and poets have dedicated their lives to it, so I m guessing you will not find the answers to love in a football book. Nonetheless, here I am and nobody can stop me from trying.
There is a substantial difference, though, when it comes to loving a football team. It doesn t require retribution. All the things that we do - attending matches, collecting jerseys, suffering when they lose - revolve around the idea that our team will always be there for us no matter what. Especially during their big losses, that is, when we ve earned the badge of a true fan. When one is committed to teams that constantly fail, there is a bigger sense of pride, of not jumping on the team bandwagon only when they re winning.
However, this is the trickier part in terms of fan culture. There are fans that beg for retribution. One can even argue that the majority of football fans want retribution. Winning titles is a major factor for so many fans to pick a team to support, especially, but not exclusively, at a young age. Even when we start supporting a traditional club being seen as a sleeping giant. Eventually many of us will ask for something back and there is no shame in admitting it. Regardless of the particular situation, it is the optimism to win one day that keeps us going.
I have chosen small teams from Europe because the leagues winners are extremely scarce when compared with others. In Brazil, six different teams have won the league since 2010, for example. Eight different teams have won the Argentine league, and nine different teams have won the Copa Libertadores in the last ten years. Meanwhile in Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona have won nine of the last ten titles; PSG have won seven of the last eight in France; Bayern Munich won eight straight in Germany; Juventus nine in a row in Italy. Even the English Big Six has been reduced to three champions in the last decade. It is unlikely that any of these teams will ever spend more than a couple of seasons without celebrating a trophy. Their fan base is plentiful.
This is the part of the story where I remember supporters that I spoke with at every stadium. They chanted, and cried, and took me to drink beer so they could endlessly talk about their teams, their fan bases, their region and friends. They could not talk about any titles. It is a very different experience from supporting a big club, where defeats are regarded as humiliations. These fan bases see football through the pain that accompanies the losses. There are millions of people supporting a small team, even if we barely notice them. When someone supports Rayo Vallecano in Madrid, to name just one club that I visited, their choice is not only born out of passion, but an act of resistance. It s like surviving in a place where they have been left to die. These fan bases are holding an umbrella during a hurricane.
Not only do they support a small team, but the economic gap in modern football has significantly increased in the last years. The difference in budgets has made people adopt slogans such as Against Modern Football , or to believe that it is more than just football . However, many of these fan bases covered in this book are not against the modernisation of football per se. It is not only nostalgia. This is literally the only alternative left.
All the clubs in this book come from cities where they have a much bigger neighbour; they are in the shadow of giants. Clubs like Espanyol, also known as the other team from Barcelona ; Rayo Vallecano, Madrid s working-class football club; Belenenses, from the historic village of Bel m in Lisbon. I have visited three different clubs in London: Millwall, due to their reputation for hooliganism; Fulham, due to their reputation as being a friendly club ; and Leyton Orient, due to their reputation for well, they have no reputation.
Then I visited Red Star, a traditional and decadent team from Paris; Sparta, a traditional and decadent team from Rotterdam; and 1860 Munich, a traditional and decadent team in Munich. I finished this trip in Turin, where Torino is definitely a club full of glories and tradition, but in a constant fight with their tragic past, and present days of voil decadence.
I added three more clubs almost literally while packing, either because I heard a fascinating story or - let s be honest - they were geographically too close to resist attending a match. I visited Queen s Park from Glasgow, the oldest club in the country; Union Berlin, a former East German team with a legacy of resistance to the socialist regime and the Stasi; and in Hamburg, I went to St. Pauli, a notorious Antifa-supported club.
I spent 1,440 minutes inside football stadiums, watched 15 games and 35 goals scored, with a total attendance of 275,000 fans. This is the equivalent of spending 24 hours straight watching football on TV (and I m not talking about UEFA Champions League level). I travelled 11,000 kilometres (6,835 miles) on buses, trains, planes and cars, a longer distance than my original flight from S o Paulo to Madrid. During the coldest evenings, watching some matches reminded me of how I used to feel when I needed to work extra hours after a long carnival weekend of drinking and partying, that feeling of I really want to go home .
And why did I do it exactly? Well, because I am a football fanatic capable of watching Tahiti vs New Caledonia at 4am for no reason. Moreover, however, I am a diehard fan of a football team . Don t get me wrong, but enjoying the beautiful game and supporting a team is not the same thing. There is a subtle but fundamental difference when we feel like we are part of the game, like the indescribable anxiety before a penalty shoot-out only when our team is involved.
I don t support a small team myself, in case you re wondering. I grew up in the Porto Alegre area as an Internacional fan following in the steps of my father, who passed away when I was little. Recently, Inter won the Copa Libertadore s twice, and they won three leagues in the 1970s. When I began attending games aged 12, however, this success was remote. The team was rubbish for more than a decade and I felt trapped, with my entire youth supporting a team with useless hope, and to make matters worse, our biggest rivals in the city, Gr mio (argh!), had won everything that was possible. Eventually all that misery and suffering was reversed, as we started winning titles and Gr mio were relegated to the second division twice (too bad, too bad), but all those years I spent attending rainy evening games that we lost to lower-division teams in the Brazilian Cup is what really moulded me into the s